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.
“Besides, no one mentioned the X-Virus being radioactive before now.”
If only there was someone who had a job to review and make suggestions about to change details to make everyone understand how their stories fit together…
We could give them a title like “Reviewer” or “Head of Continuity.” Someone who can make edits and give direction.
Or, alternatively, Leonard simply believes the territories to be radioative and is misinterpreting the cause of the systemic stress that he is feeling right now.
Not something that I expect to be shown in-story, but it would be a very reasonable event.
Maybe Kurt is simply being coy by saying he is “middle aged”. Like pretending he is an old man, “Oh, I have a heart condition because I’m getting to be an old man”. Something a guy who is 40 might tell someone who is younger than him in a joking manner. His heart condition really is caused by another reason.
Kurt’s external physiology is very different to a baseline human so his internal organs may also be mutated such as a weaker heart. Also it as always been shown that teleportation take a lot of toll on Kurt in comparison to Magik or Vanisher so he could be placing him self under sort of strain that can lead to heart failure among athletes in before 40.
I like Alastair’s explanation. There’s grace and creativity in it.
But just you wait – in 40-50 years time when Kurt is not being written as having a heart condition then…we’ll put it down to events happening differently to this possible/alternate future, I suppose.
In 40-50 years, Kurt will be 30. Kurt is 30, Kurt is always 30 (due apologies to Harlan Ellison). Unless Marvel changes their timescale rules, the edict is that the Marvel Universe never started longer than 20 years before the current day, so that Peter Parker can remain perpetually no more than 30.
Imagine in 50 years, if Marvel or humanity still exists, attempting to explain the circumstances of Fantastic Four #1 within the context of the past 15 or so years. “Wait. Why are these four racing to get to the Moon? We know the Moon is already ruled by Grand Lunar Emperor Benevolent Oligarch #3, and he’s not going to allow such rabble there unless they are part of his slaves or harem. And why is the Earth not ruled by sentient AIs? None of this makes sense.”
I feel like there have been some missed opportunities in using generic mutants as Seraphim and other goons throughout this event. We’ve had hundreds of mutants over the years – if we’re bringing back Dragoness and Strobe as the Seraphim in Amazing, why not have Husk and Transonic show up here?
Or even some Wolverine-adjacent mutants – have we seen Jubilee and Maverick in this future yet?
Feels like a wasted opportunity to give a cameo to various characters who have their fans, even if they’re not popular enough to sell a book.
(speaking of which… any sign of Betsy Braddock?)
“Besides, no one mentioned the X-Virus being radioactive before now.”
Quite the opposite, in fact. In Radioactive Spider-Man, Peter says that his radioactive blood protected him from the virus, and he doses himself with more radiation to keep the virus at bay.