Wolverine #23 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #23
“Power Grab”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Julius Ohta
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Taskmaster advances on Wolverine, with adamantium claws extended. This doesn’t actually happen in the story, where Taskmaster only has the copied healing factor.
This is a pretty straightforward issue, but we’ll run through it anyway.
WOLVERINE:
For those just joining us, his healing factor has been switched off by nanites, and his right-hand claws are still broken from the fight with the Adamantine in issue #20. The previous issue established that his adamantium is poisoning him without his healing factor (which has happened before), but was rather inconsistent about how far this was affecting him – at times he seemed to be having trouble standing, but he also seemed able to hold his own against Taskmaster. This issue seems to be saying that his berserker rage is partly responsible for keeping him on his feet, and that his enhanced senses still give him some advantage in anticipating Taskmaster’s moves.
In what seems like a byzantine scheme, the nanites have apparently been teleporting the compounds created by Wolverine’s healing factor into Taskmaster’s body, where it seems they work just fine. (Has he considered donating more blood?) Shutting down Taskmaster stolen healing powers doesn’t cure the problem, because the compounds are also being teleported to someone else.
Wolverine’s first instinct is to find out who Taskmaster is working for by beating him up, but he defers to Cecilia’s wishes on that. Instead he simply heads for the signal in Seattle that Puck told him about last issue.
He can get his hands on a decommissioned SHIELD sky-cycle by raiding old safehouses that he knows about.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Cecilia Reyes. She still keeps her old X-Men uniform handy (which makes sense, since it’s supposed to provide some degree of protection). She’s not great in a fight but her force field and an element of surprise are enough to get by. Remarkably, she’s been able to knock up a serum to force Taskmaster to reject his new healing powers in what must have been a matter of minutes.
VILLAINS:
Taskmaster. Wolverine says that they’ve fought “more than once”, and Taskmaster claims that “I owe you a beating or two”. In fact, as far as I can see, they’ve never fought on panel – Taskmaster does appear in Wolverine #167-168 from 2001, but only as one of the other competitors in a knock-out tournament, and he gets eliminated by Mr X before he gets to fight Wolverine. Of course, there’s no reason why they couldn’t have fought off panel somewhere. At any rate, Taskmaster seems very pleased that the nanites are giving him the upper hand on someone who would normally be out of his league.
For some of the issue, he fights holding Elektra-style sai in his hands, which seems to be an improvised attempt to copy Wolverine’s claws.
His mask can’t be removed – Cecilia claims that it’s boobytrapped, though how she figured that out isn’t clear.
Dr Murat Mor. The scientist on the run from Department H, as mentioned by Puck last issue. He is indeed responsible for the nanites.
He claims to have infected himself with “the Post variant of the techno-organic virus” in an attempt to find a cure for his fatally ill wife, Tina. This apparently refers to Post, the henchman of Onslaught from the late 90s; his back story did indeed involve him being exposed to the TO virus. Injecting himself with the techno-organic virus appears to have achieved precisely nothing in terms of curing Tina, who is said to have died off panel.He suggests that his aim in stealing Wolverine’s healing factor was to cure himself of the TO infection. Quite where hiring Taskmaster fits into this isn’t explained, at least not yet.
He’s understandably terrified of Wolverine and claims to be willing to set things right, but any threats from Wolverine apparently provoke the virus to transform him into a new Post – a blue skinned hulk with metallic plates and components over part of his body.
“At any rate, Taskmaster seems very pleased that the nanites are giving him the upper hand on someone who would normally be out of his league.”
This guy once held his own against the Avengers, and has taken on various memebers individually…but Wolverine is somehow out of his league? Oh dear.
My No-Prize entry: most of the Avengers don’t run the risk of going full berserker rage on Taskmaster, and he can use that against them…while going toe-to-toe with Wolverine there’s a risk that he might end up disembowled.
That has never been a factor for people like Captain America or similar street level people when taking on Wolverine.
Well, in Moira’s Life Six it was revealed that Moira was able to live into the far future by getting blood donations from Wolverine. It was due to them sharing the same blood type, as Wolverine apparently has a very rare blood type. I guess Taskmaster is one of the few individuals who share the Logan/Moira blood type.
Also, from the Krakoa era, Logan was shown to have no defence against the TO virus.
Well, y’all know how it is. Taskmaster’s like Juggernaut was; he’s supposed to be a top-tier villain, but that just eventually means becoming a jobber for new villains. He should certainly never have lost to Mr. X. but that’s hardly the worst humiliation foisted upon him.
Which is a shame because I like Taskmaster. Also he had such a cool original niche—training henchmen—that I have no idea why writers keep putting him in other roles.
Being able to teleport Wolverine’s healing ability into multiple arbitrary people doesn’t sit well with the failures described in the attempt to “make Wolverines” in Uncanny.
Wasn’t there a scene in Avengers Academy where Taskmaster and some other bad guys talk about times they deliberately lost to some C lister to make the good guy feel better about themselves?
Also, Wolverine’s magic blood was sought by vampires that time. As far as I know that was the first time his blood was said to be anything special.
This X-Annual #11 erasure, surely the ur-text of Logan’s magic blood.
@Matt Teri- In that Annual, it was explicitly said that Wolverine regenerated due to the magic crystal, not due to his magic blood.
@ASV,
Well, its like IRL where humans and other animals can manage to still survive otherwise-fatal congenital or acquired blood deficiencies , so long as they can be infused regularly with donated blood, but their bodies shall never be able to produce the essential blood components all by themselves alone tsk tsk tsk
@michael – Nah. It’s explicitly said that the crystal provides the power source, but just before that Logan even more explicitly says, “my healing factor’s in every cell of my body. So, I guess, is my will to live.” I don’t think we’re ever meant to believe that the same trick would’ve worked for someone else on the team.
Regarding Taskmaster, he had to become a lot easier to beat when he shifted from being a secretive instructor of henchmen to being a mercenary regularly fighting superheroes. It’s hard to imagine David Michelinie’s original-model Taskmaster hanging around with the Black Ant or being bothered to get into fights with Wolverine.
My sense is that Fred van Lente’s origin for Taskmaster wound up making the character easier to turn into a jobber, or at least a garden-variety hired goon. Once Taskmaster doesn’t need to have any consistent personality, he can justifiably be whatever this month’s writer wants him to be. It doesn’t help that pretty much no other writer has bothered to bring back Taskmaster’s wife.
In any case, like much of Ahmed’s run so far, this seems to be a story that’s mostly about the idea that it’d be cool to see Wolverine fight a supervillain he doesn’t typically encounter. The plot seems like a contrivance to motivate the fight and make it a little harder for Wolverine to win. We’re just meandering through villain-of-the-month plots. It’s Wolverine as unit-moving content, as if Dario Agger really were running Marvel.
It’s likewise hard to get excited about Post II: Techno-Organic Boogaloo, now with added superficial elements of Paul Dini’s Mr. Freeze. It’s not like the Kevin Tremaine version was some kind of study in missed storytelling opportunities.
@Matt Terl: The “every cell/will to live” thing in Uncanny X-Men Annual #11 is complicated by the setup for that story, in which the quest for the Crystal of Ultimate Vision somehow determines a species’ entire evolutionary potential.
Wolverine’s return is tied up with the Crystal’s broader significance as well, so there’s some kind of transcendent magical element involved in his amped up healing, not to mention Logan’s glowy aura and his newfound power to destroy Horde, who’d previously killed him almost effortlessly.
The whole story is Claremont in “dark fantasy” mode, down to including the Captain Britain characters and taking place in “the Citadel of Light and Shadows,” so I think it’s a mistake to apply its events to any characters’ more typical soft sci-fi powers.
Also, the crystal remade his adamantium. We’ve seen over and over since that his healing factor doesn’t do that (and there’s no reason why it should).
[…] #23. (Annotations here.) Well, Julius Ohta’s art has some memorable moments. I do like his Taskmaster towering over […]
@Si: I think that was an issue of Avengers: Initiative. At least, I know there was an issue of that title where Taskmaster and another villain acting as an instructor (Constrictor?) let this kid who is gonna wash out take a photo of himself standing triumphantly over their “unconscious” bodies.
There was a bit in Avengers Academy where Taskmaster mentions he’ll take jobs for the government and accept opportunities to go through archive footage of Golden Age heroes for the chance to learn new moves to copy. (He says WW2-era Captain America had “more of an edge” to him.)
I kind of like Taskmaster’s malleability. The training henchmen thing, the being willing to work for heroes or authority figures, or throw down with a hero himself, in the right circumstances. Like there’s some internal risk/reward calculation going on in each case, and it’s not always the same motivation that wins out.
I enjoyed, in MacKay’s first Moon Knight volume, when Taskmaster turns down an offer to fight Moon Knight for the vampire pyramid scheme, essentially because the money isn’t worth the likelihood Moon Knight will try to cripple or maim him, and there’s no other benefit to the job that would outweigh that.
Spending a decade as Deadpool comedy foil or sidekick might be what removed taskmasters credibility. They should team him with arcades a make murder world a house where the heroes take part in silly games for taskmasters pleasure
@Alastair: With that in mind, I’m a little surprised Gail Simone isn’t writing a series with Deadpool, Arcade, and Taskmaster now that she’s back at Marvel.
I’m not. She’s already written Deadpool and Taskmaster (was Arcade in her DP/Agent X run? Can’t remember), why go back to the same well? It’s been 20 years, I doubt she hang onto some unused ideas she feels she has to get on the page.
I love her Secret Six run, I’d rather she didn’t try to catch lightning in the bottle again. (Looking back, it’s probably a good thing she aimed in a different direction with her New52 Secret Six book).
And sure, she already worked Deadpool and Outlaw into Uncanny, but that was for a glorified cameo.
@Chris V: The Many Deaths of Wolverine had his healing factor resisting the TO infection.
“Being able to teleport Wolverine’s healing ability into multiple arbitrary people doesn’t sit well with the failures described in the attempt to “make Wolverines” in Uncanny.”
Then there’s the “adding new powers to mutants” plot over in Generation X-23, and 3K’s “adding mutant powers to humans” in MacKay’s X-Men, and it’s starting to feel like a card game where powers are cards that can be traded or stolen or passed around…