The Incomplete Wolverine – 2012
Part 1: Origin to Origin II | Part 2: 1907 to 1914
Part 3: 1914 to 1939 | Part 4: World War II
Part 5: The postwar era | Part 6: Team X
Part 7: Post Team X | Part 8: Weapon X
Part 9: Department H | Part 10: The Silver Age
1974-1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979
1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985
1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991
1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997
1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003
2004 |2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009
2010 | 2011
It’s 2012, and we’re in the first year of Wolverine as the headmaster of his very own school. At this point, Wolverine is still a member of the X-Men (well, half of them), the Avengers and X-Force as well as having a solo title. But compared to last year, 2012 is relatively restrained.
We left off with Wolverine vol 4 #20, which was the first part of another Japan storyline. But this is where Marvel goes through its brief enthusiasm for legacy numbering, and so the numbering jumps to…
WOLVERINE #300-303
“Back in Japan”
by Jason Aaron, Adam Kubert, Paul Mounts, Ron Garney, Billy Tan, Jason Keith, Steve Sanders & Sotocolor
January to March 2012
That’s a somewhat abbreviated credits list, as issues #300 and #303 have a lot of artists credited on them.
Anyway, Wolverine heads to Japan, where a war between the Hand and the Yakuza is brewing. The Hand are controlled by the Kingpin at this point, but Hand boss Azuma Gōda wants rid of him. Gōda hires Sabretooth as an ally, and kidnaps Wolverine’s foster daughter Amiko – for once, not to get at Wolverine, but because her boyfriend Shingen Harada II is the rightful heir to Clan Yashida. Shingen responds by making his debut as the new, hi-tech Silver Samurai; he’s not an outright villain yet, but an upstart who Wolverine and Sabretooth both view with disdain. Ultimately, Wolverine rescues Amiko himself, then goes after the Hand. During all this, Wolverine has sex with Yukio, who is actually a disguised Mystique (with enhanced powers that stop him recognising her by scent). Wolverine then slaughters a lot of the Hand ninjas in Tokyo, which Gōda views as a wonderful opportunity to get rid of the dead wood and rebuild from the core Hand organisation that remains in the shadows. Of course, he winds up getting killed by Wolverine. Having apparently defeated the Hand – or this splinter faction, at any rate – Wolverine is ready to return home, albeit with a sense of vague dissatisfaction about the whole thing.
What he doesn’t know is that Sabretooth, Mystique, Silver Samurai and Lord Deathstrike form an alliance to take over Tokyo organised crime, and effectively seize control of the Hand. (Or part of it? Kingpin keeps showing up in Hand stories for a while.) That’s Sabretooth’s status quo for the next few years.
Charts – 5 May 2023
To celebrate His Majesty’s coronation, virtually nothing is happening on the singles chart this week.
1. Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding – “Miracle”
That’s a total of four weeks. It matches 2015’s “Love Me Like You Do” as Ellie Goulding’s longest running number one. (Calvin Harris’s record is eight weeks, with “One Kiss” in 2018.) If you’re wondering, the number one single on the day of Elizabeth II’s coronation was Frankie Laine’s “I Believe”.
10. Nines – “Tony Soprano 2”
19. Nines – “Calendar”
34. Nines featuring J Styles – “Favela”
The maximum three tracks from his album “Crop Circle 2”, which enters the album chart at number 1. He reached number 1 with his previous album, “Crabs in a Bucket” – the first “Crop Circle” was a 2018 mixtape that number 5.
The X-Axis – w/c 1 May 2023
At last, a nice quiet week.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #11. (Annotations here.) Okay, so it undercuts the ending of Sins of Sinister: Dominion to have the four compromised Quiet Council members who went to the Pit come straight back out again in the next scene. But that point aside, the slow burn approach feels like the right one. It’s not an immediate collapse – we don’t get to the “Fall of X” stuff for a while yet – but everything is pointing towards the looming failure of the Krakoan era, as everything about Krakoa starts to get a little bit hollowed out. Half the Quiet Council can’t vote any more. Resurrection can’t be trusted any more. And so on. In fact, the direction of travel seems so clear that part of me wonders whether it’s a feint and we’re going to get “Krakoa saved from the abyss”. But I do think it’s probably time to move on to something else, and the other way of reading it is that the focus is already starting to shift to “what next?”
Storm is our spotlight character in this issue, and we pick up on the theme from X-Men Red of her being hopelessly overcommitted. It might seem a bit odd to play that angle with Storm rather than, say, Wolverine. But of course, he’s not in charge of anything, and thanks to his amazing ability to be in nine stories at once, he doesn’t have a track record of taking on leadership roles and not being there when it matters. It’s also an angle that helps to undercut her tendencies towards sainthood, and we can already see that her attempts to manage the problem here are just going to lead to catastrophe. And, despite being warned to her face that she failed to spot any of the problems in the Sins of Sinister timeline, she magnificently fails to spot any of them in this timeline either. Poor Storm.
Immortal X-Men #11 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #11
“Part 11: A Hard Reign”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Well, that’d be a picture of Storm in a tree, wouldn’t it?
PAGE 2. Data page. Our opening quote is presumably alluding to the circular arrangement of the Quiet Council meeting chamber, presented as the arena of (political) game-playing. Much of this issue is about the effort to keep up the appearance of the Quiet Council while attempting to prevent the abuse of its rules – with spectacular lack of effect, whatever the X-Men might think.
Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a pioneer of cultural history, who was interested in the role that art and culture played in society. Homo Ludens (1938) argues that play is an essential feature of culture. The term “dyutamandalam” just means “gaming circle”. The quote here is from a section which indirectly inspired the modern use of the term “magic circle” in the gaming context to mean (broadly) a place in which the rules of the game supplant the rules of the normal world.
X-Men: Before The Fall – Sons of X #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – SONS OF X #1
“Run It Again”
Writer: Si Spurrier
Artist: Phil Noto
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – SONS OF X. This is one of several X-Men: Before The Fall one-shots. The others are Mutant First Strike and Heralds of Apocalypse in June, and Sinister Four in July.
To all intents and purposes, however, this is Legion of X #14 (with the Nightcrawlers miniseries being issues #11-13).
COVER / PAGE 1. Legion faces down Mother Righteous, while Margali Szardos (carrying the Hopesword) stands over the distorted Nightcrawler, with Nimrod in the background.
PAGE 2. Opening montage.
Panel 1, as we’ll see, is Legion doing some Danger Room-style training to fight Nimrod.
Panel 2 shows a mutant transformed into a monster in New Jersey, continuing the storyline about mutants being magically transformed which was in progress in Legion of X before the “Sins of Sinister” crossover. It’s all the work of Nightcrawler’s sorceress mother Margali Szardos, who in turn has been working with Orchis. The two newspapers in the foreground show art recycled from page 3 of Legion of X #9.
Charts – 28 April 2023
1. Calvin Harris & Ellie Goulding – “Miracle”
Well, I told you that Lewis Capaldi’s “Wish You The Best” only got to number 1 on the strength of first-week sales of the pre-ordered CD single. And as predicted, he doesn’t manage a second week at number one, so “Miracle” returns for its third. Not that “Wish You The Best” collapses – it’s at a very respectable number 3, with “Forget Me” also still in the top 10. And “Miracle” is very lucky to get that third week – it beats David Kushner’s “Daylight” by the equivalent of 267 sales, which is coin-toss territory.
11. Nines – “Tony Soprano 2”
Nines has previously been one of those rappers who does much better on the album chart. His two previous top 40 singles were “I See You Shining” (number 37 in 2018) and “Airplane Mode” (number 25 in 2020). But his last three albums all made the top 5, and the most recent was a number 1. This is the lead single from his next album. Nicely shot video.
The X-Axis: w/c 24 April 2023
SINS OF SINISTER: DOMINION #1. (Annotations here.) The end of the Sins of Sinister crossover, which has been pretty successful. Yes, there’s still a degree of haziness over what exactly a Dominion is – we seem to have slipped somewhere from it being a collective consciousness into being a single ascended person. And yes, I’m not really sure I follow the mechanics of what Moira actually does to influence events in the rebooted timeline – there’s a bit of handwaving going on there. But I’ll let it slide because the big picture works. It’s a dead end, but it’s a thousand years of dead end. In a perverse kind of way, the sheer scale of its pointlessness contributes to the awfulness of it all. You could make a case that it’s all rather abstract and distanced from human concerns, but again, that feels to me like precisely the impression you want to create about a timeline knocked disastrously off course in this way. And Paco Medina gives the finale a nice sense of scale, too.
And besides, it’s not simply a self-cancelling time loop. Rasputin IV sticks around. The storyline of Sinister and his Moira Engine is resolved. The entire direction of Mother Righteous and the Quiet Council is changed. The ending here is a big surprise and it works all the better because, alongside three months of Sinister Gone Wrong, we’ve also had a pretty good idea of what Mother Righteous’s preferred timeline might look like. I can see why people might have issues with some of this arc, but I liked it a lot.
Betsy Braddock, Captain Britain #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
BETSY BRADDOCK, CAPTAIN BRITAIN #3
“The Captain We Deserve”
Writer: Tini Howard
Artist: Vasco Georgiev
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1. The Fury as “Captain Britain”, with Morgan Le Fey behind him, and Betsy in chains, in front of a cheering crowd. Nothing very much like this happens in the issue, but it’s kind of the result that Morgan is hoping for.
PAGE 2. Brian and Meggan leave Betsy to babysit Maggie.
Considering that the Manor was moved to Cornwall in issue #1 and they’re going to see a show in London, they’re either planning to fly there in theatre clothes, or they’ve got a portal somewhere. Maybe there’s still a Krakoan gate they’re allowed to use, or maybe Brian just has something connected with Otherworld.
Brian seems to be hinting that he agrees with the criticisms that Betsy doesn’t spend enough time among actual British people instead of dealing with Otherworld stuff.
Sins of Sinister: Dominion #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
SINS OF SINISTER: DOMINION #1
“Sins of Sinister, part 11: ∞ Deadly Sins”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artists: Paco Medina & Lucas Werneck
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Mr Sinister in prayer – the present-day version, not the far-future one.
PAGE 2. The Storm System, 1000 years in the future.
This establishing shot joins the action at page 11 of Nightcrawlers #3. As Vox Ignis explained in that story, the Spirits of Vengeance (who left Earth early on) have possessed Galactus, fuelled by his rage at what Sinister has done to the universe.
PAGE 3. Sinister and Moira talk.
So far as these characters are concerned, we’re picking up from Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #3, which ended with Sinister shooting Jon Ironfire through the head. Moira’s absence was noted by Sinister in that issue, but it wasn’t clear that he was in radio contact with her. (There’s no contradiction, though, because Sinister doesn’t know where she is.)
The dead characters lying on the ground around Ironfire are Bloodroot (the red one), Old Oda (the bird) and Genas Mind-Flayer (the furry guy in the hood). Not that it really matters at this stage.
Charts – 21 April 2023
I’ll get to this week’s annotations in a couple of days. In the meantime, I still haven’t done last week’s chart post, so…
1. Lewis Capaldi – “Wish You The Best”
This is Lewis Capaldi’s fifth number one – the others are “Someone You Loved”, “Before You Go”, “Forget Me” and “Pointless”. He’s in heart-rending mode, and it’s getting a bit formulaic to my mind. The main reason why it’s number one is first-week sales of the CD single, which would have been pre-ordered by the fanbase. That CD single accounts for roughly a third of the song’s sales points; without them, it would have been on course for a respectable position lower down the top 10.
