Wolverine #12 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #12
“Mother and Master”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colourist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine defends his mother. Despite what it says on the cover, Elizabeth Howlett isn’t really in this issue.
PAGES 1-2. Logan gets his “mother” to the car.
We established last issue that the whole scenario of Wolverine’s mother asking him for help had been contrived by Mastermind. That still left open the question of whether any part of it was true, but it looks from this issue as if the answer is basically “no”.
In Wolverine’s mind, he’s just rescued his mother from Sabretooth, and wants to get away before Sabretooth recovers. The whole thing is a little dreamlike, with Sabretooth simply vanishing, and no terribly clear explanation of how Elizabeth supposedly got a chance to write the letter asking Wolverine for help in the first place.
A nice touch is that Elizabeth is shorter than Logan while Mastermind is taller, which alters the power dynamic depending on which version of reality we’re seeing – unlike in previous chapters, this issue cuts back and forth between the two versions. Mastermind seems to be writing Elizabeth as more or less a pastiche, fretting about her “frail constitution”.
PAGES 3-5. Wolverine sees through the illusion.
In rather melodramatic fashion (“That cruel night, our home became the stage for a bllody revenge tragedy…”), “Elizabeth” claims that following her suicide in Origin #3, she remembers nothing until being brought back from the dead by Sabretooth, who wanted to use her to hurt Logan. This is all plausible enough as far as something Sabretooth might try.
Surprisingly, Mastermind panics when Wolverine says they’ll “touch base with my friends”. This surely can’t come as a complete surprise, and while it’s understandable that Mastermind doesn’t want to take on the whole of the X-Men (either team) single handedly, you’d have thought he could work around it with illusions. Perhaps he isn’t confident of his ability to pull this off – after all, during this very scene, he’s struggling to stop Wolverine from noticing that they’re going round in circles.
PAGE 6. Wolverine confronts the illusions.
Having failed to maintain a “realistic” illusion, Mastermind goes for disorientation instead, or perhaps just hopes to overwhelm Wolverine with his feelings for his mother. Either way, Logan seems to find it much easier to keep his rationality here, presumably because it’s so obvious an illusion.
PAGES 7-11. Wolverine confronts Mastermind.
Mastermind claims that while on Krakoa, he learned to “listen to the minds of my victims for inspiration in creating my illusions” – which is apparently meant to explain how he knows any of this stuff about Elizabeth Howlett in the first place. He says he’s not a telepath, but presumably he means that he doesn’t have more general telepathic powers – there’s clearly mind-reading going on here.
There is some precedent for Mastermind doing more than just illusion-casting – in X-Factor #243, a flashback shows him rewriting the memories of a young Lorna Dane. (He claims this only works on young and “pliable” minds.) In terms of what we actually saw him do in Krakoa, if you squint a bit, there’s some basis for this expansion of his abilities in Hellions #10-11, where his illusions for the Hellions are very personal, although still with some gaps.
Mastermind claims that his original plan was simply to manipulate Wolverine into attacking the X-Men for him – he doesn’t really specify what he wanted revenge on the X-Men for, but general past defeats, I guess. He then claims that he decided he wanted to “parent” Wolverine instead, on seeing inside his mind.
At first glance he seems to just be taking pleasure in exploiting Wolverine’s emotions, but Wolverine concludes that Mastermind has gone mad, perhaps through exposure to Wolverine’s mind. It’s entirely possible that there is no wider plan any more – indeed, Mastermind claims that “it was all real to me” and almost seems to think he’s making Wolverine an attractive offer when he says that “we could make it real again”. He also seems to feel sad about Wolverine’s rejection in the final scene.
Then again, in the same scene, Logan refers to Mastermind’s “twisted game” as “mocking every bit of pain I’ve ever felt”.
PAGES 12-15. Wolverine escapes Mastermind’s illusions.
Basically, Logan gives us a speech about how his mother was a victim who lashed out at him in a moment of weakness, and how he’s needed to come to terms with it. Logan seems to conclude that his self-loathing has been tied to taking his mother’s rejection at face value.
PAGES 16-20. Wolverine defeats Mastermind.
Well, presumably. As noted above, Mastermind seems to read this sequence as Wolverine proving that he really is just a monster who would kill his own “parent”. Wolverine apparently kills Mastermind, but is left with the fact that he can’t prove he’s truly escaped the illusion. (But we’re onto a different story next issue… so he has.)
It sounds like they were doing a bad alternate ending for the movie Inception.
So Mastermind’s big plan was to… use his powers to convince Logan he was his mommy? And um, go from there I suppose?
Look, I’m not kink-shaming, but this is just -weird-. Of course, Mastermind’s only other major storylines involved turning Jean Grey into the Black Queen, trying to convince Scott that Madelyn was Jean Grey, and um… dying of the Legacy Virus. Dude’s track record is abysmal. So maybe becoming Wolverine’s mommy is his idea of a good time.
I’m actually uncomfortable with Logan straight up murdering Mastermind at the end. Yes, he was manipulated, violated, and pushed to the limits, but Logan’s much less of a “kill the bad guy” hero than he used to be. So hey, if any writer wants to say that Wyngarde’s death was a last ditch illusion while he ran screaming for the hills, I’m cool with that.
It’s disappointing that we keep getting the return of old school X-villains (Mastermind, Changeling) back from the dead courtesy of Krakoa, but they apparently didn’t learn from this second chance. If I was Wyngarde, the -last- thing I’d do would be to screw with the X-Men. There’ve gotta be better gigs for a master illusionist.
Mastermind was also effectively able to brainwash the Beast back in Amazing Adventures v.1 #11-2, traumatizing him into what amounted to amnesia that made the Beast especially suggestible.
More generally, it seems like writers want a telepathic Mastermind. His daughters Martinique and Regan, who used the “Mastermind” name while their father was dead, both explicitly have low-level telepathy. And both the Dark Phoenix Saga and its direct sequel in the original “From the Ashes” story arc contrive ways for Jason Wyngarde to effectively have telepathy as well, either through the mindtap device provided by Emma Frost or through what seems to be either a vestige of his earlier “cosmic awareness” from the Phoenix Force driving him mad or a hint towards Claremont’s unrealized Shadow King plotline.
It would be easy enough to establish that Mastermind’s powers have been extended by Jean Grey minutes before she first became Dark Phoenix back in 1980 (circa #134 or so). Mastermind returned with a handwave in the #170s IIRC and there were hints that he had developed mind reading abilities at the time.
Given the specific wording that the narrator used in that scene, it would not even be too much of a jump to establish that his powers are in fact very extensive now, but he lacks the skill and perhaps mostly the daring to actually go beyond his zone of confort. The whole point of his power boost was to _hurt_ him. Hurt him _bad_, explicitly beyond any recovery even. It was, in short, a cruel horror scene coming from Jean. I don’t think Claremont or later writers attempted to detail his recovery, and for that very reason there is enough wiggle room.
It might even explain why he is now specifically targeting Wolverine; being so physical a character, Wolverine is presumably least capable of offering a mental challenge for Mastermind. If he learned at some point of how the first meeting of Proteus and Wolverine went, he may have been particularly emboldened; far as we actually saw on panel back in the day Proteus back then had powers that are very similar to Mastermind’s, except that Proteus used them very aggressively while Mastermind has some use for subtlety.
No. Proteus and Mastermind did not have the same power set. Proteus was a limited reality warper, while Mastermind creates illusions. It may have been Claremont’s intent that Proteus’ powers were considered to be limited due to his being a child. If they had the same type of power, everyone on that street being manipulated by Proteus wouldn’t have been falling over, as portrayed in the original Claremont Proteus story, when he is possessing Joe MacTaggert.
Also, when Proteus creates a hole in the Earth for Banshee to fall into, Scott sees the same thing that Banshee is experiencing.
Plus, Claremont wouldn’t continually have the X-Men refer to Proteus as manipulating reality, as they would have figured out his trick. Logan would have said, “He messes with our minds. We think reality is warped, but only the people directly affected by the power can tell what is happening.”
I get that Wolverine was already getting suspicious but his “mother” mentioning the X-Men without him telling her shouldn’t have been that suspicious- Sabretooth could have easily mentioned them when he was holding her hostage.
It’s annoying that Wolverine doesn’t mention what Mastermind did to Mariko- Mastermind cost a wedded life together.
@The Other Michael- I wouldn’t call what Wolverine did to Mastermind murder. Mastermind was still bombarding him with illusions when he stabbed him. And I don’t doubt that the next time Mastermind shows up, his death this issue will be explained as an illusion.
Regarding Changeling ,it’s clear from the latest issue of Astonishing that SOMETHING weird is going on with him- possibly a split personality.
@Chris V- Claremont didn’t intend for Proteus to be a cihld- he said that the last time Moira and her husband met in person was twenty years ago. Proteus was only retconned into being a child by Charles Soule decades later.
I think if I ever really thought much about the nature of Mastermind’s powers it always seemed like they probably had an element of telepathy. Why are the illusions illusions? Suggests they don’t really exist. So how/why are they seen? Because people’s minds see them. If it’s not that then they’re…holograms (with sound)?
Proteus was retconned for a while to have been messing with people’s perceptions rather than altering reality itself. It wasn’t a very convincing retcon, and later stories overrode it.
I can’t recall if Mastermind was originally making physical illusions or mental hallucinations. I suspect it probably changed from panel to panel, being the silver age. I know during Claremont’s time he was making everyone see him as a handsome man, which would suggest it was physical, unless it was some kind of passive broadcast. But he was also casting images that only Jean Grey could see.
And I suppose he is called Master*mind*, not, I don’t know, MasterVRgoggles.
@Si- In his first appearance ,Mastermind’s powers were described as “hypnotic illusions”. And he could make his powers affect people who weren’t looking at him, so clearly it wasn’t “normal” hypnosis. They were definitely intended to be mental hallucinations.
@TheOtherMichael , maybe Jason blames the XMen for the loss of Krakoa like the majority of other ex-Krakoans? And they can always have him survive this most recent death by Secondary Mutation of Healing Factor LOL
That was an unsatisfying ending. My theory was that Mastermind had an enemy gunning for him, so all this was about getting himself a bodyguard. There had to be some greater goal here, right?
But no, Wyngarde had no endgame. He decided to mess with the heart of the stabby guy, and he was never going to be able to sustain the illusion for any real length of time.
Guy has a terminal case of screwing with people he really shouldn’t.
I like the idea that Wyngarde is mentally unbalanced, and was doing what he did out of desperate need to connect, or genuinely trying to help Wolverine but being horribly unequipped to do so. It doesn’t sound like that’s what the story was, but still, it would be an interesting concept.
“It doesn’t sound like that’s what the story was”
It wasn’t NOT that. It could well be exactly that. The disappointing resolution is that the motives are unclear. Was actual mockery involved, or was it just how Logan perceived Wyngarde’s desperation while still being under attack? During Krakoa (X-Corp-I think) he seemed reasonably hinged, but we didn’t get much insight into why he does any of this.
“…the last time Moira and her husband met in person was twenty years ago.”
In Marvel’s sliding timeline that makes Proteus less than 8 years old — right?
@woodswalked- In X-Corp he seemed relatively harmless but in Hellions he ordered his daughter to kill a man who only kidnapped her under duress and tricked Havok into kissing a robot.
Tricked Havok into kissing a robot, out of context, is going to be the most hilarious thing I read today, I am sure.
I suppose Mastermind’s powers aren’t the most consistently depicted – which, again, could be an interesting plot point in-story if a writer feels like taking that ball.
Claremont told us in the prelude to the Dark Phoenix Saga that his powers allowed him to change his appearance to that of Jason Wyngarde, but did not extend to changing his profile shadow. (XM #130, 132 – 1979/1980) But he also gave us #134 as a catch-all, ready-made explanation for any psychic instability _or_ power upgrade _or_ power fluctuation from then on going forward.
Mastermind himself raises that point in Uncanny X-Men #175, when he also explicitly claims that he could manipulate Maddelynne Pryor’s feelings and behavior without resorting to illusions of any kind. Incidentally, in that issue he also implies that he is in some sense immortal.
That storyline also involves Mastermind convincing Mariko to call off her marriage to Wolverine; I don’t think we ever learn quite why, despite Mariko stating in #176 that while under Mastermind’s control she had tied her family with the Japanese underworld. I don’t think that was followed on except shortly before Mariko’s death in Wolverine #55-57 (1992). Still, the implication is that by that time Mastermind has telepathic powers that go beyond just illusion.
As someone who read Saladin Ahmed’s run of MAGNFICENT MS. MARVEL, my estimate of him is that he’s a mediocre writer with moments of greatness (which are few and far between). His estimates of his runs on Miles and now Wolverine seem to bare this out. He’s never terrible; never a writer where you want to toss a comic in disgust. But often a writer who hits that C+ grade average even though he’s capable, at times, of hitting a solid B+ or something.
He is yet another writer who is a former novelist. Only he wrote a grand total of one novel before hitting the circuit in 2017 with a Black Bolt run. That year he’d done a viral Tweet accusing Kelloggs of racism, which was enough to get editor Wil Moss’ attention. Remember, Marvel is a place where celebrity chefs have literally written comics.
A cynic could argue that tasked with a hefty challenge — writing Ms. Marvel after her co-creator G. Willow Wilson called it a run after 5 years — Ahmed failed. He spent the first 6 issues of the run sending Kamala to space and having an alien erase her parents’ knowledge of her alter ego from their minds — a retcon fans did not enjoy. From there he literally did a rehash of Spider-Man’s black costume saga, only with an “ancient Kree nanobot suit” than a goopy symbiote, right down to it becoming a monstrous double (Stormranger). Incredibly, Stormranger would have gotten a spinoff mini during EMPYRE, but the pandemic happened and it was canned due to that (and the fact that only 15 people worldwide would have ordered it). The volume limped to 18 issues, in part because Marvel lowered their cancellation threshold after the pandemic. Despite TV shows and film appearances, Kamala has never been entrusted with an ongoing ever again, and now has been awkwardly attached to the X-Men, which is as desperate as when Scarlet Spider was attached to the New Warriors.
So, yeah, I am unsurprised that his Wolverine stories are underwhelming, and the title is being outsold by MAGIK by a wide margin. Maybe he’s the Ted McGinley of comics, fairly or not. Though his run with Miles did last 42 issues.
Oh, and sometimes Ahmed’s messaging in his stories is…blunt. I.E. he literally had Ms. Marvel fight a villain named Monopoly who ran a company town and wanted to physically absorb her. Who had a design that made him look like the late Steve Jobs. Yes. Very, very subtle.
Ahmed did start writing his creator-owned Abbott series around the time that he was hired by Marvel. I don’t think critical acclaim from that book would have caught Marvel’s attention yet when they hired him though. His series Abbott is much better than his Marvel work, and I wonder if he’s a creator whose style doesn’t mesh with a superhero universe.
Also, his first novel was supposed to be a trilogy, but it remained unfinished after the first one, which makes me conclude that he is probably perfect for the world of comic books.
@AMRG: While I understand that the prominence of doing a Wolverine solo title and the overall iconic status of the character must have been irresistible, I can’t help but wish that we’d seen Martin Cóccolo finish the first chunk of Al Ewing’s Thor epic rather than illustrate this kind of replacement-level superhero storytelling.
@Luis Dantas: My understanding of Jason Wyngarde’s powers is that he projects very convincing sensory imagery, but that he traditionally could not read minds or restrict the illusions to a single observer. The Dark Phoenix Saga is explicit that he had to use a device suppl;ied y the Hellfire Club to get directly into Jeanix’s mind. She even reveals this herself, telekinetically crshing the “mindtap” mechanism on-panel just before she violently “expands his consciousness” to drive him into catatonic madness.
His expanded capacities in the Paul Smith-pencilled storyline was apparently meant to be tied to Claremont’s intended Shadow King mega-arc, with the Shdow King puppeteering and boosting Wyngarde from behind the scenes.
Honestly, Ahmed’s story would have worked a bit better had it used the successor Mastermind, Martinique Jason. She has a history with Wolverine, possesses the kind of low-level telepathy displayed in this story, and has been depicted with the kind of erratic motivations that would have fit well with the shift in intentions that her father claims here.
Is she supposed to be in the White Hot Room these days? Because if not, using Jason Wyngarde here seems like an exercise in using the more “iconic” character in place of the ore logical one.
Omar-I like to blame everything on Shadow King too, but I think the Paul Smith run is too early for Claremont have to decided upon Shadow along being behind, well, everything. Claremont stated in an interview that Mastermind was behind Rogue deciding to leave Mystique and Destiny (remember, Mystique was having similar dreams the night Rogue left to the “hallucinations” Jean was having while Mastermind messed with her mind), and he was doing it to get revenge on Mystique for a story which was supposed to be published featuring Ms. Marvel but was never published.
When Claremont did get a chance to revisit that dropped plot during his X-Treme X-Men run (as was pointed out to me), Claremont didn’t even bother to return to the possibility that Shadow King was manipulating Mastermind, instead having Destiny be the one being manipulated by the Shadow King.
As far as Mastermind’s powers being amplified, that was never explained. As Luis mentioned above, it may have been a result of Mastermind surviving and recovering from being given cosmic consciousness by the Phoenix. Although, I don’t like that explanation, as that was supposed to be the Phoenix destroying Mastermind for (essentially) raping her. I don’t like the implications of Phoenix’ punishment having the unintentional side-effect of actually increasing Mastermind’s power.
Maybe Destiny was manipulating the Shadow King manipulating Mastermind manipulating the X-Men. The ultimate Chris Claremont mind control story!
@Thom H.: Only if it turns out they all secretly kind of liked what it brought out of them.
Since I don’t think it’s been mentioned yet, let’s throw in the whole “Mastermind now looks like Peter Wyngarde” that Claremont/Byrne did during this era of “borrowing” from ITV shows of the 1960s, notably The Avengers.
We discussed that on the show a couple years ago with FOTP Iain Hepburn when Laurie Johnson passed away.
@Mark Coale: Yeah, the Hellfire Club seems to have been conceived initially as in-jokey characters based on celebrities, with the exception of Sebastian Shaw, the only one who continues to have a plot presence during Byrne’s time on the book. Other than Emma and Jean, they don’t even have the chess motif in the Dark Phoenix Saga; instead, their real names are used, and their daises have playing card symbols on them.
IIRC, Emma Frost and Jeanix split the Emma Peel/”Queen of Sin” reference from the old ITV The Avengers episode “A Touch of Brimstone.”
“Jason Wyngarde” = Peter Wyngarde and his TV role as Jason King (and, of course, inspired by Wyngarde playing the villain of “A Touch of Brimstone.”) And, of course, Mastermind had never been given a real name before then. It’s interesting that Paul Smith kept up the Peter Wyngarde look during Claremont’s second and final use of the character.
“Donald Pierce” = Donald Sutherland, who played Hawkeye <bPierce in Robert Altman’s film M*A*S*H
“Harry Leland” is physically modeled on Orson Welles and named for Welles’s portrayal of Harry Lime in The Third Man and Joseph Cotten’s character Jed Leland from Welles’s most famous film, Citizen Kane
And finally, Sebastian Shaw (as drawn by Byrne) appears to be physically modeled on actor Robert Shaw.
@Chris V: Acting rashly to revenger herself on Mastermind in the moment but accidentally giving him more power seems like the kind of thing the impassioned, arrogant, and irrational Dark Phoenix would shortsightedly do.
And I suppose there’s an irony: Mastermind’s manipulations were traumatic for Jeanix, but they also led her to throw off the last restraints on her powers. So Jeanix’s revenge likewise traumatizes Mastermind, but also renders him less limited and more dangerous in the long run.
“His expanded capacities in the Paul Smith-pencilled storyline was apparently meant to be tied to Claremont’s intended Shadow King mega-arc, with the Shdow King puppeteering and boosting Wyngarde from behind the scenes.”
That must have been Claremont’s longest planned long form plotting ever, given Mastermind’s story ends in #175 and the Shadow King subplot doesn’t start until the early or mid #250s…
“Only if it turns out they all secretly kind of liked what it brought out of them.”
Also one of them will have their arms replaced with hentail tentacles…
Regarding Ahmed’s writing- keep in mind that his current run on Daredevil has been a disaster. The whole mess with Daredevil’s sins ran on too long. And while Ahmed might have been told that he couldn’t use the Kingpin in his traditional role since Tombstone was the new kingpin (the current Tombstone story in Amazing Spider-Man seems to be leading up to Ben Reilly’s redemption, so it’s possible Tombstone’s time as the kingpin got extended for that purpose once Marvel realized just how bad the backlash to Chasm was), having the Kingpin get possessed by a demonic personification of Matt’s greed, then turn repentant, then turn evil again has got to be the worst possible way to use the Kingpin.
I can’t take Tombstone seriously anyway no matter how he’s written. I read his name and I immediately think of frozen pizza.
I think people online are overstating the issues with Ahmed’s Daredevil run. The “sins” arc was definitely too long, but it reads decently when taken in one sitting. (But, yes … 20 parts is … a lot of parts.)
Having Kingpin become a religious zealot after an encounter with a demon is something new, at least. The character’s been around for 60 years, there can’t be that many fresh takes left. Whether the payoff will work out is another question, I suppose.
I’m just seeing a lot of “Worst Daredevil EVER” comments online, which I think is over the top. Like everyone has just somehow forgotten that D.G. Chichester exists.