X-MEN LEGENDS #7-9
“Kidnapped!”
by Larry Hama, Billy Tan & Chris Sotomayor

From time to time I read the final chapter of a story and realise I have no memory of what happened in the previous chapters, and none of this feels like it has any particular significance to me. Often I go back and re-read the earlier issues, and the pieces fall into place, and I can see what the story was going for. And sometimes… it’s still just stuff happening.

For its fourth arc, X-Men Legends revisits Larry Hama’s run on Wolverine in the 1990s. And undoubtedly, that qualifies as a landmark run. We’re working through it at the moment over in the “Incomplete Wolverine” posts, but suffice to say that the first few years of Larry Hama’s run are not only vastly entertaining, they also introduce a lot of core Wolverine mythology that gets referenced regularly to this day. The later years of Hama’s run are, shall we say, a bit more patchy; some of that feels like it’s to do with editorial stop-starting, but a fair bit feels like it’s to do with having already done the big ideas, and a drift towards the surreal that often doesn’t pay off.

“Kidnapped” is aiming to recapture the tone of those earlier years. It takes place between issues #68-69, which is to say, just after Hama’s big storyline about Wolverine’s memory implants and the like. It’s something of a greatest hits. With three issues assigned rather than the usual two, you might expect it to be heavy on plot – but for the most part, it’s an extended action sequence that keeps raising the stakes by adding new characters. And that’s something Hama did from time to time in Wolverine, but there was usually a strong story at the core of it all. That feeling’s missing here.

The story sees Wolverine and Jubilee sent to investigate the kidnapping of two Japanese mutant orphan schoolgirls, Hino-Chan and Yurei. The Hand, led by the respect-obsessed Jie Jie, have kidnapped them in order to sell them to the Russian government, who apparently just want mutants for experimentation or something. Omega Red shows up as a Russian agent to help close the deal and get the girls. When that falls through, the Hand try selling to some other random buyer instead. And so you’ve got the same mutant schoolgirls being pursued by the Hand (who actually have them as prisoners), the Russians (who have already made a deal to buy them), Wolverine and Jubilee (who are just nice), and eventually Sabretooth and Birdy (whose motivations are barely touched on, but seem to be just trying to muscle in on the deal and steal the girls for re-sale). Oh, and Lady Deathstrike is working for the Hand, because she is.

So it’s the greatest hits, and there are some bits which conjure up the feel of Hama’s better stories for a minute or so. The opening scene, with Wolverine trying to get leads by pretending to sell Jubilee to the Hand, feels like the sort of thing we’d have had back in the day. Birdy keeping Sabretooth in check is a nice callback to a relationship that could have been more developed at the time. Jie Jie’s schtick of taking enormous offence at anyone who has the temerity to address her in their own language feels like the sort of thing a Hama crimelord would have done back in the day.

Then again, Lady Deathstrike and Omega Red don’t add much to this story beyond playing the hits. And Omega Red isn’t even a Hama hit – he’s a period villain introduced in X-Men. They seem to be cluttering up a story that isn’t really about either of them.

On art, we have Billy Tan – not a part of the original run, but then Marc Silvestri isn’t really an option, Adam Kubert is otherwise engaged, and I don’t think Mark Texeira has done comics for a while. Tan is a perfectly reasonable choice. He can do a solid fight scene, his Wolverine looks good. The opening scene is really quite well done – it’s got some atmosphere, Jubilee is nicely underplayed, the assorted thugs all have some distinctive identity. There’s something a little inconsistent about the look of his work, though – the first two chapters have a rather polished look to them, while the opening of part three has much heavier lines and feels rougher. I prefer his work with some rougher edges, and I think it’s some of the stronger work in the story, but it’s noticeably different.

Ultimately, the problem with this story is that the two girls aren’t really very interesting. It’s not that they lack agency – they make a fair job of figuring out their own escape, and Hama is clearly going for a kind of “us against the world” vibe with the two of them – but they lack personality. Tan draws them as two quite generic Japanese schoolgirls, and that’s kind of what they are. They don’t get to do much beyond show pluck in the face of adversity, and their individual personalities don’t develop, so they’re kind of a void at the heart of the story. Maybe that’s why it all feels a bit lacking – I just don’t care very much what happens to them, because they feel more like macguffins than characters. A shame, because there are glimmers of something better here.