Even in their present depleted condition, the X-books still have a knack for skilfully sidestepping mega-crossovers.    Their contribution to Civil War II consisted of two books: an X-Men miniseries (which I’ll come to), and this storyline from All-New Wolverine #10-12.

With that in mind, I haven’t been reading Civil War II at all, so all I know about it is the general premise.  Fortunately, as tends to be the way with Marvel’s event crossovers, that’s really all you need to know for this arc.

That premise is simple: a new Inhuman shows up who can predict the future, and there’s a big argument about how far to go in taking pre-emptive action on the basis of what he predicts.  Let’s leave aside the obvious point that it doesn’t really work as a Marvel Universe premise because there always were ways of seeing (or even visiting) the future if you were so minded.  Let’s assume the miniseries has either explained that away or blithely ignored it.  Continuity issues aside, the concept is okay.  It’s Minority Report, after all.

And because the prediction can be pretty much anything, it offers precisely what Marvel likes in a line-wide crossover: the concept that can be used as a springboard for plenty of other stories, thus allowing vast numbers of comics to be marketed legitimately as tie-ins, without actually contributing anything to, and thus overcomplicating, the central plot.  This generally doesn’t work out as well as Marvel like to imagine, simply because they produce so very many tie-ins over a period of several months that the big idea winds up looking hopelessly threadbare by the time the whole thing wraps.  Secret Invasion was especially bad for that – how many Skrulls stories can you do, really?  So if you’re reading tons of these Civil War II tie-ins, I imagine they all come off looking worse.

For example, these three issues of All-New Wolverine are, on the surface, a brisk jaunt through precisely the plot beats you’d expect: Ulysses has predicted that Logan (the old one) is going to kill Gabby; Captain America and SHIELD show up at Laura’s door to stop him; this only elevates the tensions; and the whole thing winds up looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  There’s a slight cop-out where it turns out that the prediction is accurate but Gabby isn’t dead after all (thanks to her healing factor, which Laura didn’t know about, but which was quietly established in passing in an earlier issue), and Logan gives us a hint that, in his world at least, things did indeed turn out quite badly between Laura and Gabby.  And that’s the plot.

But the whole thing is worked well into the book’s existing stories.  That’s partly because Tom Taylor’s a very good character writer who can liven up this sort of story with the little asides.  Ig Guara’s art isn’t always to my taste, and the older Logan feels a bit off model throughout – maybe the model itself is too close to the normal Wolverine, but there’s something about the overly elderly head and the overly muscular body that doesn’t work here.  But Guara does get personality into Laura and Gabby, whose naive enthusiasm with occasional lapses into momentary darkness comes across well.

Moreover, though, this is nicely structured to dovetail with the themes of the series.  The whole point of the series, after all, is that Gabby is literally a younger version of Laura who may or may not have been rescued in time to avoid her winding up in the same damaged state.  So to some extent it’s already a book about destiny and how far it can be influenced, which makes Laura particularly touchy about any suggestion that anything is writ in stone.  The future Logan complicates matters by offering both an illustration of a future which apparently didn’t come to pass, and by initially choosing not to act on his suspicions about Gabby (beyond the perfectly reasonable decision to keep an eye on her and see what happens).  Ulysses’ predictions are used in a way which brings Logan‘s concerns to a head, and also winds up ultimately equivocal about the whole thing: his prediction turned out to be ultimately self-fufilling, but then again it was still true as far as it went.

The preceding issues were billed as a Civil War II lead-in arc, and it’s now clear why: they introduce Logan and get the character in play for the purposes of this book.  They have literally nothing else to do with Civil War II.  But they do still serve to make this story stronger, because if Logan had shown up for the first time in the story about people predicting the future, it would look much more forced.  With him already in circulation, it’s much more organic.

Captain America – the Steve Rogers version – shows up here as well, playing the seemingly reasonable spokesperson of predictive justice.  This, of course, is Hydra Cap, who was brainwashed by the Cosmic Cube when he was returned to normal or had his formative memories altered or whatever precisely the idea is, but has still been cropping up in other books acting more or less as a regular guest star.  I haven’t read enough of Nick Spencer’s storyline to have any firm view on how it’s panning out over there, but I can see the logic of using him here to argue the case in favour of acting on your knowledge of the future (given that somebody’s got to do it but the story obviously wants us to find the prospect uncomfortable).  Even this version of Cap isn’t written as untroubled, just as persuaded on balance that’s it’s sensible to act on a source which has always proven reliable so far.  And the story wisely avoids complicating matters by actually raising his current status quo.  He’s just slightly off, slightly more willing to buy into this idea than he might normally be, and that’s all.  If you know what’s going on with him, it probably adds something; if you don’t, well, he’s just having an off day.

The story builds to a slightly odd confrontation where Laura rejects Logan and demands that he stay away from them.  In purely logical terms this doesn’t make a great deal of sense – as Laura recognises, Logan wouldn’t have done anything wrong if it wasn’t for SHIELD provoking him and firing him full of drugs in a botched attempt to capture him.  And Laura is hardly in a position to complain that Logan is a man of violence who brings trouble wherever he goes.  But it works on a character level.  She’s disturbed by the fact that Ulysses’ prediction was indisputably correct at least on some level, and if anything the fact that it was self-fulfilling just reinforces the worry that everything is on rails and that she has no real control over it.  She’s taking all that out on Logan, and if what she says doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, that’s not a plot problem, it’s a reflection of the fact that she’s not being completely rational about this.  Again, it’s a better story for leaving that as subtext.

The themes of the book make All-New Wolverine perhaps unusually well placed to do a Civil War II tie-in, but this story does find a way of making the tie-in serve the book, and not the other way round.