Wolverine #28 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #28
“The Beast Agenda: Savage”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Juan José Ryp
Colour artist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine is pulled into the Pit. Which is… the cliffhanger, so an odd decision to stick it on the cover and then whack a caption on it to explain what’s happening.
This issue is going to be pretty light on annotations. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the nature of the story.
PAGE 2. Stan Lee tribute.
PAGES 3-6. Beast brings food to Wolverine.
Evidently Beast’s influence is simplifying Wolverine’s thoughts and making him loyal to the Beast – though it doesn’t seem to have had much effect on his self-loathing. That said, whatever it is he thinks he’s “bad” for, it’s not his body count, which is apparently “good”. We’ll see in the data page later in the issue that there’s apparently more to this than just the control collar.
The previous issue also has a very similar scene where Beast brings Wolverine an animal to kill and eat, but this is a different Krakoan animal. His costume was already torn up in that scene, so either this scene takes place first, or Beast keeps giving Wolverine new costumes and Wolverine keeps destroying them. The latter is entirely possible, since Beast does give him a new costume when he takes Wolverine on a mission in the next scene.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits
PAGES 8-10. Wolverine kills General Norad.
“General Norad”? Really? It does seem to be a genuine but extremely rare family name, but… really?
As usual, Beast is a blundering idiot who hasn’t figured out that taking a man with impaired mental faculties on a highly sensitive assassination is probably going to go badly.
PAGE 11. Data page: Beast demands that Hope co-operate in doing something to Wolverine’s brain upon resurrection. Given that we’ve seen Hope Summers go against clear directions that she thinks are unethical before, I have serious difficulties with the idea that she’d play along with this, particularly now that she’s a member of the Quiet Council. That said, it’s possible that that’s the plot and Beast is just, once again, a complacent moron.
In the previous issue, where Wolverine emerges from resurrection, Hope acts as if Wolverine is behaving normally for the immediate aftermath of his resurrections (“He’s always extremely cranky when he wakes up from resurrection”) during the few moments before Tempus freezes him in time and Beast sticks a control collar on him. However, she does specifically warn Tempus to keep back from him. The implication may be that Tempus doesn’t know what’s been done to Wolverine, though given Hope’s co-ordinating role in the Five, it’s not obvious how she could do anything on her own; maybe she’s simply co-operating in letting Beast put the collar on him.
PAGES 12-13. Beast punishes Wolverine.
Predictably, Beast blames Wolverine for his own stupidity, and Wolverine fights back at the person treating him as a weapon.
PAGE 14. The face of Krakoa watches Wolverine.
PAGE 15. Sage insists that Beast co-operate with the murder investigation.
Beast’s excuse (both for Krakoa and for international consumption) is that Norad was killed by an impostor. Nick Fury’s got away with stupider ideas than that, to be fair.
PAGES 16-17. Krakoa lets Wolverine out.
We’ve seen in Sabretooth and the Exiles and in the X-Men Green stories in X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic that Krakoa doesn’t much care for the Pit as a system.
PAGES 18-20. Wolverine saves a child.
But the kids are scared of him anyway. Apparently, this version of Wolverine deals with his confusion by self-harm, and the blood prompts Krakoa to absorb him into the Pit after all (perhaps to keep him safe from Beast?).
PAGE 21. Data page: transcript of Beast’s appearance before the Committee on Mutant Relations.
It’s not obvious why anyone would be surprised to learn that the CIA spies on Krakoa, which is kind of their job. Beast has a stronger case when he points to the X-Desk’s deal with Danger to make robot X-Men duplicates (as seen in issues #20-23), which does make his claim that Wolverine was an impostor more plausible. He is, however, either suggesting that the robots went rogue or that the CIA was assassinating an anti-mutant general for… reasons.
PAGES 22-23. Wolverine in the Pit.
He’s hallucinating about the death of Silver Fox at the hands of Sabretooth, most obviously shown in flashback in Wolverine vol 2 #10, and blaming himself for what happened to her.
Since Krakoa is supposed to feed off mutant energy, it’s possible that it’s figured out that Wolverine’s healing powers make him a renewable energy source.
PAGE 24. Trailers.
My theory is that SABRETOOTH was the renewable energy resource: that would explain why he was thrown in the Pit while Sinister, Apocalypse, et al. were allowed to live on Krakoa and he was “punished.” Now that he’s gone, Krakoa has realized that Wolverine is an ideal substitute.
Krakoa has been feeding off of a small amount of every mutant’s energy on the island. Selene and Emplate were placed in charge of monitoring Krakoa’s energy intake. Having an entire island made up of a food source, Krakoa wouldn’t need Sabretooth, exclusively.
It’s likely that Xavier just wanted to make an example of one mutant and Sabretooth was expendable.
Moira wanted Apocalypse on the ruling council as part of her plan, and Sinister was necessary to Xavier and Magneto’s resurrection protocols. Hence, they were given power, while Sabretooth was punished.
Derek- that makes sense only if the Krakoan era was more interesting than it actually is.
Imagine putting Selene and Template in charge of anything, let alone the living vampire island you live on.
Krakoa is all style, little substance.
I like to imagine the discarded continuation of Hickman’s truncated story where it points out that leaving those two in charge of that area was part of her plan to betray mutants.
“That’s right, Charles. It has to be Selene and Emplate.”
That’s giving Hickman more credit than I’m willing to at this point, but I’m a curmudgeon.
Boiling down the narration to ‘this bad, that good, I bad, let bad out’ kind of underlines that the usual Percy monologues are… Well, just that, only painfully overwritten.
I was never a fan of his take on Wolverine, though.
I’d like to believe that Beast’s turn to evil and his treatment of Wolverine in this issue are all because Wolverine stole his mask in X-men Legends #1-2. Hank repressed it for as long as he could, but the bitterness over losing that mask has finally turned him irreparably evil. This is my headcanon.
Beast is going after Demolition Dunphy next.
There’s only so many ways I can say that Beast being both evil and stupid is boring.
If I were to send Wolverine on a highly sensitive assassination mission, I probably wouldn’t dress him in his highly recognizable costume.
Where does this storyline fall vis a vis the current X-Force arc? They seem to fit together oddly, which is especially awkward given they have the same writer. I guess we’ll see.
My guess is that this that the X-Force arc and Wolverine arcs are going to converge somewhat — Beast going to Congress will impede action on his space prison, since Krakoa wouldn’t want the full scope of Beast’s war crimes under Congressional scrutiny, and that Krakoa rescuing Wolverine at the end will bring him to Solem & Blackmoore “just getting home” from their space adventure. Solem’s weird “can’t let the fascists” win speech probably means he’s gunning for Beast. Percy’s hyped up that “Wolverine’s Loki” angle enough that I assume his involvement is meant to be significant and not random.
Depending on how fast Percy is wrapping this up, I’d expect Jeff Bannister to already be at Point Arakko with Solem & the pirates and whatever other pets Percy has — Man Slaughter probably.