Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy
The exigencies of event storytelling (and shared-universe storytelling more generally) can lead to some weird ways of constructing stories; a format that sees the same overall story pursued through multiple parallel narratives that aren’t even appearing in chronological sequence would normally be regarded as at least an interesting creative choice.
In this case, we have a rather odd transition going on between what are in effect two versions of the ongoing Wolverine series – the Death of Wolverine mini, and the Wolverines weekly. Bridging the gap between those titles are two separate minis, each serving to introduce (or at least set up) half of the cast of the weekly, and to collectively establish the premise: a bunch of characters, some established and some new, have all been the victim of potentially fatal experimentation by Dr Cornelius, and must join forces to find a cure.
Logan Legacy deals with the established half of the cast – X-23, Sabretooth, Daken, Lady Deathstrike and, somewhat incongruously, Mystique. The other book, Weapon X Project, deals with the new characters – experimental subjects who escape from Cornelius’ base in the confusion immediately after Wolverine’s death. That book started and finished second, but takes place first, thus allowing the same characters to appear as mystery villains in Logan Legacy when they’re kidnapping the other half of the cast. (In their own book, of course, they’re rather more sympathetic.) Complicating matters still further, the seven-issue Logan Legacy actually consists of a two-issue framing sequence, which surrounds five flashback one-shots in which different guest creative teams establish the status quo of each of the five cast members as Wolverines begins.
The issues that actually matter in plot terms are the framing sequence and the Mystique issue. In fact, the framing sequence is probably the least convincing at this stage, partly because the first issue grinds to a halt in order to meticulously advertise the stories to come in issues #2-6, but mainly because the premise of Wolverines is a wildly contrived one of which Charles Soule has yet to fully convince me.
Let’s leave aside the awkwardness of elevating Cornelius to master villain status, which is a bit like referencing the Silver Age X-Men stories and claiming that the archenemy of the piece was the Toad. There are practical reasons why Soule had to use Cornelius – essentially, that the alternatives would have involved needlessly complicating matters by bringing back dead characters only to kill them off again immediately – so while it’s not an ideal choice, I can see why it’s been made. Cornelius, we’re told, was obsessed with trying to healing powers and at some indeterminate point kidnapped and experimented on all of the cast members. None of them remember this, but there is a precedent for Weapon X using memory alteration, so that’s not too much of a stretch – though it doesn’t explain why he released them back into the wild after.
At any rate, we’re told that as a control mechanism, Cornelius has implanted all five with post-hypnotic control words that allow anyone (such as the Weapon X Project cast) to control them, put them to sleep, kill them, or erase the programming on the spot. The Project cast members are going to die as a result of their own experiments unless a cure is found; if the established characters help them, in return they’ll erase the programming. Alternatively, of course, they could just force them to help, but that wouldn’t be as effective because they’d all be reduced to minions with no initiative.
The whole concept of control words that can kill characters on the spot is silly, in a way that doesn’t seem to fit very neatly with a story that generally feels as if it’s taking itself desperately seriously. I suspect, to be fair, that the story was going for a sort of deadpan over-the-topness, but I’m not sure that’s the tone it’s actually hit. It ends up feeling self-consciously grim in a very mid-nineties way. Nor is there a very coherent idea of how the Legacy characters are actually supposed to help the Project ones. The early issues of Wolverine suggest that the idea is to retrieve Wolverine’s body and experiment on that, but quite how that’s supposed to help is entirely unclear.
In fairness, the Project cast are working from information in Cornelius’ files, and Cornelius never had time to update them to reflect the fact that Wolverine had lost his healing factor. So perhaps the idea is that it will indeed turn out to be a wasted effort. But the Legacy characters do know that he had lost his powers, so you’d think it would have come up somewhere. Still, there’s enough evidence of planning in terms of the interaction between the various stories to suggest that I ought to give it at least a little more opportunity to set out its stall in these areas.
At any rate, while the framing sequence isn’t altogether persuasive, the one-shots are more interesting. For the most part, they do succeed in establishing pretty clearly each character’s agenda and status quo at the outset of this story. Whether what’s established is in any way coherent with anything that came before is, in some cases, rather more doubtful. But we are at least left with a very clear idea of the position as this story is going to take it, and if you’re prepared to run with that, the individual issues aren’t bad at all.
The X-23 story, by Tim Seeley and Ariela Kristantina, takes as its starting point the idea that she’s devastated by Wolverine’s death and processes it as the death of a father figure who, being immortal and all, she had trusted to always be there for her. That leads her to bitterly reject him as a supposed larger than life legend who turned out to be just a guy in a silly costume, only for her to cross paths with an outrageously low-level superhero (the former Alpha Flight member Windshear, of all people) and come to appreciate the importance of the symbolism even at his lowly point on the superhero pecking order.
Parts of her reaction don’t really make logical sense, but in this case I think it’s the right kind of irrationality. We never saw X-23 develop any sort of significant relationship with Wolverine, but it’s not too hard to believe that it was quietly important to her in her own mind, and that she never knew how to take it any further. More dubious is a scene in a bar where a guy tries to pick her up as a prostitute and she responds by giving him a moral lecture. Yes, the story makes pretty clear that he’s a pathetic schlub who would take no for an answer (and that he’s still trying to take advantage of the desperate and confused, whether he knows it or not) – but for X-23 to react to him with anything other than outright contempt, let alone give him a speech about her feelings, strikes me as calling for a level of empathy that the character is fundamentally incapable of showing.
Still, the core idea of the story works, and the villains – a bunch of angst-ridden kids who are shooting up nightclubs in what they conceive to be some sort of performance art point about emotional pain – feels like something that could have wandered out of a Steve Gerber comic. It’s an unexpectedly odd thing to find in this series, and fits in quite neatly as a parody of self-pity taken to ludicrous extremes. Kristiana’s art is good stuff, with strong character work helped by subtle colouring from Sonia Oback (though she does sometimes seem a bit awkward in rendering Windshear’s grand heroic gestures), and I’d be happy to see her back.
The Sabretooth issue, by Kyle Higgins and Jonathan Marks, is basically Sabretooth sulking around Mogadishu where he’s supposed to be helping out a bunch of rebel fighters. In reality, he’s taking out his frustration at never having managed to prove his point that Wolverine is a mere pale copy of him, by picking off guys who could pass for Wolverine if you squint really, really hard, dressing them in a makeshift Wolverine costume, and then killing them. The largely monochrome colouring is atmospheric but the art has some serious intelligibility problems where action is concerned, and the basic concept manages to combine being Sabretooth 101 with failing to flow convincingly either from Paul Cornell’s depiction of the character, or Soule’s own take in Death of Wolverine, which weren’t compatible with each other either.
In fairness to Higgins, this may be because there’s nothing to usefully set up with Sabretooth. His flashback story plainly takes place before Axis, but it’s strongly hinted in Wolverines that the main story takes place after. If so, the take here seems to be that we’re looking at the inverted Sabretooth but that he’s keeping up the appearances of being the old character in order to maintain his intimidation factor as a matter of self-preservation. That’s actually a more interesting take on the concept than Uncanny Avengers would seem to promise.
(Higgins’ story also seems to be under the impression that Mogadishu is still in a state of civil war, though. In fact, while it’s still one of the most dangerous cities on earth, the actual rebel forces were driven out over three years ago.)
Issue #4, with Lady Deathstrike, is by Marguerite Bennett and Juan Doe – so it’s nothing if not visually stylish. Whether it makes a great deal of sense is more debatable; the central set piece is something about a fight with a demon thingy that manifests through nano-technology tattoos on three henchmen, which is both a confusing idea and confusingly depicted. The idea seems to be that you beat it by taking out the henchmen, but it’s not well conveyed. Broadly, the angle here seems to be since her quest for revenge on Wolverine has been rendered academic, Deathstrike needs a new purpose in life and fixes on taking over his role in keeping the Tokyo underworld in check (which it turns out he was doing a lot of – who knew?). This makes a certain kind of sense, since it gives her a function and it’s plausibly driven by a desire to prove some kind of point by at least taking over Wolverine’s role and doing it better. But it’s one of two stories where the grinding of gears is glaringly evident as a character is forcibly repositioned for the requirements of the upcoming series.
The Daken story, by Ray Fawkes (co-writer of Wolverines) and Elia Bonetti, is the other. The cover art shows pretty clearly that the editors were well aware that Daken was last seen as a blue-skinned henchman of the Apocalypse Twins in Uncanny Avengers, but the actual stories ignore that entirely (possibly, to be fair, because his time as an experimental subject must logically have happened since then, so there’s a gap to be filled in due course). On this version, Daken is apparently driven to protect his late father’s honour by hunting down and killing people who are selling Wolverine memorabilia on the underworld. This is sort of plausible as a development of the character, who was never on good terms with his father but was at least obsessed with him in some degree. You can make a case for Daken being the sort of character who would, in turn, become equally obsessed with control of his father’s legacy. Weirdly, though, the story seems to be convinced that Daken has hitherto been a fighter who works on instinct alone (when he’s been written for years as a scheming manipulator), and he’s generally written in these stories in a vaguely sympathetic way that seems largely off character. It wouldn’t be a bad story if it was persuasive as a take on Daken as previously established, but it really isn’t.
Finally, James Tynion IV and Andy Clarke get the Mystique issue, which is both a whopping retcon and a crucial part of the larger plot – leaving them the least freedom of all the creative teams, you would assume. For all that, they do an excellent job of using her shape-changing powers in creative ways and selling what she can do in terms of usurping people’s identities or simply causing confusion by hiding in plain sight among her opponents. The big plot idea here is that she and Wolverine are long-time arch-enemies going back decades (er, what?), and that way back even before his Weapon X days he had routinely thwarted her schemes for domination (er, even more what?). Destiny, being Destiny, foresaw the current story years ago but didn’t tell Mystique about it because it would have led to her trying to accelerate Wolverine’s death and getting beaten yet again. Now that it’s happened without her, Mystique can finally be given the advice that Destiny recorded long ago on how to make sure that she comes out of the upcoming story as the winner.
Obviously, that’s pretty important to Wolverines. But the idea of Wolverine as some sort of century-long arch-enemy for Mystique is a glaringly contrived retcon; it’s not an established part of their relationship and it sits unconvincingly with Wolverine’s own character arc, where he only becomes consistently a hero after hitting bottom post Weapon X and rebuilding himself with Alpha Flight and the X-Men. It’s not so much that it’s an inherently bad idea as that you can see the strings a mile off.
A mixed bag, then. But there are points of genuine interest in here, and if some of these approaches to the characters do become embedded as orthodox, then a lot of the problems here will fade with hindsight. Not entirely convincing at this stage, but it’s got something.
“There are practical reasons why Soule had to use Cornelius – essentially, that the alternatives would have involved needlessly complicating matters by bringing back dead characters only to kill them off again immediately”
But didn’t they bring back Cornelius from the dead for this story?
Also, who cares about continuity, there is a story a writer feels that needs to be told!
Haven’t read the issue above, but wasn’t Mystique and Wolverine’s decades-long rivalry established in the Jason Aaron “Get Mystique” arc right after Messiah Complex? Even then, hadn’t there been hints that they’d known each other way back in stories going back years (off the top of my head, I can only think of the out-of-continuity Team X/Team 7 crossover though).
Didn’t X-23 start her existence in comics as a prostitute?
What about the bizarre use of Elixer in this mini-series? His inclusion is immediately questionable from a marketing standpoint (he doesn’t really have a relationship with Wolverine outside of the mostly-forgotten Kyle/Yost X-Force series) and his purpose as a redshirt becomes obvious when you see he’s the only character without a standalone story.
He basically shows up, only says enough to remind the reader about his presence and his powers, and then basically dies to build up how dangerous the bad guys are. Of course, it’s unclear enough what actually happened to him so that later writers can decide whether he survived or not, but you can tell what the intent of his role was in this story.
I honestly wouldn’t mind if Marvel decided to write him off or kill him in a more interesting manner — “healer” characters can be problematic to keep around, after all — but this just struck me as very bad and lazy writing. It reminded me of the early 00’s, where this kind of thing was happening all the time: killing off characters who had faded into the background just to establish a new villain. That’s how we lost characters like Banshee and Skin. I even remember an issue of Tangled Web that ended with Tombstone breaking the Spot’s neck just for one last unnecessary shock, but that was quickly ignored.
Anyway, it’s a tired trope, and I was hoping for more out of Soule. Marvel is hyping him up to be the Next Big Thing, and it’s fair to expect more than this.
Elixir needed to die.
How idiotic is it having healers around who don’t heal characters who are injured or about to die. David could have cured Hope in X-Force, or the damaged Phoenix 5 or Magneto etc.
Also, what happened to the subplot about Elixir knowing who/what Hope is?
@wwk5d The story that needed to be told was Wolverine’s death in a $4.99 book that would generate 2 to 3 times the sales of Paul Cornell’s title. It is the Mighty Marvel way!
Also, Cornelius died and was brought back to life for Death of Wolverine. I remember reading somewhere that Soule wanted to use Sabertooth as the big bad but could not because of Cornell’s story arc.
Given that the whole thing was put together in a hurry largely by a new writer brought in at the last minute to replace the originally intended writer, who was then given the responsibility of devising a plot to last a year of weekly stories, it’s not a bad set up at all.
I hope next year we get a Death of Wolverines mini-series, followed by a weekly Wolverineses series with people picking up the legacy of the legacy characters.
Wolverine (via that early 90s cartoon) is what got me into comics. But the character’s omni-presence across the publishing line was ridiculous. His presence was a given for most team books and he had little influence (positive or negative) to the story (with a few exceptions). Wolverine had become redundant.
I still like the character, but I’d like to read a good run of a X-Men title where he’s not even mentioned. Heck, I’d be keen to see a X-Men movie he wasn’t in.
Save the legacy stuff for the niche X-completist and Wolverine die-hard market.
What turns me off is the very idea of Wolverine as a legacy character. The guy is the ultimate individualist, which is my attempt to be nice in saying that he is the ultimate escapist narcisistic fantasy.
Presenting him as the main axis through which so many lives revolve is… not appealling.
Though, in a weird way, they kind of do. Sabretooth and Daken are both characters who’s defining traits were in contrast to Wolverine. Deathstrike is only defined as a Wolverine villain and x-23 is his daughter/clone. Mystique is, well, a retcon, by the sound of things.
I know you could make this point for any characters and their rogues gallery and supporting cast, but hey, at least it’s a story about the extended Wolverine cast getting on with it rather than another story about Wolverine discovering long lost secrets about his muddled past.
Mystique has had too many retcons recently. Suddenly she is married to Xavier and has a son with him, as well as a son with wolverine while she became Wolverine’s oldest arch villain? I know she is a shape shifter, but she would also have to be a shape shifting Maddrox with multiple personality disorder to be able to do all that stuff
I have a strong suspicion that Cornelius was used in this event because that was his role in the Ultimate Universe.
The Wolverine/Mystique being decades old arch-enemies is nothing new.
How exactly does the world know that Wolverine died?
Everyone across the entire line is utterly convinced, as if Marvel’s marketing pushed over into 616 and everyone just nodded and started lining up for funerals and bar fights. But the only people who possibly have a clue as to what happened are the Weapon X guys, and they’ve been busy.
It’s a really big disconnect in storytelling, but I guess it’s easy to overlook because “WOLVERINE DEAD!” had been pounded into fandom’s consciousness for months until it just became a fait accompli. Seriously, what convinced the X-Men to accept that Logan was dead and there was no need to investigate or recover the body?
Looks like Wolverine is staying dead.
It’s like as soon as DC wiped out its continuity and most of its legacy characters, Marvel jumped on the legacy bandwagon. Cap has a son, black Nick Fury is the new Nick Fury, Bucky is the other new Nick Fury, there are a million Hulks, a million Wolverines, Young Avengers, kid Gladiator, kid Apocalypse, kid Scorpion, blah blah blah.
@errant
Yes, X-23 made her comic book debut as a prostitute, in NYX. Her specialty was cutting masochistic clients. She kills a john, and joins up with the other NYX characters.
NYX fell into limbo, while X-23 showed up in Uncanny X-Men where Claremont promptly seemed to write her a new personality. (To be fair, Quesada didn’t get far enough with NYX to establish a personality for her anyway.)
“…black Nick Fury is the new Nick Fury, Bucky is the other new Nick Fury…”
Alright, the next weekly book? FURIES! You could resurrect Mikel Fury (due to his inborn Infinity Formula), maybe add in one of the ‘Caterpillars’ from SECRET WARRIORS or something…
@Jaime,
I’m not entirely clear what defines a “legacy character,” but it seems to me Marvel has always had a few. A half-dozen characters have been Captain America and Bucky. And Carol Danvers is arguably a “legacy” character since she consciously adopted Mar-Vell’s legacy from the beginning. There’s The Human Torch, from the very beginning too.
In fact, were the retcon’s re 1950s Captain America done before DC integrated the golden age characters into the silver age? If so, cap might be the first legacy character.
No disagreement, though, that Marvel has run away with the idea while DC has been simultaneously pulling back.
Wasn’t there a 90s miniseries starring USAgent, War Machine, and Thunderstrike as like the legacy Avengers?
Was that Force Works?
I didn’t read Avengers in the 90s.
“Wasn’t there a 90s miniseries starring USAgent, War Machine, and Thunderstrike as like the legacy Avengers?”
Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective.
But Spider-woman was never intended to be a legacy character for Spider-man, She-Hulk was pretty uniquely defined next to Hulk, and people largely hated Ben Reilly.
It’s only in the past few years that Marvel’s gone nucking futs about it.
“And Carol Danvers is arguably a “legacy” character since she consciously adopted Mar-Vell’s legacy from the beginning. There’s The Human Torch, from the very beginning too.”
Fair enough, although for a while they outlived/outshone their originals, and arguably still do, whereas DC introduced Earth 2 to keep its Golden Age characters around.
And of course, today’s heroes are so Incredibly Important that their legacy stretches into the far future, which is why I could never take that 1990 Guardians of the Galaxy series seriously, and why the Cap-To-The-Future storyline was the weakest part of Hickman’s Avengers run.
How about a series where all the heroes are obsessed with being legacies of a team that existed 200 years ago? A cross between cosplayers and Civil War re-enacters. I could see a comic-tragic-weird version from Spurrier, or an Ellis/Ennis piss-take…
That’d make an awesome maxi-series.
As a side note, does anyone else keep checking back in hopes of Paul having a blog up about the reboot news?
Well, i keep checking up because i’m interested to read the comments and see what people have to say, and in some cases get comic book news, since i rarely check into comic book sites.
So, your comment original Matt made me go “dafuq?”! I didn’t know about the reboot (though i suspected one was on the way, but didn’t expect it so soon). So I’m looking into it but the more I read, the more confused I get, it seems that there will be a ton of books to read for this and honestly i don’t think I like it!
But I gotta admit, some of the stuff i’m seeing bring to mind the Amalgam Comics universe, way back during the Marvel vs DC/ DC vs Marvel era, which I actually liked but that was a very limited event. I don’t think Marvel would excersise restraint in this day and age
I’m just itching for new House To Astonish podcasts to fill a gaping hole in my weekend podcast schedule.
This is the only comics site I check, since I find comic sites in general horrible. I found out about it on Twitter.
TBH, video game sites are worse, but comic sites are pretty bad too. They’re basically posting every single promotional information that the comic book publishers send them, so so finding actual news in them is a chore. So thanks for informing us!
We need a HousetoAstonish to discuss Secret Wars.
I’d prefer a fresh start opposed to a commingling of ‘new’ and ‘popular’ elements of the old MU. Mashing parallel dimensions into a ‘battleworld’ sounds like an in story representation of what DC did with the nu52.
Looks to me, so far, like this reboot will be my Marvel jumping-off point. I’m expecting lots of rehashing of old stories, and I’ve never had any interest in anything Ultimate – and seriously, what the hell was the point wasting one of the last ever 616 arcs of X-Men on an Ultimate Spiderman crossover, right before they mash up 616 and Ultimate (and everything else)?
I’m not sure why they’re bothering. They’re rebooting with the same incompetent writers and editors that screwed everything up in the last 10 years any way.
Based on the wording of the announcement it sounds more like a “soft” reboot. I’m guessing Secret Wars will begin with all universes being destroyed and will end with an amalgam universe which will essentially be the same, but details updated/streamlined to include the parts that worked in the Ultimate/Movieverse continuity. I mean, isn’t Hickman’s Avengers story just a longer, drawn-out version of Crisis on Infinite Earths?
I’m just wondering if David Hasselhoff Nick Fury will be erased completely and Samuel L. Jackson Nick Fury will be the “one true Fury” in the new-ish universe.
Of all the things Marvel is ripping off from DC, they pick something as shitty as Flashpoint?
The point of a reboot is to make the books easier to get into. However, each book has to be distinct. when you have 10 x-men titles and 10 avengers titles, 10 wolverine titles and 20 spider-man titles, then a new reader would be equally lost on what to get as before the reboot. I believe one weekly title for each franchise, maybe two at best would be a much better idea than 50 titles with the same name
I have to agree with that. I read these things and I don’t know what to buy half the time. They put banners on different titles so you know they are part of the same story and then they’re either some filler bullshit or tediously related at best.
A more streamlined approach to releases is probably more of a key factor than anything.
One has to wonder what they’ll do when the Marvel Cinematic Universe gets rebooted or recast. Go back to white Nick Fury if the new actor is white? Will Qicksilver and the Scarlet Witch be Magneto’s children again if the X-Men film rights should ever revert back to Marvel? And so on and so forth.
I’m just skeptical that Marvel can exhibit restraint. It seemed like every storyline in the Ultimate Universe would introduce two or three characters that already existed in the Marvel universe. From what I can tell, DC is having the same problem now, plus fans who understandably get upset that their favorite characters haven’t been reintroduced yet. There doesn’t see to be much point in streamlining the universe when within a year writers could be racing to see who gets to bring back Woodgod first.
One of the rumoured objectives for the reboot is to redefine the Marvel Universe to work without the Fantastic Four and X-Men, because of the movie rights shenanigans. If that’s true, one wonders what that means for Wolverine; will he now stop appearing in every other issue of every other title?
You mean they might separate the x-men and avengers universes? that would be weird! would they dare?
if they did something like that, then they could have one wolverine in the avengers universe and another in the x-men U, same with quick silver and the scarlet witch but seriously, would they do that?
I’d be okay with separating the x-men from the rest is the MU.The concept is stronger if there aren’t 10,000 Super-humans running around that the public is perfectly okay with because they got their powers by experimenting on themselves.
That said, to separate them off simply bc movie rights strikes me as short sighted and altogether misconceived.
Also, universe relaunches are lazy. It’s just writers admitting that they don’t have any creative new ideas but hey look, remember how great the early issues of Spider Man were, well guess what, heres the same story but slightly different. It’s teh better now those cuz BENDIS wrote it!!!!
What I thought was going to happen when the Ultimate line first came out was they’d start establishing the “classic” characters over there and simultaneously “move on” in the 616-verse. By move on I mean retire or kill off long serving characters and let the next generation pop up, and move the concepts further than they can seemingly logically go.
By the time Morrison was done the X-men thing looked quite different to when he started. I was thinking that kind of progression could happen right across the line. Instead the Avengers moved closer to they’re Ultimate counterparts. To me, that would’ve been the best way to have their cake and eat it too.
They’re not gonna reboot. They rebooted Spider-man just a few years ago. They rebooted Guardians of the Galaxy two years ago. They keep rebooting the X-Men. The Avengers are closer to the movie versions than ever.
They’re not gonna reboot.
I think we need to distinguish between a reboot and relaunch of a series. They haven’t rebooted GotG, they just relaunched it – all the previous GotG comics are still in continuity. The X-Men have only been rebooted once in mainstream continuity (Age of Apocalypse) and that was only a temporary thing.
I’ll be surprised if the outcome of Secret Wars is a full reboot of the Marvel Universe. It seems to me to be almost the opposite of the New 52 (and even that wasn’t a full reboot, given the fudge that was made of the Batman and Lantern books) – rather than get rid of what came before, they bring in everything, make a new universe out of that, and continue on from there, with all the prior stuff still having happened in the respective realities the relevant characters came from.
That said, to separate them off simply bc movie rights strikes me as short sighted and altogether misconceived.
They have done stupider things.
It seems unlikely to me too — the X-Men are part of Battleworld, after all — but then they do keep trying to make the comic characters more like the film characters even though it seems to have zero effect on sales, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut the Fantastic Four and X-Men out of the All New Marvel Universe (ugh) for movie-related reasons.
@kevilgreen
We can only hope.
“They haven’t rebooted GotG, they just relaunched it”
No, they rebooted it. They retroactually made it not a reboot two years later, but they didn’t even do a convincing job of that.