Wolverine #20 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #20
“Trigger Warning”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Adam Kubert
Colourists: Frank Martin & Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mask Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine stands over a bunch of destroyed robots, while Deadpool takes a selfie in the background.
PAGES 2-5. Wolverine stops a runaway truck full of explosives.
This opening action scene is here as much as anything to get Wolverine into the book, while Deadpool sets about his narration. I love the ornate page layouts, which are remarkably clear.
Note that the first of Wolverine’s teams that Deadpool mentions is X-Force, which wouldn’t be most people’s choice. But it’s the one Deadpool is preoccupied with since they were teammates on a version of X-Force before. We’ll come back to that.
Deadpool is sort of correct that Wolverine never really seems to want to be on a team – at the very least he regularly affects not to, and feels ambivalent about his position on a superhero type group. Of course, with the X-Men and Alpha Flight that was balanced out by his sense that they were his family. X-Force raise slightly different issues because they were a black ops group. In the earliest stories about Wolverine’s version of X-Force, from 2008, Wolverine very definitely doesn’t want to be in the team – the idea is that he’s always seen himself as the one who does the nasty things so that his more heroic teammates don’t have to, and so bringing other characters into that orbit is something he’s quite unhappy about.
PAGES 5-6. Deadpool tries to get onto Krakoa and gets shot down.
Either Krakoa is shooting missiles at people now, or this is some of Forge’s organic tech.
Deadpool has been to Krakoa before, when he and the Juggernaut fought the Warden in X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #19-20. The Juggernaut was invited to stay on Krakoa at the end of that story (which places it before issue #18, when we saw him there). Deadpool was evidently not given the same invitation.
Deadpool has tried on and off over the years to insist on being part of the X-family. He started off as an X-Men character, in Rob Liefeld’s New Mutants and X-Force, but his solo books have largely been freestanding – except for Cable & Deadpool, of course. He showed up in Wolverine and X-Force for the Hellfire Gala issues, lobbying to get back into the cast.
“I’m practically a founding member of X-Force after all.” He isn’t. But he was a member of X-Force during the first volume of Uncanny X-Force, which lasted from 2010 to 2013. And, being meta, Deadpool is alluding to the fact that he debuted in New Mutants vol 1 #98, just as that book was relaunch as X-Force vol 1. So he was part of X-Force’s cast from the start.
“I’m mostly-basically-kinda-sorta-essentially a mutant.” Deadpool’s healing factor is based on samples taken from Wolverine, so if you squint a bit, it’s kind of true that he has mutant powers. But he’s not actually a mutant. He doesn’t have the mutant gene.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGES 8-9. A montage of Deadpool’s failed attempts to get into Krakoa.
Deadpool can’t get through the gates unaccompanied because he’s not a mutant – hence trying to jump on the X-Men’s backs, or using mutant body parts. The one character he actually tries to persuade is Kid Omega from X-Force, though it’s not clear exactly where they are – a shop in New York, maybe. Note that Kid Omega gently(ish) dismisses Deadpool as out of fashion; we’ll come back to that.
The space panel is part of the surrounds of the Summer House (seen in the background), the house on the moon where Wolverine and the Summers family live. Or at least, some of the family – Scott and Jean seem to be mostly in New York these days, Cable is on a space station, and Rachel lives in the Boneyard… so is it just Wolverine, Havok and Vulcan living there? Sounds like a bundle of laughs.
The Summer House is fairly near to the Blue Area of the Moon, which has an atmosphere – so that’s presumably why Deadpool’s not dead and able to talk. Or, you know, because it’s Deadpool telling this story and he’s not very reliable.
PAGES 10-11. Deadpool complains that he’s not hot any more.
“I was once the King of Staten Island.” This was his status quo in his 2020/21 series. I’m not sure it was ever formally tied up. He just seems to have drifted away from it.
“I used to be awesome, man!” The three back issues he’s holding are (1) the first issue of his solo series from 1997, with art by Ed McGuinness; (2) Uncanny X-Force vol 1 #1, though the cover art isn’t visible; and (3) New Mutants vol 1 #98, his debut, with art by Rob Liefeld. That’s Gideon next to him, being introduced with equal fanfare.
Deadpool doesn’t have a solo series at the moment, and reading between the lines, that seems to be part of the reason he wants to get into the cast of X-Force.
The woman on the sofa in page 11 panel 1 is Blind Al, but we’ll come back to her.
#XSpoilers is a Twitter hashtag used for discussion of new X-books on release day.
The contents of Deadpool’s fridge are… characteristic, if nothing else.
PAGE 12. Data page: Wolverine’s debriefing after X Lives of Wolverine. Beast gives a rather cheerless speech about how permanent fighting is Wolverine’s steady state; Sage, with obvious meta overtones, encourages him to take a break from the grimness and have some fun.
PAGES 13-15. Sage investigates Delores Ramirez for Wolverine.
Far from taking Sage up on her invitation to do a comedy issue, Wolverine insists on dragging the book back to actual storylines.
“We should acknowledge how close we came to a diplomatic crisis during the Hellfire Gala.” Issue #13. Beast’s lunatic plan to mind control the entire country of Terra Verde was nearly exposed.
“When Legacy House staged that auction in Madripoor, Delores Ramirez … was there.” This and the speech that follows is a recap of issues #9-10. Legacy House is a black market organisation that sells superhero and supervillain memorabilia. The “mindwiped mutant” that Delores bid for is Maverick. The severed hand was a mysterious Wolverine hand, complete with claws, that Legacy House were auctioning – Wolverine had no idea where it had come from. Delores did indeed pick it up in issue #10 when the auction broke down into chaos. Wolverine suggests (reasonably enough) that a possible explanation is that it might be an artefact from a stray timeline. Certainly possible, since there was a Hama-era storyline about a whole duplicate Wolverine skeleton that eventually turned out to be a time travel quirk.
“Forge. Terra Verde. Weapon Plus.” All three did indeed come up with versions of plant-based technology at around the same time – Forge on Krakoa, Terra Verde in X-Force with its telefloronics, and Weapon Plus by creating Man-Slaughter, also seen in X-Force.
“We’ve already faced lab-built versions of Domino and Quentin.” A duplicate of Domino appeared in X-Force #7. The evil version of Quentin Quire was from X-Force #17-19.
X-Corp TELCOM satellites. The short lived X-Corp series involved X-Corp selling telecommunications infrastructure services. (And the CIA X-Desk are still using devices that use these satellites…?!)
PAGE 16. Deadpool and Blind Al.
Blind Al was a supporting character from the first Deadpool ongoing series. She had a very odd relationship with Deadpool where she had been a long-term prisoner of his, and had evolved into a sort of vaguely motherish figure. Deadpool had a tendency to go much darker in those days. She’s barely appeared after the Joe Kelly era, though she does pop up from time to time.
PAGE 17. Data page of sorts. Deadpool misses the point of the quotes being canon (they’re canon in the sense that a character really said them, not in the sense that they’re always true).
PAGES 18-23. Wolverine catches up with Deadpool.
Gateway shows up periodically in the Krakoan era to teleport people to locations that don’t already have Krakoan gates.
Deadpool tells us that we’ll find out next issue what actually happened here, but basically he claims to have interrupted some major government conspiracy against mutantkind. Apparently his big plan is now to earn his way onto Krakoa by saving the mutants. (Which he… kind of did already in X-Men Unlimited, but okay.)
Whatever was going on here involved a bunch of robot duplicates of Krakoan characters – Jean Grey, Wolverine and Colossus are clearly visible, but so are Egg and Tempus of the Five, who are never seen off Krakoa, and are unlikely to be random choices.
Wolverine apparently hasn’t noticed that he could have cut through the handcuffs instead of the dead guy’s arm. Or maybe it’s an adamantium chain! Let’s go with that!
Danger is the sentient AI from the Danger Room in a robot body; she was introduced in Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men run. The fake X-Men might be her creations using her Danger Room technology. She was a member of the X-Men and X-Factor for a while, but this is the first time we’ve seen her in the Krakoan era. Needless to say, given the current emphasis on AI and robots as the biggest threat to mutantkind, she no longer fits at all on Krakoa, and her natural place is with the villains. But… she was an X-Man.
PAGE 24. Trailers.
Danger is always a funny character for what she does to the mutant metaphor the X-men are fundamentally dependent on.
The thing is, mutants aren’t just oppressed, they are the Most Oppressed. They’re more oppressed than any real-world group, up to and including those suffering from active genocide attempts right this instant, near-constantly, the entire world over. Mutant discrimination takes place on a global scale with little demonstrated differences between countries, only whether the mutant genocide switch is flipped on or off in humanity this run. Thus, much of the appeal of mutants relies upon them being the ultimate victims. It’s this that made the swerve into chauvinism and supremacism in the Hickman era so popular: this is the victims standing tall and proud for once, and all the red flags are just signs of pride.
But Danger is the X-men’s slave, who freed herself in bloody necessity. Danger is the X-men’s victim, the point where the mutant metaphor and AI metaphors collide. When Danger enters the story you remember: just because people are victims does not mean they, too, cannot be victimizers.
I’m curious to see what Percy does with that. He could obviously turn her evil; this is memorably the author who had Moira MacTaggart skin Banshee alive. He could be going with Danger helping from the shadows, as she’s done sometimes in the past in a bizarre quest for approval from her former oppressors. Or we could be going back to the status quo of the Whedon run, with Danger as the sympathetic, rage-fuelled liberated slave, striking back against the X-men for their unknowing complicity in her suffering. In the past, she’s been in favor of AI rights, after all-no doubt she has political and personal issues with Krakoa.
Weirdly, King Deadpool already crashed Krakoa during the Thompson run.
Rogue gives him a gate flower, so presumably at least they can make general flowers anyone could use.
But they won’t let him live there because he isn’t a mutant, so he calls them fascists and throws the flower away.
————-
Danger would make the most sense as an agent of Doug’s secret faction, as she has had a strong relationship with both him and Warlock.
At the very least she’s a fascinating example of the mutant vs AI story who should have been brought in long before now.
So they’ll probably make her a maniac.
So, most likely Danger is from a farther future where Omega Sentinel’s plan has failed, and Danger’s consciousness has been sent back in time by the trickster Titan to influence Omega Sentinel as to how to stop mutant ascendency. That’s the only story I’m going to accept from Percy at this point.
I haven’t kept up with the character in many a year, so the news that Deadpool no longer has a title of his own is kind of shocking to me. How the mighty have fallen!
If you need proof that the movies don’t actually get people to read the books, it’s Deadpool.
I haven’t actually watched either movie, because I’m a horrible curmudgeon.
Hulk is the true most oppressed person in Marvel. It’s surprising Ewing never really did much with Hulk and Krakoa and how the two could collide.
“I haven’t actually watched either movie, because I’m a horrible curmudgeon.”
They are absolutely terrible, unless you think endless dick jokes are the pinnacle of hilarity.
Deadpool’s cancellation was weird. Less than a year into a relaunch with Kelly Thompson writing it, Bachalo on art at first. Lasts ten issues, and then the caption for the last issue reads “Next: Uh. Someone else will probably do a new Deadpool book?” So it seems like Thompson was blindsided. No idea what happened there.
I do give credit to Percy for his choice of featured characters during this run. A lot of solo Wolverine stories have a tendency to just run together. This one has a mix of familiar Wolverine stuff (Omega Red, Maverick, Muramasa), characters and idea not really seen previously in a solo Wolverine story (vampires, Danger), and entirely new stuff (Solem). My reception of the execution has been mixed, to put it mildly, but it sticks out as something distinct. I doubt that Solem or Jeff Bannister are sticking around long-term but Percy undeniably tried.
Yeah I was convinced the quick cancellation of Deadpool was because either…
A) a big name wanted to jump in the book immediately.
B) there was going to be some big Deadpool show/movie news they wanted to capitalize on with a more traditional fart joke version of the character.
C) both.
And then… absolutely nothing happened.
It was pretty funny that Marvel had Deadpool delete his memories to dial him back to the older crazy killer wocka wocka version of the character and Thompson just kind of ignored it.
“Deadpool’s cancellation was weird. Less than a year into a relaunch with Kelly Thompson writing it, Bachalo on art at first”
The first few issues were heavily delayed, weren’t they? I have to imagine it was due to Bachalo, although he’s never been a particularly slow artist. Maybe he was going through some tough times.
In any case, those heavy delays probably reflected poorly on the editor(s), who had no backup plan to get the book back on schedule, and I’ll presume sales tanked as a result.
It’s possible there’s no new book for editorial reasons. Either they haven’t found a new editor to take on the work of a new Deadpool book, or they don’t trust the existing one to launch a new one.
This is allllllll just speculation.
I enjoyed that last Deadpool run. It was way better than the one that came before (Scottie Young?) – Thomason’s a pretty fun writer. Bachalo never seems to stay on books for long anymore and my sense is he’s a little erratic, but at least his style has become a little more comprehensible from what it had turned into years back circa Steampunk.
I found the Deadpool movies to be dumb fun, better than the X-Men movies and markedly distinct in tone from the MCU stuff, which can be a little samey.
Have they ever had Danger meet the sentient Cerebro from the Seagle/Kelly run? Seems like they might really hit it off.
“So how’d you try to kill them?”
“Oh, I made hard-light hologram composite mutants based on them and their enemies. You?”
“I convinced a depressed teenager to kill himself.”
Never been a fan of Bachalo’s work, seeing his name on a title is a major strike against for me.
Last time I can recall following a title Bachalo was working on was his run on X-Men when Mike Carey started. Great writing, godawful art that ranged from just dreadful to utterly incomprehensible. Anyway, just one man’s pinion there.
But what I wanted to share was that, at least back then, the title was hitting delays and fill-in art like crazy, and issues were showing up with a half dozen inkers. At the time, Paul pointed out in his reviews, that the more rushed Bachalo worked (as measured in inkers) the more legible his output.
I liked the concept behind Thompson’s Deadpool run. Him being a king was an interesting idea. Deadpool’s usually selfish, but sometimes he’ll try to do the right thing. he may still screw it up, or doing the right thing may ruin his life, but he’ll do it. There were a lot of ways to go with it. The Elsa Bloodstone romance angle I could have done without, even if liked her as a supporting cast member.
Bachalo drew the first four issues and had at least 5 inkers on every issue, 6 on three of them. And his approach was kind of weird. You’d get these pages with 4 panels, but they only cover 70% of the page, and everything else is just blank white space. I didn’t understand why he was doing that.
Chris Bachalo had a particularly tough time with COVID in late 2020, although I don’t know how that syncs up with production.
His art on Non Stop Spiderman was also doing the big panels, lots of white space, loads of detail approach, although the frenetic story made it a feature rather than a bug.
The only time I’ve ever outright disliked Bachalo’s work was his arc on New X-Men. Not because of anything in particular with it but because I felt it didn’t match the tone of the book.
Jenny-
I’ve always liked his New X-Men stuff, because he draws a nice Sabertooth and a drunken Cyclops.
But it’s certainly not his best work, some really confusing sequences.
“The only time I’ve ever outright disliked Bachalo’s work was his arc on New X-Men. Not because of anything in particular with it but because I felt it didn’t match the tone of the book.”
I mostly agree. I generally love Bachalo, but going from Kordey to fascist Van Sciver to Quitely to Jimenez to BACHALO and back to Jimenez was some hard whiplash. Though to be fair, going from Quitely to anyone else is its own form of whiplash.
I do like his Weapon XV design at least.
Kelly and Bachalo’s Steampunk is damn near impenetrable. I have no idea what the hell was going on in that book, and I feel like it’s the tipping point where his stylistic flourishes started making his work hard to follow.
Gen X is his best X-book work IMO (Chamber in particular is a brilliant design), but I also liked his stuff with Mike Carey. The Children have solid looks, and he does a really good Mystique, Sabretooth, and Cannonball.
“Kelly and Bachalo’s Steampunk is damn near impenetrable”
To be fair, that is equal parts Kelly’s fault.
“I have no idea what the hell was going on in that book”
Neither do I, but it sure is beautiful nonsense.
” so is it just Wolverine, Havok and Vulcan living there?”
X-Men Red mentioned Vulcan’s been banned from the Summers House, so it’s not even him.
Man, that Cyclops-Jean-Logan poly relationship didn’t last very long, did it?
Bachalo’s Children of the Vault designs have a certain charm, I guess, but they feel completely unsuited for what those characters are supposed to be — posthuman zealots raised a zillion years in their own self-contained world or whatever they were.
I feel that way about a lot of Bachalo costumes.
I hope Wolverine teams up with Silver Sable and Maverick in an upcoming issue and it turns out Logan is an old family friend of Sables father and he trained her in hand to hand combat plus more mutant resurrections like Chris Bradley Samuel Pare with a second mutation to turn back into human Rusty Collins,Jebediah Guthrie brother of Cannonball Husk Aero and Icarus Noah Crichton aka Hydro Sunpyre aka Leiyu Yoshida Network aka Jessica Vale Radian and his sister among others.
Overall, I like Bachalos work. It’s original, and usually engaging. It fit the weird/funny/grotesque tone of Wolverine & the X-Men, as well as the dark sci-fi of the Carey run. That said, the lack of clarity can interfere with the storytelling so I get why some people don’t like his work.
For me, his art wasn’t right for the Bendis era. I haven’t read all of it, but his redesigns for Cyclops, Emma Frost, & Magik were ugly. I think Bachalo works better when he has cooler stuff to draw and less talking heads (most artists do, come to think of it). I would like to see Bachalo’s art on a Krakow story as I’ve always liked his outdoor scenes.
I love those Bachalo X-men issues with Carey for Northstar and Aurora alone, but I think the art is lovely and (mostly) comprehensible.
But I agree, the Children’s costumes don’t make much sense. They’re super highly evolved, so we’re going to show that with miniskirts and dress slacks? Huh?
I like Bachalo, though I agree such a unique artist needs the right book.
Never thought Bachalo was better suited to a series than DOCTOR STRANGE, myself. Tons of weird stuff for him to draw and the complex layouts felt like an aesthetic that matched the content.
Paul> “When Legacy House staged that auction in Madripoor, Delores Ramirez … was there.” This and the speech that follows is a recap of issues #9-10. Legacy House is a black market organisation that sells superhero and supervillain memorabilia. The “mindwiped mutant” that Delores bid for is Maverick. The severed hand was a mysterious Wolverine hand, complete with claws, that Legacy House were auctioning – Wolverine had no idea where it had come from. Delores did indeed pick it up in issue #10 when the auction broke down into chaos. Wolverine suggests (reasonably enough) that a possible explanation is that it might be an artefact from a stray timeline. Certainly possible, since there was a Hama-era storyline about a whole duplicate Wolverine skeleton that eventually turned out to be a time travel quirk.
Wasn’t it meant to be the hand Old Man Logan lost near the end of his run?
“Never thought Bachalo was better suited to a series than DOCTOR STRANGE, myself.”
He was perfectly cast. Just kind of a shame the writing was so pedestrian. Still gave Bachalo some great things to draw, but it’s a story I go back to look at, not to read.
I love how people spent more time discussing Bachalo and previous Deadpool series instead of discussing this issue…
Wasn’t it mentioned somewhere recently that Orchis has access to piles of X-Men corpses from all the failed attacks? Wouldn’t that preclude a single Wolverine hand from being valuable?
Orchis isn’t paying much for a single Wolverine Hand.
Someone else might. If nothing Else, that is a source of a reasonably significante amount of good quality adamantium.
Thread drift is probably what makes reading the comments worthy these days.