Wolverine #31 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #31
“Weapons of X, part 1”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Juan José Ryp
Colourist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine fights a whole team of Beasts. This doesn’t happen in this issue, but it’s clearly coming later in the storyline. (For whatever reason, the surprise ending of this issue is not only given away on the cover, it was in the solicitation copy.)
PAGES 2-5. Beast brings the Pointe to life and heads off into the sea.
Last issue, Wolverine killed the Beast in revenge for Beast turning him into a weapon. Beast was automatically resurrected as a clone in X-Force HQ from an “auto-backup”. The obvious question is how this fits with the idea that the Five are… well, necessary. In fairness, though, the Five aren’t involved in the process of restoring memories, and we saw in X-Force #37 that that bit can be done by a machine if need be. So maybe Beast got the Five to create these bodies for him – in defiance of the normal rules against multiple resurrections – and has them all stored in the Pointe, but he can’t make any more. The other possibility is that this Beast isn’t truly a resurrection, but just a regular old clone.
Either way, the game is finally up for the Beast as leader of X-Force (even if he casts it as himself firing the rest of the team), and he heads off to pursue his agenda single-handedly. Beast considers himself to be a heroic nationalist, and page 2 makes a point of having him in a more traditional heroic pose than we normally see him in. Beast’s worldview is vaguely recognisable as a warped version of Wolverine’s; Wolverine also sees himself as someone who does the dirty work so that other people don’t have to know about it, but he at least feels conflicted about doing so. Nonetheless, it does seem to be the case that Beast’s ultimate motivation here is nationalism, albeit filtered through considerable self-importance.
Beast’s moral reasoning is garbled, which is no doubt mostly intentional. Comparing Wolverine to a nuclear weapon, on an island that has actual Omega mutants lying around, doesn’t really make sense. Beast also seems inconsistent about whether he’s rejecting morality entirely (as something that gets in the way of serving the greater national good) or whether he’s justifying himself morally by an appeal to a version of utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number). But of course Beast’s worldview doesn’t have to be internally consistent.
It’s probably just being done for intelligibility purposes, but for all his nationalism, Beast’s computer screens don’t actually use Krakoan text.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits.
PAGES 7-10. Wolverine fights Beast’s booby-trapped body.
Self-explanatory. In amongst this, Wolverine’s narration makes clear that he suspects Beast allowed himself to be killed and that he has something wider in mind.
PAGES 11-12. Beast destroys a submarine.
This is his idea of “remain[ing] covert”, is it? March a giant skull monster into the sea and attack the very submarine that’s presumably reporting back on you constantly? Well, I suppose he’ll be able to do what he wants now it’s out of the way.
PAGES 13-14. Beast wakes his clones.
This is (kind of) the new X-Force – an entire team of Beasts.
PAGE 15. Data page: the Beast’s views on morality. As already noted, this is rather garbled, since he was making an appeal to utilitarianism earlier in the issue, but you can decide for yourself whether that’s Percy’s error or Beast’s. It’s not true that morality depends on a fear of divine punishment – but it’s an argument that religious people have been making for centuries.
In practice, though, most religious people have no difficulty seeing moral rationales that exist independently of God. If you ask a Christian why murder is bad, they’re unlikely to reply “Because God says so, even if we have no idea why.” What Beast is really identifying here is the question of why people should behave morally if there are no sanctions not doing so. One conventional answer is that there is a sanction, which is the way you are treated by other people, and also the fact that you contribute to making the world a worse place that you then have to live in. If pushed, this version of Beast would probably say that he’s a moral nihilist – morality, on this view, is a social phenomenon, but not an objective truth that exists to be discovered in the real world like the laws of maths or physics. But heck, he’s a deranged nationalist, not a philosopher.
The other problem with all this, of course, is that as an active superhero in the Marvel Universe, Beast knows perfectly well that gods and afterlives exist. The Waiting Room is literally right there.
PAGES 16-17. Cecilia Reyes operates on Jeff Gardiner.
Wolverine is now saying that they’re all to blame for following Beast. Well, yes, it might have been an idea to shut him down when he mind controlled an entire country over a year ago now.
PAGES 18-19. Wolverine asks for Beast’s memory files.
According to the data page on page 19, Beast has wiped all of his back-ups “since the founding of Krakoa … along with a good deal of what precedes them”. This is a slightly odd way of expressing it if he’s actually left files from as far back as his membership of the Avengers – he left the team in Avengers #211 (1981).
Sage infers that Beast has left files from his Avengers period untouched because he didn’t see them as important. But it’s fairly obvious where this is heading: this storyline ends with Beast getting killed and resurrected as the classic cheerful Beast, who then gets to do a storyline about whether he bears moral responsibility for things he doesn’t remember doing. It also seems likely that this is precisely Beast’s endgame – he expects to get himself killed and sees this as a route to resurrection without responsibility.
PAGES 20-23. Beast tells X-Force that they’re all fired.
Apparently Beast is merrily cloning himself a whole team of Wolverines now. I do like the art on this – Ryp has got the sense of these characters all being identical and not merely similar.
PAGE 24. Trailers.
Sage infers that Beast has left files from his Avengers period untouched because he didn’t see them as important. But it’s fairly obvious where this is heading: this storyline ends with Beast getting killed and resurrected as the classic cheerful Beast, who then gets to do a storyline about whether he bears moral responsibility for things he doesn’t remember doing. It also seems likely that this is precisely Beast’s endgame – he expects to get himself killed and sees this as a route to resurrection without responsibility.
That reminds me of Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man, which dealt with Tony Stark’s cartoon supervillainy in Civil War by having him wipe his own brian nd get rebooted with only his pre-CW memories intact.
Interestingly, Fraction had rebooted Tony learn about what happened after his memories ended and say he would probably have done it all the same way again.
This is just stupid.
70 issues of Percy
And Beast’s endgame is
Krakoan Kaiju?
and “Weapons of X”???????????
The dialogue implies that Beast was able to delete memories from the backups selectively. If that’s possible, then why didn’t the Krakoans just do the same thing with Maddie and Vulcan? If it’s possible to delete Hank’s backup to just after Avengers 211 and get good Hank back, then why didn’t they just delete Maddie’s backup up to just before Uncanny X-Men 234 and Vulcan’s backup up to just before Giant Size X-Men 1 and get good Maddie and good Vulcan back? The answer seems to be “Then we wouldn’t have had Dark Web and the Storm vs. Vulcan fight”.
Cecilia talks like Jeff might die anyway. Why? I thought that as long as someone was injured with a conventional weapon and they’re still breathing, Elixir can heal them. It looks like Jeff was shot with a normal bullet.
“and we saw in X-Force #37”
Is this 27 or a different title? Not being snarky, just not sure.
Different title, @Mathias X.
Paul ran the annotations on that issue early last February.
No wait, I got it.
This storyline ends with cheerful Beast coming back, he says the stars and garters thing and everyone exonerates him…
Then he accidentally activates a message fron dead Beast instructing him how to continue the black ops work now that he’s cleared of all suspicion.
DU DU DUNNN
If Adam Kubert is done with Wolverine, I’m happy to have Juan Jose Ryp draw the title. The level of detail is fantastic. I would love to see these issues in black & white,
As for the story… In isolation, I’m enjoying it on a “turn off your brain” level. It’s rough when you consider the fact that Beast has been getting away with crimes against humanity for so long. If we had skipped about 20 issues of X-Force, I’d be happier seeing Beast’s downfall and eventual comeuppance. As of right now, I’m not at all confident we’ll see this story resolved in a reasonable amount of time.
Michael-It was discussed that characters could be rebooted from earlier back-ups early in House/Powers. Xavier admits that he erased his memories twice by using an earlier backup, prior to whatever it was that Xavier wanted to conveniently forget. Hickman never got around to explaining which two events Xavier felt he couldn’t accept.
I guess there is the moral issue of whether a character requests that their memories be wiped beforehand. Xavier was making the choice to forget those moments.
Beast purposely deleted his files back to a certain point in his life. Madelyne and Vulcan would need to have made a request to be resurrected with an earlier version of their memories.
I’m sure Maddie would feel it was a violation of her rights to have her mind tampered with again; to be turned into the nice, innocent girl she was before she discovered she was a puppet being used by Sinister and that her husband only loved her because he fooled himself into thinking she was Jean.
Why would Beast go back to his days as an active Avenger instead of, say, his stint as a Defender or even the times of early X-Factor?
Even as late as the Morrison run seems to make more sense than going back literally forty years of real time publishing. There must be a reason for that choice.
You might, at a stretch, say Avengers was the last time Beast was a cheerful team player without a hint of manipulation – when he went over to Defenders, he reformed them into a ‘real’ team and essentially told people what to do.
I’m still amazed at how non-important is that true resurrection is being lately shown to be a lie. We have several versions of the same characters running around (last month girl Wolverine, now Beast) so it’s obvious no soul, Spark or whatever is being restored. Everybody is just a clone at this point. Perhaps a more stable clone that doesn’t dissolve into goo any time you look at it sideways, but a clone anyway.
Although I was a big fan of Defenders in that era, I can barely remember anything about the stories now. All I really remember at this point is Cloud and Moondrsgon being on the team and loving in the mansion in the desert. I have a stronger memory of the JMDM era than the “x-men era” with Bobby, Hank and Warren
Beast did join the Defenders during the DeMatteis era, with issue #104 in 1982.
I was always a fan of the Defenders. The DeMatteis and Peter B. Gillis run which followed were both excellent comics. Of course, both of them pale next to the classic Steve Gerber issues.
@Chris V- Aside from the fact that Maddie never knowingly consented to become the Goblin Queen (she was tricked by S’ym), Xavier was ALREADY prepared to tamper with Vulcan’s mind in X-Men Red 9 to make him less dangerous.As Paul pointed out in his review of that issue, Xavier said he would only violate people’s minds in cases of “absolute necessity” which could mean anything.
Hank was definitely written as a piece of work in the Defenders, but I think not intentionally so. That issue where he was called out for putting his own career and ego ahead of mutant rights was an important turning point in the run up to X-Factor, though.
Another important turning point, and for my money the best reset point for him, if that’s what happens: that issue of Secret Avengers where Captain America tells him it’s okay to commit war crimes for the greater good. He really took that to heart.
I confess I’m not reading Percy’s books, but I like the idea of Evil Beast. All the bad guys have gone good in the new era, some of the good guys should go bad as well.
I think the reset point being Beast’s Avengers tenure in an unsubtle response to fans complaining that they miss the wise-cracking, fun Beast from that specific era. The log could have said Hank left his back-ups from an more vague point in time untouched (“pre-Krakoa,” “[X] years ago,” “before [X event],” etc.) but I think it’s either fan-pandering or fan-trolling.
If I remember correctly, wasn’t Hank also having issues with his intellect being drained whenever he used his strength early on in X-Factor? That seems like a good in-universe explanation for why he might not want to be restored to a backup from around then, for instance…
That happened, @Tobias Carroll, but not that early.
I’m certainly no expert, but if your goals as a writer were A) reset Beast to a time when he was fun-loving and not morally compromised, and B) retain as much of his history as possible, wouldn’t you choose circa X-Treme X-Men Beast, immediately before Morrison’s run? He’s not substantially different at that point than he was in the Avengers, and you retain an extra 15 or 20 years worth of stories that “happened” to him.
Issue #19 is too high a number to be regarded as “early”? Because that’s the issue of X-Factor where Pestilence infected Beast with the illness that caused the problem.
It’s probably the point where Kang took control of Beast, Drew. Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about Teen Hank, at least.
No one brings this up, but shouldn’t Beast also be able to summon magic? Since Teen Beast learned magic before he was sent back and Adult Beast now has access to those memories?
That would also be a possible in-universe explanation for the heel-turn. Adult Beast finally being corrupted for the dark magic Teen Beast practiced because he can now remember it.
Just as a publishing choice, aren’t the events better told in XForce? If you’re not reading Wolverine (and I’m not) then this seems to be resolving stories from the other title. I know from crossovers and these annotations that Percy has done them as companion books but there’s not even a blurb mention in XForce.
So, X-Force’s new enemy is a man who literally could do nothing right over the last several years, who’s plans, even the simple, dead-certs, would somehow snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
Having just completed a replay of ‘Batman: Arkham City’, Beast reminds me of Professor Strange, confidently declaring that he has beaten Batman literally as the Dark Knight is headbutting him and destroying his computers.
I have not read the Secret Avengers issue that @Skippy mentions above (although it somewhat fits what I know of that time – isn’t that when Steve attempted to work with Red Hulk, for instance?), but even taking into account that Steve was out of character at the time (was that really some three to six years before the first appearance of Kobik’s Supreme Hydra Cap?) the fact remains that what Beast has been dwelling into are not crimes, but rather immoral and ineffective actions.
Crimes are by definition just disobedience of laws, which are political tools.
What Beast has been doing is much, much worse and yet also sillier.
I look forward to the miniseries ‘The Malice of McCoy’ where Kieron Gillen is given the job of making Beast a credible antagonist to the X-Men before resetting him to Avengers Beast.
@Luis- the issue is Secret Avengers 16, where the Secret Empire is about to send Cincinnati back in time, which will kill all or most of its inhabitants. Beast basically turns a Secret Empire vehicle into a nuke, which kills all the people in the Secret Empire base. At the end, Beast says “How many people did I just kill?’ and Steve says” How many did you just save? Do the math.” Steve had a point in this case- all of the people in the base were complicit in an attack on a civilian population. But Beast is a twisted version of the same reasoning to justify actions like mind-controlling a country, performing nonconsensual experiments on people guilty of minor offenses, enslaving a teammate and putting a child in a coma to force her father to work for him.
I can almost shut off my brain and enjoy this, and yet… It just always feels like Percy fumbles the pacing and resolutions. I kind of like Hank going full amoral renegade with a team of clones. But Percy’s books have always been on the wrong side of the zany / camp line for me. And the fungus head beast is a nice enough idea, even if it’s a bit too close to Last of Us, I do miss when comics constantly references other bits of pop culture. But again there’s no many dropped threads, the tone just doesn’t land, and why is this story in Wolverine? I get that Percy has blurred this line before but it’s probably do to advertise the fact that major X-Force beats are happening in the solo Wolverine book.
There ARE true resurrections , especially in the Krakoa Era : the first cloning of a deceased person is a reincarnation of their distinct soul in a new copy of their original body . Marvel 616’s version of Lady Death herself personally confirmed it to Ben Reilly (BR inevitably became evil because too many physical resurrections of a soul causes them to lose their conscience, which also explains why the majority of Sinister’s Marauders are now mostly sociopathic) and this was a further confirmed by Marvl 616’s version of the Living Tribunal in his role as “The Death of Death” to a team of heroes that included Jane Foster in her role as The Last Valkyrie.
You could make the interpretation that Beast’s time on the Avengers was the happiest time in his life. The X-Men would need him to science up solutions for them, whether building a machine that messes with Unus’s powers or curing a genetically engineered super-virus. The Defenders had a leadership vacuum.
The Avengers were different. Hank didn’t need to be the science guy on a team that already had Stark and Pym. They weren’t hurting for leadership. Hank played the class clown because he was able to. The X-Men relied on him to be the genius. The Avengers only needed him to pull his own weight.
I’m sure that’s not where Percy is going with this, but it’s something a more character-focused writer could pick up on.
A lot of Hank’s 1970s plotlines were about accepting himself, first after his mutation into his furry form, and then as the guy who figures out his limitations among the Avengers. (Jim Shooter got a whole subplot out of the Beast coming to terms with not being either the brains or the brawn of the Avengers.)
But as soon as he was back in the X-books, he kept getting new version s of that arc, with various unstable mutations and so forth.
Played right, the Beast could be used to suggest a problem with Krakoa which is that it tells every mutant — at least every X-team character — they have to be part of something world-historical and important.
What if that brings out the worst in a guy like Hank McCoy?
There were some plots earlier in the Krakoa-era which seemed to hint that Krakoa was bringing out the worst in some formerly heroic mutants while mellowing out many formerly “evil mutants”. I liked the idea. It made sense. Those mutants tended to be fighting a war of dominance with humanity, but now they are living on an island of all mutants and being told they are already the “dominant race”, so they could stop being violent extremists and learn to live life. Meanwhile, the X-teams had always embraced the ideology that they were fighting against those evil mutants for a chance at, what they hoped would be, acceptance by the majority culture. Now, their old cause no longer holds meaning. The “evil mutants” live on an island with them. They are the majority culture. Many of their concerns would switch to fighting to protect what they had gained…which fits with Beast embracing the mutant nationalism of Krakoa.
Plus, in Beast’s situation, he is placed in a morally compromising position of authority being the head of Krakoa’s version of the CIA.
I don’t particularly trust Percy and his editors to notice and deal with it, but there is an obvious clash between the casual cloning of himself that Beast engages into this issue and the insufficiently explained and gradually forgotten taboo against having two copies of the same person existing at the same time.
On the same note, I don’t think that the simultaneous existence of X-23 (no, I will not call her Wolverine, thank you very much; she deserves better) and Talon has been sufficiently addressed either.
This has been a strange storyline, which takes the unlikely and unexplained turn so often that it is bordering on self-parody now. For instance, are we to take Beast’s rebellion at face value? Does he actually expect to get away with dissolving X-Force without even having approval of the Quiet Council?
It wasn’t actually a prohibition on cloning, although Krakoa would most likely have wanted to be guarded against such due to the machinations of Sinister and Moira’s warning to Xavier and Magneto about him from Life Nine.
However, the issue pertained to resurrection. The idea was that there must be only one copy of each individual granted resurrection due to the issue of Cerebro recording the person’s “soul”.
The Quiet Council and The Five already had to deal with the reality of clones as to whether a clone of a distinct being was to be considered an authentic person, in their own right. The conclusion was that clones have their own individual lives which shape their unique personality, so therefore, Cerebro would record a clone’s “soul” separately from the original.
I guess Beast’s actions create a conundrum as to whether he would have the right to request each of his clones be resurrected upon death now.
I don’t believe anything from this Percy story will be treated in such a manner going forward.
I doubt the selecting of Avengers-era Beast as a reset point has anything whatsoever to do with what or didn’t happen with the character during that period. I think it’s just a matter of association. When I think of the bouncing, blue-furred, happy-go-lucky version of Beast, the Avengers period is what springs to my mind first. It’s where he became that character.
@Michael – Elixir can bring people back from the dead on his own steam, so whatever’s happening to Jeff and his son should be easy for him to rectify. But obviously it takes a deal of plot tension away to have someone like him around.
If this does indeed end with Beast being factory reset to being the fun-loving heroic Avenger, I’m all for it. He’s a favorite of mine and it’s been deeply depressing seeing his slide into darkness and villainy.
@CitizenBane: Jeff has a daughter actually.
CitizenBane> Elixir can bring people back from the dead on his own steam
I think we’re meant to forget about that, or else the whole corrupted Hope resurrection leading to Sins of Sinister couldn’t have happened.
Beast breaking bad is a totally viable plot line. All the other O5 had their turn we’ve had the Dark Phoenix, then Dark Angel, Dark Cyclops, even Iceman got corrupted by a death seed in Marjorie Liu’s Astonishing (as Battle of the Atom reminded me recently, and actually that run was pretty good and I’ve got to add it to my re-read queue). Beast has largely avoided such a story because we had the AoA Dark Beast, so good old 616 oh my stars and garters Hank has had a slow decades long drift. The magic plot line from time displaced Hank was actually the most interesting angle for the character since… I dunno when. But unless I’ve missed any hints, Percy hasn’t seeded anything having to do with magic here, which seems like a serious missed opportunity.
Elixir can resurrect people on his own , one at a time , but it’s been shown in Cullen Bun’s Uncanny X-Men that every time he does it , he apparently gets corrupted into becoming evil , since is single-handedly going against the “natural order” of organic life , thus it would be preferable to him to instead do it with the rest of the Five , and the experience gives them apparently a combined religious / sexual high LOL
Wondering if the submarine destruction is a conscious echo of Magneto destroying one in Uncanny #150, which was a pretty big deal during his trial in #200…