Wolverine #22 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #22
“Doctor’s Orders”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Julius Ohta
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine is sad about his broken claws.
WOLVERINE:
As we established at the end of the previous issue, his healing factor isn’t working, although his senses are still fine. We’re essentially told that Wolverine will die without his healing factor. The reasons for that aren’t explained here, but various earlier stories have said that Wolverine would die of adamantium poisoning without his healing factor – this was a major plot point in Paul Cornell’s Wolverine run in 2013-4, for example. It doesn’t really make any sense, because if adamantium is totally indestructible then it ought to be inert. And Bullseye gets by just fine with an adamantium skeleton and no healing factor. But… it is the established way this works.
Wolverine has grudgingly agreed to see a doctor, and he’s reluctant to have Nightcrawler hanging around for the process. He seems to have intermittent bouts of weakness – Cecilia has to help him down the hallway, but he seems basically okay later in the issue when he’s fighting Taskmaster.
Eventually we establish that Wolverine has been infected with nanites which have slowed his healing factor to normal human levels, and which are somehow transferring that power to their hired gun Taskmaster. Wolverine jumps to the conclusion that this was done in issues #15-16 when Department H tagged him with their cardiac arrest machine. That’s certainly possible, but it begs the question of why Department H would wait another four issues to shut down his healing factor. (As I pointed out last issue, presumably his healing factor dealt with his other wounds from fighting the Adamantine in a more or less normal way, or else he’d have realised the problem more quickly.)
When he calls Puck, he learns that a Department H scientist has gone on the run with stolen nanites, so perhaps the idea is that someone in Department H has gone rogue and this wasn’t an official plan. He doesn’t really have a chance to act on this information before Taskmaster shows up to attack him. Taskmaster refers to having employers who are responsible for what’s happening, but never actually identifies them.
He inflicts a lot of damage on Taskmaster with his remaining adamantium claws before learning that Taskmaster has gained healing powers – he does seem to be trying to kill the guy.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Nightcrawler. He’s dragged Wolverine to see a doctor, but reluctantly accepts Wolverine’s instruction to leave – he doesn’t entirely trust Wolverine to act sensibly, but can’t really take issue with Wolverine’s stated desire for privacy with his doctor.
Cecilia Reyes. She’s back working at Our Mother of Mercy Hospital in the South Bronx, which is where she was working in her earliest appearances. (There was, at least at one point, an actual hospital called Our Lady of Mercy in the Bronx.) While this might seem an unlikely place for a superhero to go for treatment, this particular hospital has been heavily kitted out with cutting edge equipment by Sunspot, and offers “genetic counselling” to civilian mutants from around New York. For some reason, she also has access to a wristband that will let her “monitor your condition remotely and contact you once I’ve learned more” (rather than, you know, using the mobile phone that Wolverine pulls out on the next page).
Cecilia is able to figure out what’s wrong with Wolverine pretty quickly, which she says is because she’s had the advantage of examining him without his healing factor in the past. There’s no footnote to this, but Ahmed is presumably thinking of the Paul Cornell run mentioned above – Cecilia doesn’t appear in that run, but she was the X-Men’s in-house medic at the time, and she’s shown treating him during this period in Nightcrawler vol 4 #1.
Puck. Because Wolverine already suspects Department H are to blame for his condition, he calls Puck to find out more – apparently just taking the view that it doesn’t matter if the call is monitored. Puck was among the Alpha Flight members who agreed to fight Wolverine in issues #15-16, but Wolverine doesn’t hold that against him. After a small amount of dithering, Puck obligingly advances the plot by telling Wolverine about the runaway Department H scientist.
VILLAIN:
Taskmaster. After a stint in Deadpool‘s supporting cast, he seems to have gone back to being just a regular gun for hire (which, to be fair, is basically what he was doing in Deadpool too). His unnamed employers have used nanites to give him Wolverine’s healing factor. It’s not actually clear why he attacks Wolverine in this story – he could test the healing factor more safely just by cutting himself, and he’s clearly not trying to kill Wolverine, because he attacks in the first instance with tranquiliser darts. (Then again, he does also take a swipe at Wolverine with a sword…)
Another unanswered question is how he knew that Wolverine would be at the hospital in the first place – it’s not even in his home city, and we’re specifically told at the start of the issue that Nightcrawler teleported them into the building to avoid drawing attention.
Taskmaster’s whole thing is that he can copy the moves of the best martial artists in the world, but for whatever reason he puts up a fairly dismal performance once Wolverine brings out his remaining claws – if it wasn’t for his new healing factor, he’d be dead. Maybe he’s allowing some sort of point to be made about his healing factor, but this really wouldn’t be in character for Taskmaster, who isn’t a masochist. A more charitable reading would be that when he sees the state of Wolverine’s claws, he assumes that the guy is going to be a pushover and lets his guard down.
“Puck was among the Alpha Flight members who agreed to fight Wolverine in issues #15-16, but Wolverine doesn’t hold that against him.”
Puck was even the one who tagged Wolverine with the heart-attack gizmo.
“After a stint in Deadpool‘s supporting cast, he seems to have gone back to being just a regular gun for hire (which, to be fair, is basically what he was doing in Deadpool too).”
Also, it couldn’t have been easy finding out Ellie got trapped in a black hole because Wade was an idiot.
Ah Nantes. The rest of the world got over the idea 20 years ago, but mutants are still catching them like covid.
I guess Cecilia is totally over that brief, ill-advised stint with Mark Russell’s X-Factor. Can’t blame her. I think everyone else is just as eager to put that moment behind them.
Surprised Puck’s never heard of nanites. They’ve only been a thing for a long time now, especially in comics. I guess he’s just not paying a lot of attention. Again, can’t blame him.
Also, Logan was definitely going for a severe maiming if not outright killing of Taskmaster. Good thing Tasky has a healing factor now, huh?
Paul O> As we established at the end of the previous issue, his healing factor isn’t working, although his senses are still fine. We’re essentially told that Wolverine will die without his healing factor. The reasons for that aren’t explained here, but various earlier stories have said that Wolverine would die of adamantium poisoning without his healing factor – this was a major plot point in Paul Cornell’s Wolverine run in 2013-4, for example. It doesn’t really make any sense, because if adamantium is totally indestructible then it ought to be inert. And Bullseye gets by just fine with an adamantium skeleton and no healing factor. But… it is the established way this works.
1) Didn’t Cornell handwave that away by giving him some injections to prevent the adamantium poisoning? [You’d think he’d keep a supply of those for emergencies]
2) ISTR the problem with the adamantium is meant to be that it interferes with his bone marrow, meaning that without it being “supercharged” by the healing factor, it can’t make enough good blood cells? Or did I make that up?
3) Doesn’t Bullseye have an adamantium *spine*, not a *whole skeleton*? Also, while the actual plot was dropped, there was a thing in Hama’s Wolverine after Fatal Attractions that healing factors change adamantium into “adamantium beta”. Again, never amounted to anything, but it technically is a thing which could make a difference there.
Also, how can his super-senses be “still fine” without his healing factor? Isn’t it established that he has super-senses BECAUSE his healing factor keeps them in superhuman shape, and without it they fade to normal human levels?
The Other Michael> Also, Logan was definitely going for a severe maiming if not outright killing of Taskmaster. Good thing Tasky has a healing factor now, huh?
Eh, Wolverine’s in much-weakened condition against a tough opponent, and it’s not as if he’s against maiming and/or killing at the best of times.
@SanityOrMadness- Bullseye would have to have more than just his spine bonded with adamantium to perform some of the feats that he does. For example, in Captain America 374, Bullseye jumps a couple stories and lands feet first on the roof of a car, while thinking “They’re no good for getting through airport security but adamantium-laced bones have a few advantages!” So obviously more than just his spine would have to be laced with adamantium. However, the Official Handbook claims that “portions of Bullseye’s skeleton” are laced with adamanitum, so it is possible that Bullseye still has some non-adamantium bones left.
Regarding his senses- they would probably start to fade EVENTUALLY. But the question is how long? Six months? A year?
“ISTR the problem with the adamantium is meant to be that it interferes with his bone marrow, meaning that without it being “supercharged” by the healing factor, it can’t make enough good blood cells? Or did I make that up?”
The first time Wolverine lost his powers, in the Genosha story, it wasn’t explained why, but Wolverine was getting sick. Someone in the letters column asked if it was because of the adamantium cutting off the white blood cell production, and the editor or whoever agreed in a vague way. But I don’t think it was ever actually said in the comics. The poisoning thing only came years later.
God, I can remember a 35 year old letter column but not my kid’s date of birth.
@Si- In Uncanny 237, the Genegineer said Wolverine’s “hemoglobin count is abnormally low– perhaps some facet of his power compensated for it–as things stand now…his system simply isn’t producing sufficient red corpuscles to sustain his life”.
Back in the 1980s I read that Wolverine’s healing factor made his aging slower.
I distinctly remember immediately thinking “Boy, are they pushing it! If anything replacing his cells more frequently ought to make his aging noticeably _faster_, not slower!”
I never liked Wolverine, that probably made me hope some plot reason to put him aside turned up. Still…
At the time I had no idea of how far they would run with the idea of him “aging slower”, let alone which other exotic applications his healing factor would hoard over time. In Powers of X #6 back in 2019 he is literally the last surviving human (or mutant, I suppose).
Sorry, I can’t NOT find that all ludicrous. How far can we be from someone deciding that – since Wolverine is effectively immortal and has a weird set of mutually forgiving features that hype each other all the time – he is destined to at some point as the centuries pass he will acquire Skrull shapeshifting as well due to some exotic adventure, which somehow is not at all incompatible with his supposedly rigid, indestructive adamantium bone lacing? After, of course, having served a term as President in every known surviving Earth Nation, because why the frack not? And put him to work a couple of centuries on the cure of cancer and succeeding completely despite never having anything resembling an adequate skill set for good measure, will you?
What, that is ridiculous? Sure, but have you seen what has been published on panel about him this far? Sweet summer child…
@Luis- Wolverine’s healing factor causing him to age slower was established at a very early stage. In X-Men Annual 4, in 1980, Wolverine mentions the winter he spent at Monte Cassino. The battle of Monte Cassino took place in 1944. Assuming that he was at least 18 at the time, he would have to be at least 54.
Did the adamantium/healing factor connection first get established in Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X? Because if so, and if Bullseye got his adamantium skeleton before that, I can imagine writers just wanting to handwave the contradiction away, especially given that Weapon X is a story everyone remembers while “metal skeleton” ends up being a weirdly superfluous element for Bullseye, and one that plenty of writers seem to ignore (outside of Gruenwald’s Captain America I can’t think of that many writers who really did much with it – when Daredevil is beating the crap out of Bullseye no one has him, say, breaking his hand because he’s punching a metal skull).
Luis: part of that comes from comic writers (and the general public) not understanding how healing works, and part of that is due to the crazy power inflation that’s hit Wolverine over the decades. It’s crazy to go back and ready early Claremont issues where he’s basically a scrappy if nasty fighter but wildly outclassed on a team with people like Storm and Phoenix, and you fast forward a few decades and writers are seriously describing him as “the most dangerous mutant on the planet.”
@moosensquirrel- As noted, the adamantium/ healing factor connection was first established in the first Genosha story, in Uncanny X-Men 235-238. But Bullseye got his adamntium skeleton before that.
One power that Logan must have that’s never mentioned is the ability to dial down his pain sensors.
Healing multiple bullet wounds and broken bones is one thing, not going into shock from the pain of those injuries is another.
Even “just” the three broken bone claws on the cover of this issue should be agonizing, especially if he’s moving them in and out of their sheaths. It makes me shudder if I think about it too long.
Yeah the ridiculousness of him just ignoring things like exposed nerves and ruptured organs is even greater when you yourself are a chronic pain sufferer.
There was that one story with Power Pack in the 80s where he was actually in shock from his injuries, and couldn’t even talk or think coherently.
Some stories do address this. For example, in X-Men 226, Wolverine is in excruciating pain as he tries to heal from the Blob’s attack. And he wants to yield to “the transitory oblivion of a healing coma” but the X-Men need him, so he fights to stay awake.
Don’t quote me, but I seem to recall a statement somewhere that there are neurological and physiological gateways and ceilings that limit how much pain a person can feel at any given moment.
Still, yes, Wolverine seems to be presented at least some times as having some measure of control over how much pain he feels and/or how much it will hinder him.
Hard to tell how much of that is an actual power, a learned ability, or just narrative convention. Black Panther often seems to have that same trait.
There is a condition called congenital analgesia. The only problem is that Logan has been shown as feeling pain, which would mean that’s not the explanation.
The more you think about the pain, the weirder it gets (relative to how weird super powers are in general). Like we’re told that popping his claws hurts every time, because apparently his mutant gifts include all of the requirements for retractile claws except fairly straightforward sheathing. So you’d think he’d avoid extending his claws unless he really needs to, because he’s essentially getting stabbed to the bone each time. But no, he pops them out instead of pulling the tab on his beer cans.
By the way, there actually is one animal in real life with bone “claws”, the hairy frog of Cameroon (yes I know that sounds made up, but you can google it). It breaks its own toe bones, which tear through the flesh as needed. They possibly retract, or possibly just heal over time. I guess it’s hard to study frog feet. The “claws” are more like Spider-Man 2099’s finger spurs than Wolverine’s claws, and are probably used for wall crawling rather than gutting ninjas. But the frogs do indeed look hairy.
So none of this wolverine ancestry or wolf ancestry, Logan is clearly a type of frog. I mean, the very first time we saw him, he was hopping about. I rest my case.
@Si
Ah yes, leave it to Power Pack to have the real and most honest exploration of pain mitigation.
That comic went hard.
[…] #22. (Annotations here.) In which the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor turns out to be to do with nanites that have […]
So potentially silly question: were you being sarcastic about Power Pack or was that as intense as you’re making it sound?