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Feb 20

All-New Wolverine #25-30 – “Orphans of X”

Posted on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 by Paul in x-axis

With All-New Wolverine‘s Legacy arc, Tom Taylor has certainly taken the remit to heart.  “Orphans of X” is, quite literally, a story about the legacy of Wolverine, and the characters left in his wake.  Taylor and artist Juann Cabal also find themselves in the happy position of being able to this story without the actual, original Wolverine being around.  So although his shadow inevitably hangs over the whole thing, the focus remains firmly on his legacy, rather than on the man himself.  Yes, Old Man Logan is in here, but he’s kept to the margins and (wisely, in this context) not treated as an ersatz Wolverine.

It’s a very simple idea, even though a bunch of guest stars and some side quests get it to six issues without it feeling like much of a stretch.  There’s a group called the Orphans of X, and they’re basically the relatives of people who’ve been killed off by Wolverine and his ilk over the years.  Largely, they seem to be the family left behind by the cannon fodder.  And they basically want to kill off all the Wolverine-type characters, to put a stop to the whole thing.

Why are they called “Orphans of X”, when they don’t actually seem to have a problem with the X-Men in general?  Unclear.  Let’s run with “they’re a bit confused”.

At any rate, this big plan necessarily involves finding a weapon which can be used to get rid of Wolverines.  This is a Legacy story, so Taylor trawls through the continuity back catalogue and comes up with the Muramasa Blade.  That comes from Daniel Way’s Wolverine: Origins, an extensive and convoluted conspiracy-oriented back story which everyone seems to have politely agreed to just ignore.  Wise move.  Thinking about the book still brings me out in hives.  But the Muramasa Blade serves a useful function here, not just because it’s a pre-existing macguffin and that’s simpler, but because it has a magical gimmick of incorporating a bit of the original Wolverine’s soul.  Aside from giving the absentee original a shadowy presence in the story, it fits rather neatly with the general theme of him being a somewhat malign influence, given that the blade exists mainly to inflict damage on his heirs.  Also, the story takes the opportunity to destroy it once and for all, which is nice.

Wolverine: Origins did have one element that took root in the Marvel Universe: Daken.  And he’s the guest star who gets most of the panel time in this story.  That’s a smart choice too, because on the one hand, he’s probably one of the more deserving targets that the Orphans could have picked on – his depiction these days is somewhat inconsistent (and we’ll get to Iceman shortly), but he’s still mainly a villain.  On the other hand, there’s nothing especially villainous about his depiction here.  He’s been attacked without real provocation; the Orphans are torturing him; and he has no ulterior motives when he does join forces with Laura.  The main point seems to be to present Laura, Daken and (to a lesser extent) Gabby as Logan’s children, and as damaged goods.

Cabal’s art is good stuff; he has some imaginative page layouts, with vaguely sinister grids contributing to an aura of surreal oddity that surrounds the Orphans.  Much of what they do, particularly in the first half of the story, doesn’t actually make a great deal of sense.  The story is very much having its cake and eating it where the Orphans are concerned.  It’s keen to stress the idea that they’re basically a group of ordinary people driven off the rails, living normal lives and making contact through a newsletter.  At the same time, they have to be a threat to Laura, Daken and Gabby, or else there wouldn’t be a plot.  And so they have elaborate high-tech schemes with clones of Laura’s dead mother, and their forces can pursue Daken through suburbia only to vanish inexplicably when he gets round a corner.

You can sort of rationalise this by saying that, well, a lot of the wolverines’ victims were bad guys and henchmen and presumably have contacts in odd places.  The story itself uses this explanation when a bunch of Hand ninjas show up, apparently on the instructions of a rogue mid-ranking commander.  But it’s at odds with the central theme of the Orphans’ presentation, which is that they’re essentially mundane people dragged into Wolverine’s world and corrupted by it.  So it shouldn’t work.  But the story cleverly uses that tension to create an atmosphere of strangeness around them.  Cabal’s clean lines and occasional detours into abstract page layouts help nicely with that.

At the same time, the story also does another solid job with Gabby, who continues to serve as the book’s comic relief by acting as if she was in a sitcom.  This is the point where she finally gets a codename – Honey Badger, suggested by Daken “because you’re sweet and you have claws”, and prompting a panel of Gabby imagining herself in decades of Honey Badger comics.  She’s a great character, and the book is all the better for having her there to undercut any detours into excess grimness.

I have reservations about the finale.  I can see that this story maybe needed Old Man Logan for plot reasons, but I’m not convinced it gains from having Sabretooth or Lady Deathstrike.  She’s a pretty tenuous inclusion in a “Wolverines” category, and besides, neither of them are really descended from Logan in quite the same way.  The big pay off of this arc is to have Laura give a speech to the Orphans where she convinces them that they too are victims of the same legacy, as they’ve all been exploited as weapons; she convinces them (or at least the majority) that they should be joining forces to go after the people who were giving the orders.  This could be awfully sentimental, but one of the Orphans does refuse to play along, and I think that does enough to get around it.

My issue is more this: it’s one thing for Laura to argue that she and Gabby and Logan have been victims of people who used them as weapons.  But the others?  You can make a case that Daken and Sabretooth were used as weapons, but they were also pretty awful people to start with.  And Yuriko doesn’t even really fit that mould.

So I’m not sure it sticks the landing.  But the rest of it works, and the ending does certainly work for Laura, which I guess is the most important thing.  Transcending her past, and the tension between doing that and claiming Wolverine’s mantle, is the central theme of this version of the character, after all.

Bring on the comments

  1. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    Why are they called “Orphans of X”, when they don’t actually seem to have a problem with the X-Men in general? Unclear.

    “X” as in “Weapon X”? I mean, no, it’s not the first thing you’d think of X representing in the Marvel Universe…

  2. Moo says:

    “X” as in “Weapon X”?

    That’s probably what it means, though that doesn’t make much sense. Not sure how the public would be familiar with the Weapon X designation and its significance to Wolverine unless Logan wrote his own Wikipedia entry.

    But these people also call themselves “orphans” even though Paul indicates that they’re “relatives” which I assume also includes spouses, siblings, parents, etc. So, next of kin, then. Or “NeXt of Kin” if they have reason to emphasize the “x”.

    These people don’t understand branding, They need to have a chat with Skunk Bear and Honey Badger.

  3. Brian says:

    Giving Gabby the Honey Badger moniker makes her character’s existence totally worth it.

  4. Rob says:

    Didn’t Jason Aaron do basically this exact story with his Red Right Hand arc in Wolverine?

  5. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    Yeah, I had the Red Right Hand in my mind all the time when I was reading it. I was waiting for something to happen that would finally differentiate OoX from RRH. It didn’t… but the finale shows very clearly how Laura is different from Logan, and for me that still makes this story work.

    (Also, in the end, the RRH were autodestructive, while the OoX are more mundane in their means and motivations.)

    I’m not actually sure if Taylor read the RRH story. I think that he’d write a line for Gabby about how it’s been done before if he did.

    And even if he did, and he was actually copying it… The whole RRH story boiled down to ‘Wolverine is tricked into killing a bunch of his children’, which in itself was a story Jason Aaron had already done with Fat Cobra in the Immortal Weapons miniseries, just a year before. So we’re dealing with a copy of a copy by way of autoplagiarism in between and… well… ‘shrug’ is all I have left at this point. 😀

  6. Pasquale says:

    “My issue is more this: it’s one thing for Laura to argue that she and Gabby and Logan have been victims of people who used them as weapons. But the others? You can make a case that Daken and Sabretooth were used as weapons, but they were also pretty awful people to start with. And Yuriko doesn’t even really fit that mould.”

    I think Taylor (and Laura) agree with you here and that’s why Laura asks them not to be present for the finale. I think it makes the story/message messier in a good way.

  7. Brian says:

    …so the left hand doesn’t know what the Red Right Hand is doing?

  8. Voord 99 says:

    I think it’s also fair to say that it’s a significantly different story if you do it with Laura than if you do it with Logan himself, for reasons which I think our host brings out in his conclusion.

    In fact, I’d say that repeating a recognizable Logan story can even be a positive virtue for a Laura story if it’s done well.

  9. Billy says:

    “NeXt of Kin” sounds like a spin-off series that follows the relatives of the X-Men.

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