Last Wolverine #3 annotations
LAST WOLVERINE #3
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Edgar Salazar
Colour artist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Leonard fights the original Wolverine.
This is the final issue of the miniseries, with Wolverine resuming next month.
PAGES 1-3. Nightcrawler rescues Leonard from Wolverine.
The previous issue ended with Leonard waking at night to find that Vindicator’s plan to free Wolverine from mind control was simply to kill him with the Muramasa Blade. Leonard and Kurt’s role was simply to get her close enough.
Incidentally, the recap pages on issues #2-3 of this series give Leonard’s full name as Leonard Two Bears, which I don’t think has ever appeared in the body of a story. (Issue #1’s recap page just calls him “Leonard”.)
For the purposes of this story, we seem to be workings on the original, Wolverine: Origins concept of the Muramasa Blade, where its magical powers can cut through adamantium and leave wounds that won’t heal.
Nightcrawler clearly sees Leonard as similar to Wolverine at least in one key sense: he’s a basically decent and heroic person struggling to contain extremely violent impulses. In Leonard’s case, that comes from his Wendigo curse, which he seemed to have comfortably under control before coming to the Revelation Territories.
PAGES 4-6. Nightcrawler teleports himself and Leonard in pursuit of Vindicator.
Nightcrawler reveals that he has a heart condition, and really shouldn’t be here. He was already exhausting himself from multiple teleports last issue, though we were told that that was to be expected simply from the exertion and the trauma of re-mutating.
His powers were restored by the X-virus on entering the Revelation Territories last issue. At first he looked like he normally does, except with graying temples. However, by the time he’d finished teleporting to Philadelphia, he looks as he does here, with apparent further mutations on his face.
PAGES 7-10. Leonard fights Logan.
Leonard is still determined to save Logan and convinced that, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Logan will be able to break Revelation’s conditioning with a little encouragement. To be fair, we’ve seen in Amazing X-Men #1 that Logan does need reconditioning from time to time, and Laura Kinney: Sabretooth has his healing factor playing a part in that – but that would suggest that Logan might be able to break free if he was being beaten up badly enough. Leonard isn’t quite willing to do that, and wants to rely principally on the conventionally heroic inspirational speech. He’s prepared to fight Wolverine, but only with a view to containing him.
PAGES 11-12. Vindicator cuts off Logan’s left arm.
As already noted, the Muramasa Blade can cut through adamantium. This is also a callback to the Age of Apocalypse version of Wolverine, who was missing his left hand. Because of the Blade’s magic, the wound shouldn’t regenerate, though for some reason Logan doesn’t appear to be bleeding to death, or indeed bleeding at all. It seems he’s at least able to heal over the stump.
This trauma, either alone or in combination with Leonard’s pep talk, does in fact free Logan from Revelation’s control. So the irony is that even though Heather intended to use the Muramasa Blade to “free” Logan by killing him, she actually manages to use it to free him anyway.
PAGES 13-14. Vindicator holds off the Seraphim.
Most of the Seraphim who appear in this issue seem to be generics, but the woman with the dragon wings is Dragoness, once of the Mutant Liberation Front.
Heather takes Logan to be temporarily free of his conditioning – she says that Logan needs to be taken away “before the conditioning locks in again”, though if it’s going to reassert itself anyway, it’s not obvious what taking him away achieves. Perhaps her thinking is that Leonard’s pep talk might now finish the job.
Heather told us last issue that she’d be pushing the Vindicator suit’s hazmat systems to their limit in order to survive in the Revelation Territories. Leonard and Kurt both take that to mean that if she’s spending energy fighting the Seraphims, she’ll die of the X-virus.
PAGES 15-18. Kurt dies of heart failure, and Leonard throws Logan to safety.
“The day of death is better than the day of birth” is a Bible quote, from Ecclesiastes 7:1.
Leonard throws Logan over the side of the building in order to force him to escape; this reverses the scene in flashback in issue #1 where Logan did the same to him, apparently allowing him to escape. Completing the role reversal, Leonard succumbs to his own berserker rage in order to hold the Seraphim at bay. He evidently considers that sacrificing his own humanity to save Logan is a worthwhile trade.
PAGES 19-20. Logan gathers his senses and prepares to go after Revelation.
Logan’s first person narration finally returns now that he’s been freed.
The images in the final page seem to be Revelation and characters who Logan wants to avenge. The ones on the left are obvious: Leonard, Heather and Kurt. On the right, we have Magneto, Angel and Xorn, all of whom Logan killed while under Revelation’s control in X-Men: Age of Revelation – Overture.
Kurt claims that his heart condition is due to middle age. How old does Ahmed think Kurt is? Simone is writing him as extremely athletic. In a recent story, Storm’s age was given as 30. Kurt should be a couple years younger. Besides, when Kurt was resurrected in the Resurrection Protocols, he was presumably resurrected a bit younger because there was a queue and they didn’t want to have to constantly resurrect people.
Let’s assume Kurt is 30 now. He should be 40 in the Age of Revelation. And he’s been told to avoid strenuous physical activity in the Age of Revelation for a “couple of years”. 38 is pretty young for an age-related heart condition. (I’d have no problem if Kurt’s condition wasn’t age-related, but Kurt specifically says his condition is due to middle age.) it’s especially odd since Scott and Hawkeye are also 10 years older and they’re doing the normal superhero feats.
I’d have no problem if Kurt’s heart attack was simply the result of teleporting multiple people over long distances multiple times. That’s supposed to be difficult for Kurt but the writers seem to have forgotten about that over the last few years. But Kurt’s dialogue implies that he was told to avoid physical activity when he had lost his power.
Leonard says he that he can feel the radiation drawing out the monster in him. What radiation? Philadelphia wasn’t nuked- the Vanisher teleported the bomb to Washington. Unless the idea is that the X-Virus is radioactive. Which is odd, because it was partly derived from the Transmode Virus- if the Transmode Virus was radioactive, the new mutants would have probably all died from cancer by now. Besides, no one mentioned the X-Virus being radioactive before now.