WOLVERINE vol 8 #14
“Silver and Snow”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Wolverine in a snowbound forest, with an image of Silver Sable in the background.

WOLVERINE:

For some reason he’s only just got around to returning to Canada to mourn the wolf pack from issue #1. He suggests that the need to mourn them only really became clear to him over time, and in particular that it may have been prompted by his reaction to the illusions of his mother in issues #9-11. The whole thing prompts him to reflect that his very need to mourn the animals demonstrates that he was never really like them.

He winds up in a ghost town looking for fuel, and naturally decides to stick around to defend the local mutants from Department H interference – especially once he’s escalated the situation by fighting them off once.

It’s not entirely clear whether he recognises Silver Sable before she introduces herself, though he certainly clocks immediately that she’s a pro. I can’t seem to pin down any ealrier story where they’ve interacted to any material extent. But he’s perfectly happy to work with her, anyway.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Silver Sable. A long established mercenary character who debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #265 (1985). Mehta describes her as a “transnational mercenary”, which is fair enough. Her real name is Silvija Sablinova, which isn’t quite in Blackagar Boltagon territory, since Silvija is at least a real name. (Sablinova isn’t.)

Her only significant involvement in the X-books before was as Nightcrawler’s love interest in 2023’s Uncanny Spider-Man miniseries.

She’s been hired by an unspecified “old comrade” with a mutant son to defend this mutant encampment. Normally, Silver Sable’s services are astronomically expensive, so either there’s more resources involved than first appears, or she’s doing him a favour, despite insisting that she expects to be paid.

Understandably, she recognises Wolverine immediately. She assumes that he’s a threat to the camp even though she recognises that that would be out of character. In fairness, she seems to have been called in by the two Morlocks that Logan first encounters, and arrives to find him already fighting them. She seems completely unfazed by the prospect of fighting Wolverine and tries to take him down with tranquilisers; she underestimates the amount that she needs, but still manages to slow him down enough to stop the fight.

The New Morlocks. A mutant group comprising “a few families, a few individuals”, according to Silver Sable. She starts explaining their name but gets cut off almost immediately – she gets as far as “since a couple of them…”, so perhaps there are some original Morlocks in here. Only two actually appear on panel, and both of them are new. Both look like normal humans and seem relatively well dressed, in contrast with Morlocks groups of the past.

Chowdown. The first of the two Morlocks initially attacks Wolverine with a baseball bat, with predictably bad results. When he uses his powers, his eyes start glowing yellow and he starts to pull Logan’s arm into a hole in his stomach. However, he breaks off and lets Logan go when something more pressing occurs.

Deepfake. They (the gender is left ambiguous) initially threaten Logan with a pistol, which they seem to have just found lying aorund the ghost town somewhere. Their threat to shoot seems like a bluff. When Deepfake uses their powers, they remove their sunglasses and start glowing purple; Chowdown immediately stops to talk them out of it, implying that Deepfake suffers some very unpleasant consequence when using their powers.

Both understandably make a break for it once Silver Sable shows up to deal with the situation.

VILLAINS:

Department H. A group of heavily armed Department H soldiers show up at the town. They get a briefing on the edge of town, which Wolverine apparently overhears, since he references some of the dialogue later. On the one hand, the group are armed to the teeth, they seem paranoid about what any mutants might do, and the guy in charge refers to mutants as “freaks”. On the other hand, in all fairness, the same guy does clearly tell his men that they’re there for a “recon”, and that if they run into any trouble they should just leave.

Wolverine and Silver Sable then attack them as soon as they get near, rather than simply talk to them and try to head them off. Chowdown is very impressed by what he describes as a “semi-pacifist takedown of heavily armed police-state goons”.

Mira Mehta. Up till now, Mehta has been presented as a supporting character, but she reacts to Wolverine actions in this issue with horror and says that she’s “underestimated how far gone he is”. She decides to call in Alpha Flight to detain him. This is a bit of a leap from how she’s been presented before, but then Wolverine did attack the Department H guys before they’d actually done anything other than show up, and (it seems) despite knowing that their instructions were just to carry out a recon.

GUEST APPEARANCE:

Alpha Flight. The group appear on the last page in what’s effectively a symbolic panel. The group shown here are Snowbird, Puck, Marrina and the new Vindicator (Agent Arsenault), who debuted in X-Men #11. The Alpha Flight line-up in that story also included Guardian, but he doesn’t appear here.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES:

• Wolverine is mourning the wolf pack that was killed by Cyber in issue #1.
• Wolverine refers to “what Mastermind did to me”, meaning the weird storyline in issues #9-11 where Mastermind pretended that his mother Elizabeth Howlett had somehow returned from the dead.
• Wolverine also refers to not having the chance to mourn her “the first time”, i.e. her death in Wolverine: Origin #3, just after she had thrown him out of the family home.