Laura Kinney: Wolverine #8 annotations
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #8
“Honor Bound”
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
WOLVERINE.
She mentions checking the Treehouse for “new leads” – that refers back to the message drop that she found in issue #1.
When going after MGH dealers, she chooses to wear her black and grey X-Force uniform from the Utopia period. She observes that “being on X-Force taught me that you can do things that no one has to know about”. In practice, she seems to be using it for added stealth.
She refers to Bucky telling her in issue #5 that “if there’s one thing a Wolverine has, it’s time”. His point was that she had plenty of time to figure things out and come to terms with pars of her life.
Seeing Polly and Haymaker as a couple reminds her of her illusory life in issues #6-7 where she was in a couple with Julian Keller, and makes her wonder whether that’s what she always wanted. NYX was clearly setting the two of them up as a couple before it was cancelled.
SUPPORTING CAST
Haymaker. Jordan Gastin was introduced in the 2023 continuity-implant miniseries X-23: Deadly Regenesis, also written by Erca Schultz. This is their first appearance outside that miniseries.
Haymaker’s back story involves them being an MMA fighter whose criminal brother Drew was killed by Laura, back when she was X-23 and an assassin for hire.To avenge his brother, Jordan winds up working for Kimura under the name Haymaker, and gets powered up with MGH (Mutant Growth Hormone). Eventually Haymaker figures out that they’re on the wrong side and joins forces with X-23.
Without access to MGH, Haymaker has no superhuman powers, and is simply an MMA fighter with a costume. They’re now working with Polly (see below) to fund her Oasis project by stealing cash from low-level criminals. Haymaker regards Oasis as a big deal, and they and Polly are clearly a couple.
Polly. Polly’s only previous appearance was in issue #1, where she was running a mutant refuge in Dubai. For some reason she’s now setting up a New York branch, even though NYX is surely covering some of this territory already.
Scout. Gabby shows up on Laura’s front steps at the end of the issue with half her face mutilated. Since Gabby doesn’t feel pain, we can’t read too much into her relatively muted reaction. She also appears with Laura in this week’s Uncanny X-Men #17, looking absolutely fine, and she looks normal on the covers of the next two issues as well. Basically, it looks like a Masque story, but we’ll see.
She still has Jonathan, her pet wolverine.
Emery and Ivan, the mutant siblings from issue #1, appear in cameo at the opening of Oasis Flatiron; they talk about Murder Me, Mutina, the slasher film from this week’s Uncanny. As in that issue, nobody seems surprised that a mutant teen might want to see the film – evidently the promotion isn’t outrageously anti-mutant.
VILLAINS
A group of MGH dealers. They’re getting desperate mutants to sell them their powers, and are powerful enough to beat Laura into unconsciousness. Unless they’ve found a massively powerful mutant to work with, that may suggest some actual fighting skill beyond their powers. They run away when faced with a mysterious figure that we don’t see.
CAMEO APPEARANCES
Luke Cage has a single line of dialogue over the phone, congratulating Laura for taking down the dealers.
” NYX was clearly setting the two of them up as a couple”
Some readers thought that NYX was setting Laura and Kiden up as a couple but no one at Marvel except Lanzing wanted to use Kiden, so it will probably never be mentioned again.
Colorist Rachelle Rosemberg talked about the last issue of the series on Instagram by posting some pictures of work on issue #10. Sure, the series will be replaced by Laura Kinney: Sabretooth during the Age of Revelations, but from the tone of the post it seems that it will not return later.
Hollywood has conditioned us to think every close relationship must be sexual. It’s a shame.
@Si: It’s bizarre, but I’m not sure the blame is on Hollywood. Lot of Westerns, comedies and crime movies are really dependent on strong, non-sexual friendships, and they’re a major component in franchises like Lord of the Rings.
But — and LOTR is an example of this — there’s a component of many fandoms that seems obsessed turning those social relationships into secretly sexual ones, insisting on subtext that isn’t there. X-Men certainly has its share of this.
Some people will ship anybody with anybody, but on the other hand X-Men has tons of subtext that absolutely is there.
Yeah, there’s three kind-of related phenomena here.
Firstly, Hollywood has indeed got real trouble with the idea the male and female leads don’t have to be an item, unless one of them is gay or they’re both already attached (and sometimes even then).
Secondly, until recently, people who wanted to see same-sex relationships in mainstream media pretty much had to imagine them into existence, hence Kirk/Spock and all that followed. This isn’t as true as it used to be, but once people have the mindset of inventing subtext where none was intended, it’s a hard habit to break.
And thirdly, some writers did want to include same-sex relationships and couldn’t outright do so, so they did write them as deniable-but-definitely-there as possible (I think it was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men that said if one of Kitty or Rachel was a guy, their relationship in Excalibur would be so obviously romantic that nobody would even question it. It was definitely the episode where they interviewed Chris Claremont where he said yep, that’s what he wrote.)
X-Men has tons of subtext because it was written for years by Chris Claremont, who was a right perv. He seemed to think that any female was bi.
I’m all for diversity, representation, and sexual freedom. In some way, it might be a good thing that the Comics Code was so backwards in those days though. Claremont managed to write truly believable female friendships that female readers could relate to, at a time when most comic writers came across as people who had never even talked to a woman. It’s sort of disappointing some of the time, and at other times can be outright creepy, to think about this adult male (Claremont) dreaming up underage females wanting to “get it on”.
On the other hand, it’s an outright shame that Claremont wasn’t able to pursue his original ideas for Mystique and Destiny back then.
@Chris V- In fairness, Claremont wasn’t alone in creepy attitudes towards underage girls. Marv Wolfman insists to this day that Terra was an Evil Slut and Deathstroke was just a victim of circumstance. And Steven Englehart’s Green Lantern run had Hal’s businesswoman girlfriend turn evil so that he could hook up with a teenager suddenly aged to adulthood.
@Michael, well , its Escapist Entertainment after all, so sexual wish-fulfillment fantasies are par for the course. Are you part of the Millennial/Gen-Z thought-police crowd that seeks to regulate even power fantasies? You know, USAmerican corporate comics got rid of the “Comics Code Authority” in order to have much more freedom , not less !
No, not every relationship has to be romantic. To use a NYX example, Kamala and Sophie were clearly just friends.
But this is not someone expressing platonic expression: https://imgur.com/lkHikIu
Platonic affection. Dang it.
Claremont’s first run largely coincides with the first period of significant growth of awareness of the complexity of the LGBTIQ+ spectrum (actually more like a cloud or constellation, for there are multiple dimensions and at least some room for fluidity in there) among the general public. Claremont was one of the first mainstream writers to acknowledge that spectrum to any significant extent in his writing. Later, John Byrne did the same in his own work, with less ambiguity.
The understanding of the spectrum and its social consequences – both existing and desired – is still improving to this day.
As things stand now, the better established terminology includes aspects of biological factors, identity, attraction and expression, with much more than hints of other significant dimensions that are not yet very well understood or described (fluidity, romantic attraction as a distinct dimension from sexual attraction, nuances of plurisexuality, neurological aspects).
Sexual and affective identities and relationships are anything but simple to understand and categorize in real life, and it is probably a good thing that they can be hard to understand from the outside when shown in comic book panels as well.
@Daibhid C: So how come no one can point out these alleged romantic elements? Proponents of her being bi by point to the scene with Sat-yr-9. Claremont never said anything like that in an interview on their show. The closest was an interview he did with someone else about the upcoming AU mini X-Men: the End, where he said he wrote it as if Kitty and Rachel had been meant to be together from the start. He might have been trolling, since he said that was why one of Kitty’s children had red hair. They were never actually written as being together.
@Chris V: That’s a kind of circular reasoning where Claremont has the reputation of thinking every female is bi, so anytime he writes writes two women in a panel they’re assumed to be in a relationship, using logic that would embarrass Frederick Wertham. Something similar happened with John Byrne. After creating Northstar and Maggie Sawyer, fans wanted to know which of his Next Men was gay, the favorite being Danny. He trolled this in a fake scenario with Jasmine.
@MasterMahan: Lots of Redditors thought Kamala and Sophie were meant to be more than friends.