Wolverine vol 8 #21
WOLVERINE vol 8 #21
“Broken”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Julius Ohta
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Wolverine still has all his claws, presumably to avoid spoilers for the previous issue in the solicitations.
WOLVERINE:
In issue #19, he lost the adamantium on his right-hand claws and broke the claws themselves while fighting the Adamantine. As the issue starts, he’s back at home – Haven House from Uncanny X-Men, which hasn’t been mentioned up to this point – and still recuperating. He’s having nightmares about events from the series to date: Mastermind posing as his mother in issues #11-12, and losing Silver Sable after being rejected by the New Morlocks last issue. He’s moping about how he breaks nice things by being around them, and misses Sable more than he expected.
Nightcrawler drags Wolverine on holiday to Waikiki Beach, more for the mental downtime than the physical recovery. On the whole, he does seem to appreciate the location and the relaxation, at least when he isn’t being pressganged into posing for photos. In narration, he says that he feels more able to relax when he doesn’t have inexperienced mutants around to take care of; Nightcrawler, however, can take care of himself.
Logan knows the name of Nightcrawler’s girlfriend MacKenzie Deneer from Uncanny X-Men, but doesn’t seem particularly confident about it. She doesn’t seem to have greatly impinged on his consciousness.
When they cross paths with the Absorbing Man and Titania (who don’t appear to be doing anything illegal), the X-Men initially try to stay out of the way. But when the Absorbing Man starts an argument, Wolverine baits him into a fight for no good reason. Nightcrawler and Titania finally put a stop to this pointless fight.
Afterwards, Logan realises that his healing factor isn’t working. Presumably his senses are still fine, since he’d certainly have noticed if they had packed in. It’s not entirely clear when this happened, but presumably it wasn’t during the fight with the Adamantine in the previous issue, since he picked up a lot of injuries in that fight and it would have been obvious if they were healing slowly. (His bone claws have taken a little time to recover in the past.)
In some previous stories, losing his healing factor has caused Wolverine to start dying from adamantium poisoning, but Marvel aren’t always consistent about this. There’s also no sign of bleeding when he extends his claws, which is normally supposed to happen when he doesn’t have his healing factor to close the wound.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Nightcrawler. Drags Wolverine on holiday to help him relax. He tries to calm the situation with Absorbing Man and Titania, with limited success. He’s rather more optimistic than Wolverine that the two are capable of reforming.
VILLAINS:
The Absorbing Man and Titania are genuinely in Hawaii on holiday, but not unreasonably they assume that the X-Men must be on their tail. When Nightcrawler explains that it’s just a coincidence, Titania is willing to take it at face value – they’ve been saving up for this holiday for two years and she just wants the peace and quiet – but the Absorbing Man still wants revenge for that time when Wolverine cut off his arm in Secret Wars #7. Once the fight is underway, Titania does act to stop Nightcrawler from helping Wolverine. Attacking the Absorbing Man with Wolverine’s remaining adamantium claws just results in him copying the adamantium. For some reason, adamantium Absorbing Man still seems to have normal eyes, which I don’t think is how his powers normally work. When Wolverine does have the Absorbing Man cornered, Titania thinks Wolverine is going to kill him and puts herself in the way. Nightcrawler then persuades everyone to go their separate ways.
Some people questioned whether Wolverine floating made sense in this issue since in some stories it weighs him down. But that’s been written very inconsistently over the years.
This isn’t the first time that the Absorbing Man has gone after Logan to pay him back for cutting his arm off. He went after him before in Wolverine 164. The Absorbing Man doesn’t seem to remember that in this issue, since he says “Been waitin’ ages to pay you back for that.”
I get that writers like The Absorbing Man and Titania as quirky, reliable villains, but they definitely need to respect the effort Al Ewing put into making them legit in Immortal Hulk, and Rainbow Rowell in her She-Hulk series. I.e. they’re not mook of the month bank robbers like the Wrecking Crew any longer.
At least here they were just on vacation until the requisite unprovoked brawl…. I’m always afraid they’ll be back to fighting Spider-Man or something.
What can I say, I like believing some villains really can change. And these two would be perfect for, say, the recent West Coast Avengers project.
Ahmed has written Absorbing Man before (in a Black Bolt mini of all things), and seems to understand his current status as a guy who spent a long time as a petty thug and is trying to rein in his worst instincts. It’s worth reading for Crusher Creel fans, it’s basically a prison break series where he’s the co-lead and gets a lot of good lines. I particularly recall one where he’s selling himself as a fighter with something like “Hey man, I used to fight Thor on the regular, and I still have every one of my teeth.”
I used to feel the same way re: wanting villains who’ve shown some redemption to continue down that path. Sadly, experience has turned me cynical in that regard. Baron Zemo, Constrictor, Sandman, most of the Thunderbolts really… at some point, a writer won’t care about character rehabilitation or an editor just won’t have read the relevant issues. White Queen is a rare exception, and we’ll see about Juggernaut, but it’s hard to sacrifice a villain whose powers and/or motivation make them a great foil for your hero.
Sandman they’ve kinda split the difference where The core guy is good and he has a sand clone who’s bad
Zemo was disappointing, Thunderbolts and Born Better did so much to show how hard he was trying to improve and it was working
Then Dennis Hopeless used him in a more villainous way then some other writer in the last few years just kinda made him more two-dimensionally villainous than he’s been since his inception and it just didn’t flow
I remember being worried that was gonna happen to Loki when I was reading JiM but what they’ve done with him since has been interesting (Cgillen was concerned to and said as much in his afterword, especially given , per his words, that Loki was a fairly flat villain in the contemporary first avengers movie)
Zemo going ultra-evil again is more Ed Brubaker’s doing, as Brubaker had him enact a vengeance campaign against Bucky-as-Cap, help Sin find the artifact that kicked off the “Fear Itself” event, and later aid aversion of HYDRA against Steve Rogers’s Cap.
In Zemo’s case, some writers have trouble considering his actions under DeMatteis and Stern forgivable. He turned Edward Whelan into Vermin and Whelan killed people as Vermin. He targeted Arnie Roth because he was gay- I can see why people have problems with redeeming a guy like that. He killed Roth’s boyfriend. He had Hyde torture Jarvis- and Jarvis seemed to still be affected by that as recently as Ewing’s Wasp series.
(Although as Omar pointed out, DeMatteis toyed with the idea that Zemo was redeemable himself at one point.)
Plus, I can see why redeeming the son of a Nazi doesn’t go over well in today’s political climate.
Constrictor is just bizarre- nothing about his portrayal in Rogue’s series seemed consistent with how he died. And he really didn’t have any information that was useful to Rogue since he got knocked out in the middle of the incident in question. I’m not sure why he was used.
I think some villains should never be redeemed. Especially today, when a majority of comics are relying on villains created during the Silver Age. The amount of quality villains will really be strained when you start redeeming the quality villains. Baron Zemo is one character I didn’t think ever needed to be redeemed. He works well as a villain. I could see him as the cynical leader of the Thunderbolts pretending to be reformed but really still being the same nefarious character. Some characters work best as evil villains.
It might make more sense if Marvel was able to create lots of new compelling villains with staying power to challenge the villains, but that’s certainly not the case. Supervillain reform should be done sparingly, and with characters whose backgrounds make sense. Most of the Thunderbolts protagonists were either villains whose background would make it possible to see how they could learn and change, or they were underdeveloped enough that giving them a more sympathetic backstory would be convincing for them to want to reform. There are plenty of other villains who are far less forgivable.
That’s a problem with current Marvel. They seemed unable to create new villains that fans cared about and had worn out the old villains, so it seemed like Marvel decided that making their superheroes act villainous would be a better answer (it was also the influence of what was popular in comics at the time, that the superheroes were almost as bad as the supervillains). So, we have to ignore the villainous actions of certain superheroes and move on. I guess in that environment, it makes sense that any supervillain can be reformed. Then, you run into the problem of creators who want strong villains and realize if they create a new villain, the character will probably never be seen again. So, they want to go back to the classic villains, and if most of the classic villains are redeemed, the creator is forced to revert said character.
As I said, with some of these characters, I have no problem with them being treated as villains because they were created to be villains and have little redeemable in their history.
“Born Better” didn’t really do much to make Baron Zemo more sympathetic either. He had “daddy issues”, sure. He renounced Nazism, but not his personal ubermensch dreams. Sort of like those earlier Right-Wingers who embraced Nietzschism and saw the Nazis as uncultured barbarians and populist pretending to be an elite, instead of truly embracing the concept of the ubermensch. He’s better positioned to be a fascist villain in the present day than he was when the mini-series was written. The idea used to be that all fascists must be Neo-Nazis pledging their loyalty to the failed Third Reich and Hitler, and if someone denounces the Nazis, they couldn’t possibly be an evil fascist. Now, we have people like Steve Bannon saying that “ethno-nationalists” are idiots, even though he’s obviously very much a fascist. He simply moved from being an outdated neo-Nazi to embracing modern far Right populism.
Absorbing Man is a divisive case. There’s a lot in his history which says he could easily reform. On the other hand, his powers make him hard to reconcile with writing him as an actual hero. He’s too powerful. What villain could defeat him? He gets defeated because the hero outsmarts him, which doesn’t work well when the villain is positioned as the underdog.
Tbh my first experience with Zemo was the Tbolt version and I didn’t know all that history , and I was a kid so I was extra inclined to take him at his word in Avengers/Thunderbolts when he said he really did want to save the world, which I guess could be meant ambiguously in the same way it is when Doom says it
He really did seem sincere that his Nazi forebears were fools for their bigotry tho
@Chris V- The various Amazing Men at DC have similar powers to the Absorbing Man.
Kurt Busiek said recently that when heroes and villains both have very effective powers. heroes need weaknesses or the struggle isn’t as dramatic. So there have to be ways to disrupt the Vision that don’t work on the Shadow-Thief.
(Although it’s odd that he used the Shadow-Thief as an example, since writers kept tinkering with the Shadow-Thief to try and make him work. He can now turn intangible with the Dimensiometer. No wait, now he’s a ninja, he’s a bloody ninja. No wait, he’s made a deal with a demon and can turn other people into shadows. No wait…)
@Drew
But USAmerican-style traditional superfolk are spiritual siblings to USAmerican-style pro wrasstling , and in pro wrasstling , there’s always been a revolving door of moral alignment back and forth over the entire course of a standard career. Furthermore , there’s that famous quote Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight movie that a hero either dies a hero or lives long enough become a villain , and that also works the other way around , a villain either dies a villain or lives long enough to become a hero. Finally , as Cain told Sammy in Chuck Austen’s Uncanny Xmen , nobody’s a villain to themselves , it’s other people that consider them villains . So just like IRL , for the majority of “cape comic” villains who aren’t DC Joker-style anti-social sociopaths , they’re either delusional egomaniacs who believe they’re the heroes (like Victor Von Doom) or cynics who view themselves as merely professional soldiers of fortune I.e. mercenaries who may run afoul of the current statutory laws every now and then , but are not necessarily “bad” people , even though they may strictly speaking not “good” people .
“ That’s a problem with current Marvel. They seemed unable to create new villains that fans cared about and had worn out the old villains…”
I’m not saying anything insightful here, of course (yet here I go, typing away), but new characters don’t scratch the nostalgia itch of the old fans that keep the Big Two afloat, and also Marvel has zero interest in fairly compensating freelancers for any new characters they invent that catch on, which can’t much motivate writers and artists to offer anything that isn’t an extension of some previous creation (and yet many still do, bless ‘em). It’s little surprise new ideas rarely break out when neither fanbase nor publisher is interested in encouraging them.
“Absorbing Man is a divisive case. There’s a lot in his history which says he could easily reform. On the other hand, his powers make him hard to reconcile with writing him as an actual hero. He’s too powerful. What villain could defeat him? He gets defeated because the hero outsmarts him, which doesn’t work well when the villain is positioned as the underdog.”
Yeah, that’s essentially the same issue you face with the Juggernaut. As originally conceived, he’s literally (physically) unstoppable. You HAVE to remove his helmet and get Professor X or Betsy or Jean or someone to put the mind-whammy on him (or Spidey has to trap him in cement). Which works fine when he’s a bad guy, but nobody wants to watch the villains put together a finely-tuned plan to overcome the unbeatable hero. So he has to be depowered if you want to reform him. I’m not sure how that would work with Creel, though.
Maybe something similar to how they depowered Mimic for Exiles — he can only hold five powers at once, and only at half strength. You’d probably have to make it so Creel can only hold a form for a certain period of time and it’s mentally taxing on him, or something like that.
I love villains reforming and generally becoming real people instead of pulpy cackling maniacs. Titania and Creel have put in the work; they’re relatable but not quite angels. Zemo though? Come on. Dude is a nazi
@Drew: Make it physically taxing for Creel. Sure, he can take on the properties of an object and, yeah, he has super strength, but at some point trying to fight in a body made out of concrete is just going to wear him out.
@ChrisV, @Adam: I’d also point out that in many cases it took years for these classic villains to get any kind of depth. Doom and Namor are exceptions, but it was, what, seventeen years before Claremont turned Magneto into something other than a cackling supervillain.
@Taibak, Drew- Or we could just have Al Ewing write Creel. He would have Creel defeated merely by falling out a window and his fans would insist that it makes perfect sense.
@Michael: That would actually work for Creel. He accidentally absorbs the glass, then shatters when he hits the ground.