Wolverine #23 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #23
“Old Haunts”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Adam Kubert
Colourist: Frank Martin
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Danger impales Wolverine and Deadpool on swords. It’s a callback to Adam Kubert’s own cover for Wolverine #88 (1994), which has Deadpool impaling Wolverine in the same pose.
PAGES 2-5. Deadpool and Wolverine fight their way into the X-Men Mansion.
The page layouts echo the opening pages of every issue in this arc (though I’d struggle to tell you quite what the point of that is). Apparently Danger has mocked up a Sentinel for our heroes to get past.
This is interspersed with Wolverine reminiscing about the days when the Mansion was home, with images of the X-Men teaching pupils on the lawn, and having one of their signature baseball games. Wolverine, having been around for over a century, tells us that he has an all-things-pass attitude to the Institute, remembering it fondly enough, but recognising that attempts to recapture the past are bound to fail. Wolverine claims later in the issue that Danger and Deadpool are both making this sort of doomed attempt. It’s fairly obvious why that’s the case for Danger, who’s returned home to her place of awakening, and more of a stretch for Deadpool.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits. As with the previous issues in this arc, Deadpool offers his annotations.
PAGES 7-8. Deadpool turns serious.
Deadpool decides that he really wanted to be in X-Force in order to rub shoulders with the greats, but recognises he’s not going to get in. Instead, he decides to ask Wolverine for a more realistic favour. Needless to say, dropping the schtick gets him a more sympathetic hearing. Wolverine is all about sincerity, after all, and responds much better to what he sees as a perfectly reasonable request for Krakoan drugs.
Kubert draws the Mansion not just as overrun with Krakoan foliage, but with what seem too be abandoned possessions left in the students’ rooms. This is a bit weird, since the X-Men hardly left in a hurry, and I wonder if there are crossed wires here. Also, shouldn’t these bedrooms have… well, beds?
PAGE 9. Data page. Deadpool promptly reverts to being stupid, but of course we’ll get this scene (more or less) later in the issue.
PAGES 10-11. Wolverine and Deadpool fight past X-Men robots.
Incredible Hulk #180 is, technically, Wolverine’s first appearance – albeit on a last page cameo.
The Wilhelm scream is a widely-used stock scream sound effect.
PAGE 12. Data page, kicking into touch the Sidri plotline from Giant-Size X-Men: Nightcrawler (2020). In that story, Cypher struck a deal with the Sidri to let them continue living in the Mansion as long as they protected the gate to Krakoa in return. The plotline hasn’t been mentioned since, and presumably, as Deadpool says, Danger managed to drive them all out.
PAGES 13-20. Wolverine and Deadpool defeat Danger.
Danger basically feels rejected by the X-Men, and claims that by serving as their training facility, she was a sort of mother figure to them. It’s not just Danger herself who has been forgotten, but the Danger Room as a trope of the X-Men. She claims only to be interested in getting her daughter back, but changes tack when Wolverine tries to call her bluff on that. Apparently, Danger is trying to make robot X-Men not just to please the X-Desk (as suggested in previous issues), but to recreate an earlier stage of X-Men continuity where she belonged. Ultimately, she seems to set herself up in the Mansion as an aggrieved and murderous Danger Room, but allows Wolverine and Deadpool to go in the hope of being left alone. She can’t seem to make up her mind whether she wants to punish the X-Men or ignore them.
PAGE 21. Deadpool and Blind Al.
She got her Krakoan drugs and she’s feeling much better now.
PAGES 22-23. Deadpool joins X-Force.
Who, by the way, also now feature Omega Red as a member – as trailed in X-Force.
PAGE 24. Trailers.
I still don’t get why exactly the X-Men would not just abandon the mansion, but actively trash it with Krakoan vegetation like this. You’d think they’d see the value of keeping a facility like this operational for any number of reasons, including securing it against outsiders.
I can get the whole “Krakoa is everything” mentality they’re pushing, with their attempt to encourage an internal culture, language, etc, and eliminate outside influences and anything to do with their past–gee, that’s not cultish or anything, no… but this just doesn’t make much sense.
Love how they actively lampshade the “Sidri in the mansion” plot as something which didn’t go anywhere and which was dropped offscreen.
Logan and Wade basically shrugging and leaving Danger and her family to the Mansion and wandering off feels like another careless repudiation of the pre-Krakoan era that will come back to bite them in the ass.
Danger’s daughter claiming Xavier as “Daddy” is disturbing. I wonder if the child is an actual callback to the X-Club mini where Danger was indeed pregnant.
Maybe it’s a fault of the art, but even for Logan and Wade, the scene where they’re basically pulped and their combined healing factors bring them back as a joint monstrosity before they just pull themselves apart feels excessive.
I suppose trashing the mansion is a case of a metaphor trumping commonsense within the story. Which makes it a rubbish metaphor, but still, you can see the thinking behind it.
@TOM – Remember, the Mansion was destroyed in the run up to Age of X-Man. They had to rebuild it TO trash it.
The separable Wolverine/Deadpool goop monster is as eye-rollingly ridiculous as anything that’s ever been done with either character in a “serious” book.
I swear… superhero headquarters.
Avengers Mansion gets rebuilt, and then immediately destroyed.
Titans Tower gets rebuilt… then immediately destroyed.
The X-Mansion gets rebuilt SOLELY to be symbolically abandoned.
It’s wild how writers don’t even give these places a chance to breathe sometimes.
Don’t forget the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier dropping out of the sky every 10-15 minutes.
I think I’ve said this about the previous issue as well, but… I like certain approaches to Deadpool. I like him in serious books (Unc X-Force), I like him silly books (Cable & Dead pool), I sometimes like him in his own book (Gail Simone and even parts of the Duggan/Posehn rrun).
I don’t like him the way Way wrote him and I do not like him the way Percy writes him. And now he’ll be on X-Force. Joy.
But the worst part of this arc is Danger. Another discarded X-Man, made crazy off-panel, all for the sake of a crap nothing story.
If Madison Jeffries got sent to the Pit for loving her and doing something for her, maybe there’s a non-zero percent chance LaValle will salvage her somehow? I’m not holding my breath. But I like Danger and this was shit.
I don’t particularly like Danger and I also thought this was shit. Just empty nothing for the sake of maybe setting up some future plot point, if someone remembers it. I liked the first couple issues of the Deadpool team-up, but what a limp finish!
Shits all around. What a waste of Adam Kubert. You can see how hard he is working to make something out of this non-sensical story, but nothing could save this.
About the bedrooms … Moving sucks, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s not worth the effort of packing. XD
Thom –
Given how much Helicarriers must cost to begin with (conservatively priced at 10-20 billion!), I genuinely wonder how they can afford to keep building them. We’ve seen them fielding anywhere from one to twenty at a time of various sizes and they seem to lose them at a startling rate so…
And that’s before you get into all the knock-off versions stolen, reverse-engineered, or just plain copied by other organizations.
And it’s not like they can save that much money from salvaging the destroyed ones, not that we ever see them trying to do so most of the time.
@The Other Michael: So true. I suppose that’s why Fury/Hill keep the numbers of all their billionaire genius friends in their phones.
“Hey, Tony. You’ll never guess what happened…”
Maybe they keep building them on the cheap, really cutting every corner possible. Which is why they keep crashing.
The Vimes Boots Theory, if you will, but for ludicrously huge flying buildings.
SHIELD is really just a cover for a flying aircraft carrier company to bilk money out of the UN.