WOLVERINE vol 8 #24
“Master and Monster”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Wolverine (with broken claws) posing in front of headshots of Alpha Flight. Apparently no one gave artist Dan Panosian anything beyond a list of names, because he’s drawn current members Puck, Snowbird and Marrina and the previous Vindicator, Heather Hudson. The current Vindicator, Agent Arsenault, wears a black and white costume, and per X-Men #12, she has short blonde hair.

There’s a back-up strip, which is the fourth part of the serial for Disability Pride Month – as before, there’s no attempt to recap the plot and no indication of where you can read previous chapters. They’re in Amazing Spider-Man #32, Uncanny X-Men #31 and Fantastic Four #14, if you care. But it’s got nothing to do with the X-books so I won’t be saying any more about it – except to wonder why Finesse seems to be the highest-profile explicitly autistic character in a universe that includes Reed Richards. (Or, hell, Scott Summers, but that’s another matter…)

WOLVERINE: 

He says that his healing factor has been suppressed for “days”, though that might just mean issue #21 when he realised the problem. He wouldn’t have expected his broken claws to grow back overnight after issue #20, and as I’ve pointed out before, presumably his other injuries from that fight healed as normal. His healing factor is still working to some minor extent, so he comes round fairly quickly after being knocked out cold.

Understandably, he doesn’t have much sympathy for Mor – the story here is about him needing to defend the guy from Alpha Flight anyway.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Puck, Snowbird and Marrina show up in pursuit of Mor, as foreshadowed in issue #22. Remarkably, Wolverine only makes the connection at that point, even though he phoned up Puck specifically to ask about Department H nanotech. Let’s assume that without his healing factor, Wolverine isn’t really on top form mentally.

The three regular members of Alpha Flight have minimal dialogue and continue to take orders from the new Vindicator. To be fair, this is a perfectly legitimate Department H mission, since Mor really has done a runner with some highly sensitive technology. As in issues #15-16, Puck seems willing to fight Wolverine at least for the purposes of keeping him at bay. (Snowbird is also ordered to fight him, but we don’t see her response to that order before things go out of control with Mor.)

VILLAINS:

Dr Murat Mor. A flashback expands on the story that Mor already gave us last issue. He claims to have spent “years” working “as an expert in medical nanotech” – which sits a little oddly with Dr Reyes claiming in issue #22 that the field was purely theoretical, but perhaps the idea is that he was a scientist rather than the doctor that the art seems to depict.

Hoping to get access to more resources to save his wife, he signed up for Department H. Somehow or other, Department H was already in possession of “nanites carrying the techno-organic virus variant once borne by the mutant villain Post”, and even more bizarrely, Mor claims to have “read about them in an old medical journal”. The original Post was a herald of Onslaught, introduced with much fanfare in X-Men #50 (which is where he fought Wolverine). For those who may not remember, “Onslaught” was a notoriously chaotic storyline where the X-office was throwing out foreshadowing without any apparent clue of where any of it was going, and such plans as they did have seem to have got hijacked anyway when “Onslaught” was derailed to provide a catalyst for the unrelated “Heroes Reborn” event.

In his debut, Post was simply a random powerful guy who abducted the X-Men, fought them for a bit, and generally foreshadowed that Onslaught was a big deal. Not long after that, Cable #33 gave him an origin story as a mutant who had received a blood transfusion from Cable at one point, which is where he got infected with the techno-organic virus. Beyond that, Post didn’t come to much – he drifted around the second-tier titles for a while, and eventually got killed off in Cable #87.

Post never had anything to do with Alpha Flight, but presumably his nanites have wound up in their possession through the black market or something. Mor’s big idea was to modify the nanites to cure cancer, and to test them on himself, with predictable results. He says that the virus has begun taking over his body “and my thoughts”, so there may be a suggestion that he’s being rebuilt into Post himself.

His last-ditch plan was then to steal Wolverine’s healing factor, and so he came up with the cardiac-arrest-inducing device from issues #15-16 as a way of tricking Department H into implanting a “time-released healing siphon” into Wolverine’s bloodstream. He also hired Taskmaster to test the healing siphon and, supposedly, “to bring you in for a direct appeal”. (In issue #22, Taskmaster evidently interpreted this instruction as “abduct him”.)

In time-honoured tragic fashion, Mor has compromised his humanity for nothing, because his wife died this afternoon. He says that he can reverse the process, but doesn’t get a chance before Alpha Flight attack.

When cornered or anxious, he turns into his Post form. In this form, aside from brief moments when it’s wearing off, he speaks robotically and says things like “Commencing threat reduction.” The original Post wasn’t like this – he had a normal personality (well, as much as any one-dimensional henchthug does). Occasionally, he mutters things about keeping a promise to his dead wife. Aside from that, the Post personality seems to be mainly interested in escaping threats and getting to safety, and seems to perceive itself as acting in self-defence.

Agent Mehta and Taskmaster both have one-panel cameos in Mor’s origin flashback.

Vindicator. Agent Arsenault is still Alpha Flight’s field leader despite Mehta’s obvious irritation with her in issue #16. Consistent with her previous appearances in this series, she’s obnoxious and high-handed and views Wolverine as a traitor. When she debuted in Jed MacKay’s X-Men, she seemed to be depicted as someone who was fundamentally competent in other respects; Ahmed seems to write her as an overconfident loudmouth who makes matters worse by going in guns blazing.