Wolverine: Three Months To Die vol 2
In December 2013, when Marvel were soliciting issue #1 of the current Wolverine run, by Paul Cornell and Ryan Stegman, they offered retailers a novel incentive to order high. Any unsold copies of issue #1, they said, could be exchanged for an exclusive “Mortal Variant” of issue #12 in September 2014. And, it was made clear, you would want copies of issue #12, because it was a “double-sized landmark issue” which Marvel expected to receive “national attention for its game-changing story”.
In April 2014, Marvel announced the four issue Death of Wolverine miniseries by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven, to ship weekly in September. Entertainment Weekly, who were given the official announcement story, described Death of Wolverine as the “culminat[ion]” of “Three Months To Die”.
Issue #12 has now shipped – in August, not September. It does provide a proper conclusion to the Paul Cornell run which extended over the last two volumes of the series. It does not on the face of it lead in to anything in particular. And no one could claim with a straight face that it contains a “game-changing story”, let alone anything that might sanely be expected to achieve “national attention”. As for the “Mortal Variant” that retailers were promised last year, that’s been shifted to Death of Wolverine #1 – a change that retailers will probably be quite relieved about, given all I’ve just said.
All this quite obviously suggests a significant change of plans somewhere along the line, with Cornell’s originally planned ending having hit the cutting room floor. More to the point, whether or not that’s what happened behind the scenes, it’s how the story reads. This volume has been reading a bit oddly from the point where Wolverine’s cover within Offer’s gang was blown after only a single story, which seemed to have been paced with a longer stint as a villain in contemplation.
But by the time we reach the final issue, we have Sabretooth never actually getting around to transforming New York into a feral paradise in the way he’s been planning all series. We have Pinch and Lost Boy sidelined into a barely-sketched subplot about alternate reality duplicates which shows every sign of being a vague hint at something that was meant to be more developed – I strongly suspect it only stayed in because Cornell needed it in order to pay off the significance of Lost Boy’s tattoo and complete his character arc. Other than providing those duplicates, the reality-altering macguffin is not actually used, but still gets a randomly tacked-on resolution about how it’s an intelligent being.
And as our big finish, we simply have Wolverine reconciling with his supporting cast, coming to terms with his mortality, and defeating Sabretooth, with an epilogue about how much closure he’s achieved. Which is certainly a resolution, and very likely reflects the character arc Cornell always intended. But that doesn’t detract from the powerful sense that there was meant to be, and certainly ought to be, more. After all, as the culmination of twenty-four issues of story, “Wolverine beats up Sabretooth in a shopping mall” can’t help but seem like an anticlimax. It’s certainly inadequate to set up the idea that Wolverine might now feel free to retire.
This is disappointing. Cornell was a smart choice to write Wolverine. He’s not first and foremost an action writer, but his style is very well suited to the romantic streak that’s been central to Wolverine’s character (and to his lasting appeal) since at least the Claremont/Miller miniseries in the 80s. The basic arc of Cornell’s run is standard enough – challenge his sense of identity, break him down, and build him up again – but it’s a solid structure for exploring the character in a way that plays to Cornell’s strengths.
But there are problems with the underlying arc here quite aside from the seemingly truncated climax. In order to have Wolverine re-connect with his supporting cast (and not simply have the result be an X-Men story), Cornell has had to introduce a substantial non-X-Men supporting cast in the first place. With the possible exception of Pinch, the resulting relationships never developed the weight that the final act needs them to have. And there’s a suggestion that the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor doesn’t merely threaten his identity but actually leads to him having to come to terms with his own mortality for the first time. That means treating his healing factor as de facto immortality, which used to be fairly common, but the more conventional ground rules have largely been reasserted since Civil War. Under those rules, Wolverine may be very hard to kill, but he certainly can be killed, especially by the sorts of villains who fight the Avengers and the X-Men. You can blast him to smithereens, as the Sentinels did in “Days of Futures Past”. Or you can drown him – it worked on Daken, and this very story says it would work on Sabretooth.
Still, there’s something to the idea that Wolverine’s relationship to Sabretooth, and the courage he needs to face Sabretooth, are things that are fundamentally altered by the loss of his healing factor. Sabretooth has always worked best as a distorted reflection of Wolverine himself – separated from Wolverine, the character isn’t all that interesting in his own right. He’s the arch-enemy and so he has to be the villain for a story like this (or at least a story like this was presumably intended to be). For Wolverine to lose his healing powers poses both restores the original idea of Sabretooth being a threat who was out of Wolverine’s league, and Cornell is clearly trying to bring back the sense of fear that accompanied Sabretooth’s appearances in the late 1980s.
As noted, the story spends a lot of time building up Sabretooth’s scheme to acquire a reality-altering macguffin and use it to transform the world into a feral paradise where there are no non-physical powers, no technology, and just an endless fight for supremacy. Actually, Sabretooth’s vision of this world may be slightly more nuanced than that, because at one point he describes it as a world where the strong get what they need, but also protect the weak – this seems a little odd for him, but perhaps even Sabretooth figures that there has to be some sort of civilisation in order for him to rule it, and recognises defence of his tribe as one of the things that would prove his value and superiority.
Regardless, when you introduce something like that, you’re setting the reader up to expect a story where Sabretooth actually transforms the world, and the hero has to put it back. That’s not what we get. This isn’t really a violation of the Chekhov’s Gun principle – the gun placed on the mantelpiece in act 1 may not be fired in act 3, but act 3 is still centred on Sabretooth planning to fire it. Still, its rushed role here leads me to strongly suspect Cornell’s original plan did involve a temporary transformation of the world, which would presumably have provided a more memorable final conflict, and also been the focus for a stronger exploration of the parallels between Wolverine and Sabretooth. (Which, of course, is just a way of exploring Wolverine himself, what with Sabretooth ultimately being his mirror.)
How that would have played out can only be a matter of speculation. So let’s speculate. Cornell has Sabretooth repeatedly spelling out the ground rules of simple, primal “utopia” he plans to create – essentially survival of the fittest. Wolverine, in contrast, gets a speech in issue #11 about zen jokes, about the confusion between high and low culture, and about coming to terms with the lack of a clear meaning. (“I still keep looking for meaning, for rules to live by, when there’s just life. So I’m just gonna keep on stumbling along. And I guess that’s okay.”) This seems plainly intended as a statement of the moral, even if it’s less than clear how it actually emerges from the earlier chapters: Wolverine comes to recognise that there is no simple and straightforward ideology to live by. All this is fairly consistent with Cornell’s MI-13 stories, incidentally, where he liked to make a point of how British people reject simple narratives in favour of complicated ones, something he evidently viewed as a good thing.
So… all this seems to point to the idea being a clash between Sabretooth’s grindingly one-note ideology and Wolverine’s more complex worldview, playing out in an altered world purported designed by Sabretooth’s rules, and with Wolverine ultimately coming out on top because the rules themselves are stupidly designed. You can see how that could have worked, and could have been a much more satisfying resolution than one we actually got.
None of which really alters the fact that this doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t satisfy. It has the hallmarks of the final issues of sudden cancellations of yesteryear – it feels like something that doesn’t so much complete the story, as sketch out how it might have been completed. Whatever may have been going on backstage, the fact remains that this feels like a story that had its final act lopped off and a mid-story complication awkwardly retooled into a climax. In a sense it’s to the story’s credit that it still retains some workable sense of resolution, but it’s a frustrating read that could surely have been far better. It so obviously wants to feel definitive, and it so obviously isn’t.
Well, putting aside the fact that its a bit absurb to have split up a long form run into three arbitrary volumes, its pretty clear that since Cornell’s Death of Wolverine pitch was rejected in favor of Soule’s, Cornell was obliged to alter the ending of this arc. Perhaps we’ll have a better inkling as to why following Death of Wolverine.
“Its pretty clear that since Cornell’s Death of Wolverine pitch was rejected in favor of Soule’s”
Or more likely, Cornell rejected editorial’s Death of Wolverine pitch, so they replaced him with Soule.
It’s a damn shame that the complex character work and recurring thematic conversations that we’ve seen throughout Cornell’s run had to be hastily resolved in this comic’s climax, where Wolverine falls into two stupid cliches; 1.) taking off his armor to fight Sabretooth in his underwear (because apparently his manly pride is more important than his chances of stopping this genocidal psychopath), and 2.) not killing Creed when he’s down so he doesn’t traumatize Pinch’s daughter (because apparently that’s more important than a world without Sabretooth, who’d held her hostage and was going to kill her without a second thought).
It also hurt that one of Logan’s biggest external conflicts in the story– his falling out with Kitty– was compounded by her leaving the Jean Grey School for no credible reason beyond petty butthurt at the end of Battle of the Atom. It puts a distance between them completely unrelated to this story and prevents them from having a truly meaningful reconciliation.
“…at one point [Sabretooth] describes it as a world where the strong get what they need, but also protect the weak.”
I haven’t been reading any of this, so this too is a massive speculation, but…isn’t Vic due to star in AXIS? Moral inversions and such?
Could we be in for a poacher turned gamekeeper scenario?
//\Oo/\\
“a “game-changing story”, let alone anything that might sanely be expected to achieve “national attention””
Does Marvel’s marketing/PR machine actually put out stuff like that with a straight face?
Also, who the hell is Charles Soule to be writing the Death of Wolverine? Shouldn’t it have been by someone with at least a long term connection to the character, like Claremont, or Larry Hama, or Jason Aaron, or a dozen others?
Well it should be Larry Hama.
But it’s Charles Soule because the first two people that they asked did not want the job. Soule was number three.
I don’t know who Charles Soule is.
I don’t know who half these writers are.
Still, probably a far different notion than what Child Me thought Wolverine’s death should look like in the 1990s.
Charles Soule is a pretty good writer, actually. But he’s also one who’s willing to take on salvage jobs on dodgy projects like INHUMAN, and I suspect that’s why he’s writing this one.
Now that Paul has mentioned it I think She-Hulk might be the only book pitched by Soule. All his other mainstream work is in taking over titles that are tied pretty closely to the former creator ( allow some latitude for thunderbolts) and then Superman/Wonder Woman because DC wasn’t getting a monthly book they needed out of that team.
@Neil Kapit “It also hurt that one of Logan’s biggest external conflicts in the story– his falling out with Kitty– was compounded by her leaving the Jean Grey School for no credible reason beyond petty butthurt at the end of Battle of the Atom”
She left the Jean Grey School because the people running it were stupid and endangering the lives of children for nothing. Or at least that’s clearly how Bendis intends it to be read in his books.
WatXM consistantly put the kids in a much worse position than Cyclops’s team ever did (and through Logan’s own choices, unlike with Cyclops–Logan actually takes Quentin Quire with him to rob a casino), and on top of that you have multiple instances of the combat ready staff of X-Men leaving everyone else to die so they could go fight in a pointless war against each other and all of their friends. Even if you can ignore that because Jason Aaron is insane and was working under a really strange editorial mandate, All-New X-Men then has Logan openly wanting to murder Young Cyclops and having to be restrained from doing it. The whole Xavier SChool vs JG School conflict is impossible to take seriously as anything but Logan having a nervous breakdown, and it gets worse for the other characters! You’ve got Hank recklessly playing with time without any clear plan (and apparently dooming the universe). You’ve got Storm ordering her teammates to kill each other in the Brian Wood book, and threatening them with physical violence when they complain. You’ve got Iceman freezing the planet and pressumably killing millions of people. Battle for the Atom should have ended with *everyone* quitting, taking all of the kids with them, and just leaving Logan’s team and the X-Force behind. But since it didn’t, Kitty was at least involved in all of those plotlines, so it makes sense that she’d be the first one to snap and run for the hills.
The best thing about Cornell’s run is you can at least use it as justification for an interpretation where Logan’s actions (esp. after AvX) are the result of stress/illness. But then you’re still left with Hank being crazy too, and Storm and Iceman being dangerous to the people around them.
I don’t really understand the kitty/logan falling out to begin with though. The way Cornell presents it has her shocked that he would kill people. He’s murdered people right in front of her, going all the way back their early appearances together in the 80s. He’s even tried to kill *her* on multiple occasions. And held the threat of it over her head on others. Hell, she was standing right there when he wanted to kill Young Cyclops. Cornell’s portrayal of Kitty frankly makes her look really stupid. I think Jubilee would have been better. Its a more natural role for her, as someone who has been written as having a lot more trust in Logan’s inherent heroism than anyone else.
He had a *much* larger role in her formative years than he did with Kitty, they’re a lot closer, and she’s always been written as having a more trusting outlook on Logan than the rest of the team (going back to Jubilee being the one who used to snap Logan out of his berserker rage thing). It would have made a good use for Shogo as well; we could have just had Jubilee re-evaluating her relationship with Logan in light of a natural shift in priorities. She’s maybe ok with being friends with a violent psycho, but would she want him around her kid, when he has a history of being mind-controlled or even just snapping? That kind of thing.
I think Jubilee would have been better. Its a more natural role for her, as someone who has been written as having a lot more trust in Logan’s inherent heroism than anyone else.
Unfortunately, I think Jubilee’s current messy status quo (chirpy, vampiric adoptive mother) probably keeps a lot of writers from using her for much of anything.
Kitty was Cornell’s choice because she’s the template on which characters like Jubilee, Armor, and arguably Pixie are based: the ingenue and reader identification figure, with the side option of being semi-sidekick to the baddest X-Man of all. Really, writers have been trying to replace Kitty ever since Claremont wrote her out of the role in the Mutant Massacre.
At present, it’s probably Young Jean playing the part in Bendis’s books, especially since Old!Scott and Logan have halfway switched archetypes at this point. Idie and Quentin Quire almost felt like Jason Aaron doing a wacky spoof version of the concept, with an emotionally damaged “kitty” and Quire more explicitly positioned as a poseur version of “Logan, the cool rebel.”
Out of curiosity, has Jubliee ever killed anyone?
Wasn’t Kitty’s upset less that Logan was going to kill (because that’s just what he does), than that immediately after losing his healing factor, he went into an obvious trap and endangered a lot of civilians just to prove that he wasn’t scared?
@Omar Karindu “Kitty was Cornell’s choice because she’s the template on which characters like Jubilee, Armor, and arguably Pixie are based: the ingenue and reader identification figure, with the side option of being semi-sidekick to the baddest X-Man of all. Really, writers have been trying to replace Kitty ever since Claremont wrote her out of the role in the Mutant Massacre.”
I know people have been saying that for years, but I really don’t see it in the early issues. The idea of Wolverine’s succession of sidekicks that he trained seems more like a recent adaption that was just foisted upon two characters that didn’t need it (Kitty and Jubilee). Jubilee was introduced as basically a normal person, that fell into an extraordinary lifestyle after a bunch of bad things happened to her. Early Kitty was written more as a weird kid who didn’t fit into her peer group and joined a superhero team because at least they were stranger than she was. Both options provide an easy hook for reader identification, in a sense that we can all identify with being down-on-our-luck or with not fitting in, but they’re more like opposite spectrums of reader identificaiton.
The sidekick thing is really Jubilee’s exclusive privilege, early on. In my reading at least, Jubilee looks like she was a character filling a unique role, that she was actually created for, but then she got banished to Generation X, and the writers of the mid-90s tried to force that role onto Kitty once she rejoined the cast, and damaged both charcters (especially Jubilee). Before then, Kitty was never really a conventional teen sidekick, she was a normal member of the team. That was her main internal conflict, being of age with the New Mutants, but being a full member of the team instead of in-training. The idea of Kitty as a sidekick, and even someone who was particularly close to Wolverine (they have one arc together before the Mutant Massacre, and it was in a limited series), doesn’t seem like it showed up until well after Jubilee was introduced. If anything, I think Rogue might have been closer to filling that role, when she first joined the team. despite being an adult at the time.
Really the same for Armor as well. I know they tried to turn her into a sidekick character later on, but if you look at the end of Whedon’s run when she first joins the team, she’s basically in the same boat as X-23. She’s there to fight and hit things. Actually if you want to cast Armor in the template of an earlier character, I think Colossus works better. They’re both down to earth people who are there to provide the muscle.
@Neil Kapit “Wasn’t Kitty’s upset less that Logan was going to kill (because that’s just what he does), than that immediately after losing his healing factor, he went into an obvious trap and endangered a lot of civilians just to prove that he wasn’t scared?”
God, was that it? I just remember him getting into a bunch of pointless fights to reclaim a sword we don’t know why he cared about, given to him by a guy we’ve never heard of before, and then getting trapped in a mall by a door. And the X-Men/Avengers just letting him go. It stopped making sense to me when he didn’t go home for backup after getting beat by Batroc.
“Cornell’s portrayal of Kitty frankly makes her look really stupid”
I think one reaches a point where you just can’t stomach the ever-present Reset button any longer, especially if it just ditches certain character elements so the plot can work. Maybe this is a technical necessity after 35 years worth of contraditing stories, but it erodes the sense of disbelief. I just can’t take such stories serious any longer.
Looks like it’s paid off for Soule; Marvel announced today they’ve signed him to an exclusive contract.
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