X Lives of Wolverine #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X LIVES OF WOLVERINE #3
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Joshua Cassara
Colourist: Frank Martin
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. In the foreground, western hero Wolverine stands over the defeated bone coils of an Omega Red that he’s evidently defeated. In the background, Department H-era Wolverine (recognisable by his mask) faces off against the real Omega Red.
PAGE 2. Professor X and Marvel Girl continue to monitor Wolverine.
Wolverine’s opening narration continues the theme of time. He casts his long lifespan as more of a curse. Bear in mind that one of the signature achievements of Krakoa is supposedly to enable all mutants to live forever; Wolverine apparently sees that as a bad thing that makes life less meaningful.
PAGE 3. Wolverine experiences flashbacks to various parts of his life.
Apparently, just like us, present-day Wolverine is in some sense experiencing all these events together. From left to right, the four recognisable flashbacks show:
- Top left, Logan in World War I, probably as a member of the Devil’s Brigade, fighting a German soldier possessed by Omega Red. We haven’t seen this segment in the main story yet.
- In the main panel (X shaped to mirror the Cerebro helmet), old west Logan fights an Omega Red gunslinger. We haven’t seen this in the main story yet either, and with only two issues to go, you have to wonder if we’re actually going to.
- At the top, Logan as a member of Team X, in a plot thread we’ve already been following.
- Department H Wolverine fighting what seems to be some sort of north African merchant possessed by Omega Red (bearing no resemblance to the fight seen on the cover).
PAGE 4. Recap and credits. There are many more “life” panels at the top of the page this time, and by combining this and the earlier issues we can say that the numbering runs like this:
- Life 1: Wilderness Logan, from just after Origin.
- Life 2: Logan in the old west, apparently from the period of his life shown in Loki vol 3 #5. If so, it’s 1911.
- Life 3: Logan serves in World War I, as shown in Wolverine vol 3 #57-60 and Savage Wolverine #21-22 (and mentioned in Wolverine: Origins #17).
- Life 4: Not yet identified.
- Life 5: Jasmine Falls, where he marries Itsu and fathers Daken.
- Life 6: The birth of Professor X, shown in the previous issue. Oddly, the recap page tells us that this scene took place in England.
- Life 7: Team X, another of the book’s major plot threads.
- Lifes 8-9: Not shown, but presumably one of them is Department H. The other is most likely either Weapon X or the pre-Krakoan X-Men, though Madripoor would also work.
- Life 10: The present day.
PAGES 5-7. Omega Red tries to kill Benedict Xavier.
Benedict gets a first name here. This is all largely self-explanatory – Omega Red possesses various crew members before settling on a giant whale, and Logan arrives to help.
PAGES 8-10. Logan fights a possessed Itsu.
This continues directly from the end of the previous issue. Omega Red’s reasoning is that since Wolverine has blocked all his previous attempts to assassinate Xavier, this time he’s going to deal with Wolverine first.
“I thought you wanted privacy…” Jean left Logan alone with Itsu last issue.
“Can you save Daken?” In other words, if Logan kills Itsu, can they stop Logan and Itsu’s as-yet-unborn son Daken from being erased from history. The answer is pretty obviously no. The bit about putting a Cerebro unit in a black hole as a possible solution doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but presumably the idea is to isolate it from the timestream somehow or other.
Romulus shows up at the end to attack Itsu, even though she’s currently possessed by Omega Red. The data page following tells us that in the original timeline, Romulus attacked Wolverine and Itsu on the day that Daken was conceived, but Wolverine drove him away. This is new, and frankly a bit odd. Romulus’s schtick – generally ignored by most writers since, but hard to gloss over if you’re doing a series about Wolverine’s history – is that he’s a shadowy manipulator who Wolverine never dealt with directly. In this story, however, he does attack Wolverine directly, and acts as if Logan knows perfectly well who he is.
This seems to contradict the premise of Wolverine: Origins, which was that Logan regained his full memories as a result of House of M, and set out to investigate the conspiracy that he now remembered being a part of. Getting his unredacted memories back was the impetus for the plot. Despite that, he didn’t start off knowing who had been in charge of it, and didn’t seem to know anything Romulus before hearing about him in Wolverine vol 3 #50-55. Percy seems to be retconning that into a story where Romulus keeps his distance from Wolverine because he’s been so comprehensively beaten in direct confrontation in the past.
PAGE 11. Data page, essentially spelling out in less accessible form what we already established in the previous scene. Itsu’s death at the hands of the Winter Soldier is shown in flashback in Wolverine vol 3 #40, and Daken’s abduction by Romulus was shown in flashback in Wolverine: Origins #5.
PAGES 12-13. Mikhail’s pitch to Omega Red.
This continues the flashback thread showing how Omega Red was roped into this. At this point, it’s still rather vague what the Cerebro Sword has to do with anything, though evidently this plan somehow involves taking advantage of its residual ability to access the regular Cerebro network. Last issue, Mikhail’s ability to use the Sword in this way was flagged as a possible source of inside information.
From here on, we’re in fairly straightforward territory (well, as this sort of plot goes).
PAGES 14-15. Team X Wolverine shakes off Sabretooth and pursues his mission.
Sabretooth wants revenge because Wolverine turned on the team and abandoned their mission last issue, refusing to preserve the timeline if it meant re-enacting his past atrocities.
PAGES 16-17. Wolverine defends Benedict Xavier.
Pretty self-explanatory. Benedict is blown away by all this and evidently sees it as a revelatory signal in some way.
PAGE 18. Data page. In plot terms, the main point of interest here is that Professor X is using the Cerebro Sword’s connection to try and monitor Mikhail and Omega Red in turn.
PAGES 19-20. More of Itsu and Romulus.
Romulus is driven away, Itsu is freed.
PAGES 21-23. Team X Wolverine reaches Charles Xavier.
Quite why Charles Xavier is taking an interest in this sort of campaigning isn’t exactly clear, but okay. The pay-off, of course, is that Mikhail and Omega Red have finally figured out that the simple solution is just to possess Wolverine himself.
PAGE 24. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: WOLVERINES.
Idk maybe they should just time travel Wolverine’s brain to the Wolverine of last week, kill Omega Red before he joins Mikhail and spare us this exercise.
In the Hickman mythology, black holes are outside of time, which is why the machines intended to jump into one, so they wouldn’t be affected by Moira dying.
I don’t know how Wolverine expected to reach a black hole, or how he intended to get the data out again. Maybe they could toss it into that Xorn guy’s head. Then some kind of magic tree nonsense would get it out again? Trees can do anything these days.
It wasn’t that black holes exist outside of space and time, it is that the singularity is at the heart of a black hole. This is the place of the Dominions, or the “machine gods”. The Dominions exist outside of space and time.
The Phalanx assimilate all information from a host culture and then download this information to the Dominions, where the sum totality of the culture’s knowledge will exist for eternity as a part of the Dominion. This was what post-humanity hoped to achieve with Ascension.
Wolverine’s plan in this comic makes zero sense.
If the timeline changed, how would Logan remember he dropped a Cerebro unit in to a black hole?
How do they know this information about black holes?
Post-humanity was told about the Dominions by the Phalanx. Moira gained this knowledge during Life Six from the Librarian. Nimrod and Omega Sentinel seemed to have done intuitive knowledge of this reality, presumably as advanced AI is in some way connected with a Dominion, since the Dominions are “machine gods”. Mutants shouldn’t know about any of this.
I think it’s deliberately or accidentally conflating two different uses of the term “singularity”.
In the singularity at the centre of a black hole, gravity is so strong that time and space are theoretically crushed to a single infinitely small point and therefore don’t really exist. Not really what Hickman’s saying, but close enough for fiction.
In technological singularity, an AI self-improves at an exponentially faster rate until it expands far beyond the scope of human understanding.
That’s why there’s a timeless AI in a black hole, but I think the black hole singularity is the important bit. If the Dominions are outside of time, then the helmet would be too.
But yes, there’s no reason why Wolverine would know any of this.
Sorry, I enjoy pop science chatter.
Hickman does conflate the two definitions of the “singularity” in to one term. If this definition of a singularity is commensurate with existing outside of space and time, in the sense that Moira’s restarting time wouldn’t effect whatever exists at the heart of a black hole would probably be debatable.
However, it was explicitly stated in Powers of X that the Dominions tear a hole in the very fabric of existence, so that the Dominion exists outside of space and time. This seems to be specifically Hickman’s point as to the Dominion being outside of the confines of Moira’s powers. No matter how many times she restarts reality, the Dominion will always continue to exist, unaffected.
Just to add on a bit more: Hickman conflates the two definitions of the Singularity in order to show an origin.
Machine intelligence will eventually evolve to a point of such complexity that its final form will be the Stronghold. The Stronghold’s intelligence is so advanced that it’s mass collapses physical reality creating a black hole.
Eventually, cooperating Strongholds (at a sufficiently advanced level forming that which is called Titans) through competition with and conquest of other Titans, reach the end-state of all evolution, which is the Singularity at the heart of a black hole known as a Dominion, which is so far beyond conscious comprehension that they are commensurate with God.
Sounds like the story has places to go and not a whole lot of rationale to guide it, so it ends up spreading the plot across several different strands and alternating focus among them in order to make the disjoint appear intentional.
You know, if Omega Red just travelled to the time of consummation, he wouldn’t even have to succeed at killing any people. Just fighting Wolverine nearby would kill the mood.
“Romulus is driven away, Itsu is freed.”
I read those pages three times, and have no idea how Omega Red was driven out of Itsu.
Also, what does the Cerebro Sword actually do? Why stab Omega Red with it? Oh, and how do AIs or Cerebro helmets survive the gravity of a black hole? I’m not going through this material with a fine-toothed comb, but I’ve been frustrated by the amount of hand-waving modern super-hero comic book writers do. I can accept a lot of comic book nonsense, but it seems like said nonsense isn’t even making it to the pages.
Mike-Hickman is basically saying that pure intelligence can survive a black hole, which is why I wrote that Logan’s plan makes no sense. The Cerebro would be completely obliterated, regardless.
Percy’s idea makes zero sense on any conceptual level.
Another question as to objects in a black hole bring outside of changing time…there would now be two exact copies of the object, if possible. Except, by going back in time and changing the past, it would erase Logan throwing an object in to a black hole in the first place. So, would the object still exist in the black hole that was never thrown in the black hole in the new reality?
Was Percy implying that the information on the Cerebro would survive in a Singularity if thrown in a black hole and could then be downloaded later by another Cerebro unit? That’s why I think maybe Percy misunderstands Hickman’s mythology about the Dominions.
My point was that Percy completely misunderstood Hickman and seems to think that a black hole is some sort of magic portal or something.
Paul: “…Logan in World War I, probably as a member of the Devil’s Brigade…”
Sorry, I haven’t read the issue, but I think one half of this sentence must be wrong.
If memory serves, the Devil’s Brigade was the American/Canadian 2nd Special Service Force, during the SECOND World War. During the First World War, the 1st Canadian Division (of several) was apparently known as the Red Patch Devils, from the simple red square that was the formation logo.
However, as with the overwhelming majority of the “So bad-ass that their enemies called them X” legends, that origin was probably myth and/propaganda.
Not my mistake. Wolverine: Origins #17 says that Wolverine fought in World War I as part of the Devil’s Brigade, which is presented as some sort of black ops squad linked to Romulus. Writer Daniel Way presumably picked up the name from Alpha Flight #33, where Wolverine mentions in passing his service in the Devil’s Brigade. I suspect he just didn’t realise it was referring to a real unit.
*sigh*
Darn, I do remember being frustrated by that back at the time, too.
What can you really say about an issue where Wolverine-possessed teenage bone-clawed Logan fights a giant white whale?
@Mike, I believe the idea is that Omega Red vacates Itsu in order to go after Xavier, having distracted Wolverine. Red goes off, Wolverine quickly scares off Romulus and heads off to protect Xavier.
If they threw Cerebro into a Black Hole that already had a Dominion squatting in it, wouldn’t that Dominion get the data?
Not unless it was downloaded to the Dominion, which is the purpose of the Phalanx as go-betweens for material reality and a higher reality. The Phalanx assimilate everything from the chosen species as pure information, eliminating all evidence of the physical/material, and then download it to the Dominion.
Joseph S: that’s as good an explanation as I’m likely to get. I mean, Omega Red put Wolverine in a no win scenario, then Romulus came along. No idea why Red didn’t do more to exploit that, or why the two bad guys didn’t team up, other than “it’s a Wolverine comic.” I wish Percy and co. had figured a way out of the dilemma besides Red just leaving.
Chris V: I just looked up whether information can survive in and be released from a black hole, and Stephen Hawking and others have theorized it could. Good on Hickman for doing the research. As for whether or not depositing the object in the black hole would erase itself, time travel doesn’t make sense. I just assume that if something is planted in the past then it was there all along. (1967: the object is in the black hole. 2022: the object is created and sent back) Or something? That’s how it worked with Data’s head on the stupid TNG episodes with Mark Twain.
Mike-Yeah, that’s why I enjoy Hickman for all his faults as a writer. He does a great deal of research, and in different areas (the Dominions are also based in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point). I feel like I’m reading a work based in the science fictional when I read Hickman’s comics.
Percy’s ideas remind me of reading a Silver Age comic…Want something to exist forever? Throw it in the nearest black hole and retrieve it later!
It’s rubbish of course. But maybe we can be generous and say it’s rubbish because Wolverine isn’t that bright and he was grasping at straws based on something he half-heard Reed Richards mention once.
But even if not, I don’t personally mind the concept. Maybe Marvel black holes do work that way. Why not? It’s not the craziest idea in the comics.
Well, I’m not reading this comic, but if Wolverine jumps in to the black hole with a Cerebro because he knows his healing factor can even survive the gravity of a black hole and come out beyond, I will seriously consider buying the collected edition.
Wolverine is The Dominion.
I think it’s wild that any single commenter here could have done this job better than Omega Red. Arkady is a fucking dumbass — why the heck would Mikhail bother to send him him back instead of literally anyone else? Pretty sure Ursa Major could have finished this job by now.
Oh man how much cooler would it be if Xavier’s midwife etc suddenly turned into a giant bear?
Mathias X & Si: YES!!!
And the whale would turn into a bear-whale…
I’ve seen the Omega Red whale called “Omega Dick” online. That’s all well and good, but it should have been Major Dick.
“Mutants shouldn’t know about any of this.”
But you said in the same post that Moira knows it. And mutants now know what Moira knows. OK, it was supposed to be just the council, but maybe they’ve made sure all the main guys know.
“Wolverine stands over the defeated bone coils of an Omega Red that he’s evidently defeated.”
I hadn’t realised these were non-carbonadium coils. The coils/tentacles aren’t artificial?
“Lifes 8-9: Not shown, but presumably…”
IX is shown in the recap lives as being Middle East, with Wolverine in his first appearance era mask.
XIII should be Weapon X, as it was one of the ten Woverines on that cover…but that also had Patch, which he never went by ’til after Fall of the mutants. Just representative of Madripoor?
I found the Cerebro sword part to be a worse example of hand-wavey nonsense than the black hole mentions. Stabbing someone with a data repository while using reality-warping powers caused possession powers through time because…it just does? What part is the data playing? I’m some of these eras Wolverine is the only mutant, and it’s before he’s been catalogued. Why is it linked to Wolverine’s life? Mikhail and Omega could pick Benedict’s ancestor and there wouldn’t be a Wolverine alive to stop them.
Omega Red’s coils are supposed to be artificial implants, but maybe it’s just Rasputin being creative. I’m personally reminded of the old bad guy Spyne, he had a tail that was kind of like those tentacles.
And yeah, there are even more plot holes in this than most time travel stories. They could possess baby Charles Xavier and make him jump off a bridge or something. What’s Wolverine going to do, kill the guy he’s there to save?
Are we seriously not expecting some hand-wavey nonsense between now and the end of this that undoes any damage done to the timeline? If Xavier dies it’s M’Krann crystal shenanigans again and nobody wants *that*.
There’s actually some very trippy ideas Percy could play with in this story, so long as no one cared about him breaking the Marvel Universe.
Since these events are taking place prior to the birth of Moira, if Omega Red succeeded in stopping Charles Xavier from being born, it would also retroactively wipe out all (?) of Moira’s past lives also.
Moira’s power only resets the timeline back to the moment of her birth. Everything which happens prior to that point is left untouched from lifetime to lifetime.
So, if there is no Charles Xavier in existence, then it would effect most of Moira’s past lives as well. Just imagine Percy trying to deal with all the ramifications of preventing Charles Xavier being born.
Dave-Well, yeah, the Council does know. They said it was their burden to bear. I don’t think they’d tell Logan, who doesn’t even have an official position on Krakoa.
So when Wolverine returns from the black hole with Cerebro he’ll be the techno-Wolvie from X Deaths, right?
Dunno, Forge said that he’s from 1000 years in the future. Doesn’t sound the same as ‘outside of time itself’ to me.
Galactus was chilling out at the centre of a black hole in Walt Simonson’s Fantastic Four run, so Marvel Universe black holes are varied, I suppose.
Ah, but it does sound like techno-organic Wolverine is from Life Six. Life Ten Wolverine will use the Cerebro to assimilate Wolverine from Life Six after coming out beyond the black hole as a Dominion. Wolverine’s healing factor is obviously too powerful to not survive such minor inconveniences as Moira’s mutant power ending the timeline or the Phalanx scouring the planet of all traces of lifeforms. Life Six Wolverine just regenerates outside of space and time following Moira’s erasing the timeline at which point he assimilates the now techno-organic Life Six Wolverine before sending him to the present-day Life Ten.
Obviously, we have cracked Percy’s grand plan.
Thekelvingreen-Hickman did write that the only two beings which can destroy a Dominion are the Phoenix and Galactus. So, apparently Galactus can survive a black hole. I guess that Simonson comic took place after Galactus had absorbed a Dominion as foodstuff.
>> Galactus was chilling out at the centre of a black hole in Walt Simonson’s Fantastic Four run, so Marvel Universe black holes are varied, I suppose.
Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a black hole, and that means comfort.