X-Men Blue #29-30: “The Search for Jimmy Hudson”
Continuing my catch-up efforts – X-Men Blue is already up to issue #32 – we have this bizarre little two-parter from Cullen Bunn and Nathan Stockman. You may recall that we just did an arc with a fill-in team so that the regular cast could go off and appear in the Venomized miniseries.
X-Men Blue doesn’t really bother to explain what happened in those issues, beyond the fact that Jean Grey is alive and well, something that is unlikely to come as a tremendous shock. But Jimmy Hudson, who wasn’t in the set-up issues at all, is apparently now the last remaining Poison on Earth. Yay?
Cullen Bunn is hardly the first writer to have pet villains who he takes from book to book with him, but his decision to cart the Poisons around with him is an odd one. They’re plainly designed as Venom villains; they’re a riff on the symbiote concept, and they’re intended to be particularly threatening to Venom and his fellow symbiote users. But instead of taking root in the regular Venom title, instead they’ve followed Cullen Bunn to Monsters Unleashed and X-Men Blue, where they don’t really belong at all.
Jimmy Hudson is off on his own, doing the old Bruce Banner sad wanderer routine where he tries to keep himself to himself but turns into a monster when he’s angry. Since he’s Poison Wolverine, the monster is basically an exaggerated version of Wolverine, complete with claws that stream around the room. Visually, it’s actually not bad; Stockman has a likeably cartoony style that can carry this sort of thing off, but there’s also something very believable and grounded about his work, which the Poison stuff can play again. (He’s also commendably good on drawing a wide range of body types, something that always helps to make the bit players feel more distinctive, because so few artists do it.)
So the X-Men are trying to catch up with Jimmy, who bizarrely insists that he’s entirely a Poison now, even though he acts completely normally most of the time. He maintains, rather unconvincingly, that these are just the echoes of his host body’s memories. Everyone else thinks Jimmy is horribly dangerous, but Jean Believes In Him, and she’s starting to get through to him just in time for Daken to turn up at the cliffhanger.
What’s Daken doing here? Well, he was in the previous arc, and he’s apparently here at Magneto’s request to do what needs to be done. But I guess we’re going for the idea that he and Jimmy are both meant to be the sons of Wolverine, and that should be interesting, right?
Not really. Daken is the antihero who wants to use lethal force and seems to have a perfectly good reason for doing so, but we all know he’ll turn out to be wrong because it’s a superhero comic and that’s how it works. There’s a hint of him taking an interest in getting rid of Jimmy, but it’s not well developed, and it wouldn’t fit anyway with the way he’s been written in books like All-New Wolverine. More to the point, there’s a fundamental difficulty in trying to play Daken off against Jimmy Hudson, which is that Jimmy Hudson has the charisma of a plank. The story tries to suggest that Jimmy and the Poison are both survivors of dead universes, but… so what? Where does that take us?
Eventually the X-Men just let Jimmy go, because Jean trusts him so much and he’s trying so hard. Which comes across as monumentally dim, given how he was acting earlier in the story. Whatever Daken’s motivations, he’s surely right when he objects that Jimmy is not safe to be out there unsupervised.
It’s fortunate that this story has two issues of interesting art, because it’s not got much else going for it. It’s an over familiar plot, but it really falters on the most fundamental level: who cares about Jimmy Hudson? Who cares that he was a Poison, and who cares that he’s out of the book? Who ever cared? It’s not that Cullen Bunn has done a bad job of finding character hooks on this title generally. But he hasn’t found anything that works with Jimmy. Perhaps this should be taken as a two-issue admission of defeat and a gentle removal of the bozo from the cast, but I suspect not, given that he’s been partnered with Bunn’s current pet concept.
More likely, there’s just nothing much to the guy – or perhaps, anything that worked was specific to the Ultimate Universe setting. I wouldn’t know. Even I’d given up on Ultimate X-Men by the time he appeared. I suppose he’s a loose end that somebody will feel compelled to tie up in the end, but for now I’m happy enough to see him go.
Nope. Jimmy Hudson has always been a boring, uncharismatic waste of a character. He was ACCEPTABLE in Ultimate Comics X as a replacement for Logan, because “you have to have a Wolverine,” (I guess?) but in a world that has Daken, Laura, heroic-Sabretooth, AND Old Man Logan? Jimmy is entirely pointless.
He should’ve died with the rest of Earth-1610
Poor Jimmy Hudson. He aint looking for nothing but a good time, but I guess every rose has its thorn.
Well his Mama don’t dance, and his daddy don’t rock & roll. He’s gonna need SOMETHING to believe in.
Maybe he should become a Fallen Angel. (Boom, Poison deep cut AND X-book deep cut. 🙂
There is an exquisite silliness in the situation where Wolverine is dead and therefore there are only a half dozen or so variations on the theme running around.
Once upon a time that was an “Exiles” joke issue. Now it is the way it goes.
I always found it to be a weird Silver Agey artifact that DC had multiple Flashes and multiple Green Lanterns and so forth running around in the same universe. Then Marvel, for some reason, decided that was a good idea in the 2010s and now there are two copies of a fair number of their characters. It’s annoying.
The Wolverine situation, while not exactly that, is particularly egregious. Presumably the idea was to “give him a rest” a la Thor or the FF, but if anything, I’m more Wolverine-fatigued than ever with Old Man Logan, Laura, L’il Laura and the Whole Clone Gang, Jimmy Hudson, Daken, Gimped Sabretooth, and others filling the role.
On another topic – Paul (or others), have you noticed the absolute explosion of X-titles in the last couple of months? I’m still an X-Men completist (a sickness, I know), and lately, probably 3/4 of my read pile has been X-Men books between multiple ongoing titles (many of which are multi-shipping each month), a flood of minis, event minis (like the Wolverine thing), and so forth.
Praying that Extermination is finally – FINALLY – the end of the Original Five Teens. Bendis is a lunatic for unleashing them on us.
It seems to me that Wolverine has achieved equal footing with the X-Men as a saleable brand, at least from Marvel’s perspective.
Honestly, it seems as if Marvel really only has a few brands in comics that can reliably support ongoing “families” of titles: The aforementioned X-brand, Wolverine, Deadpool (of all things), the Avengers (though the post-Hickman era seems to be testing that), and Spider-Man. (At DC, Batman, the Justice League, Green Lantern, and Superman that work as supportable franchises.)
All of this seems quite independent of the movies: Marvel certainly tried to build franchises on the Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy, but the Panther stuff died quickly and the Guardians don’t seem to support solo books or secondary titles for very long. There were also some efforts around the Netflix series characters that never went anywhere, and the less said about the attempt to use the Inhumans in place of the X-books, the better.
I suspect the limited number of supportable brands, coupled with creators’ understandable desire to save their original ideas fort creator-owned work, accounts for the proliferation of endless variant versions of the most saleable characters at both companies.
@Omar: I had the same thought. In addition: the limited number of supportable brands is likely bolstered by the reluctance to create new characters for major companies. Because even if most new characters fail outright, all it takes is one to make a fortune (e.g., Deadpool).
I guess what I’m saying is that the way out of this mess might be to give creators some ownership of the characters they create — that unravels the whole problem.
And it’s certainly in everyone’s best interests to do so as the comic reading market continues to shrink. Marvel and DC can’t rely on the same 8-10 prototypes forever. And the Hollywood gravy train has to falter at some point.
“Even I’d given up on Ultimate X-Men by the time he appeared.”
Me too. My interest in Ultimate X-Men was swept away by a Jeph Loeb tidal wave. Jimmy Hudson never really seemed to have a point for being. He was just there. I could not tell you any details about the guy beyond “has Wolverine powers”.
Eh, Marvel has had duplicative characters since pretty early on, just not so much in the mutant titles until recently. Giant Man, Ant Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Thing, all have knock-off versions going way back, many of which have grown to become important characters.