Wolverine #46 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 6 #46
“Sabretooth War, part 6”
Writers: Benjamin Percy & Victor LaValle
Penciller: Cory Smith
Inker: Oren Junior
Colourist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Sabretooth operates on Wolverine’s brain. Not something that actually happens in the issue, at least not literally.
PAGES 2-6. Sabretooth briefs Wolverine for their “mission”.
Last issue, Sabretooth came to Krakoa looking for what he described as “something those mutants left behind”, and which he evidently expected to find in Forge’s lab. Wolverine came after him, only for Sabretooth to instantly zap him with the enslaved Quentin Quire, and place Wolverine in a scenario where they were Team X teammates again, about to go on a mission. That’s where we come in.
From the way this plays out, Quentin is obviously doing something a bit more subtle than simply making Wolverine see illusions. Clearly on some level Wolverine is reacting to the world around him, or he wouldn’t be swimming when he believes himself to be parachuting. But on a conscious level, he’s apparently experiencing the version of events on the right hand side of the page.
Sabretooth claimed last issue to be motivated by hate. According to Quentin, Sabretooth has also told him that the purpose of these illusions is manipulate Wolverine into getting him access to Forge’s lab, taking advantage of the fact that Forge’s defences will be keyed to let Wolverine in. But it’s obvious that a big part of Sabretooth’s agenda is just to get Wolverine back to what he regards as Wolverine’s classic mode, when they were both in Team X and having a lovely time killing people together.
Page 3 panel 3 shows us an image of the object Sabretooth is looking for. As confirmed towards the end of the issue, this is the gun that was used to depower Moira MacTaggert in Inferno #4, and which then appeared again in X Deaths of Wolverine #4, another Benjamin Percy story. Sabretooth’s plan is apparently to depower Wolverine and tell us. (In fact, in a nice bit of sequencing, he effectively tells us this in page 12 panel 3, over ten pages before we’re told explicitly what tech he’s looking for.)
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGES 8-10. The Exiles try to come up with a plan.
Last issue, the Exiles tried getting to Krakoa and wound up getting chased off by one of the Stark Sentinels. Nekra, who fancies herself as the team leader but is still ultimately driven by hate, has no apparent plan here beyond opening fire on a Stark Sentinel in the vague hope that something helpful might happen. It doesn’t. Fortunately, by luck as much as anything else, the Exiles end up taking refuge underwater, which steers them in the right direction to follow Wolverine and Sabretooth towards Forge’s underwater base.
The thing Nekra is holding in page 8 panel 5 is the “Death Seed” that she was given by Cypher in Sabretooth #5, which will supposedly contain Sabretooth in some way if she can get close enough to use it.
PAGES 11-14. Sabretooth and Wolverine enter Forge’s lab.
Sabretooth seems to be trying to guilt trip Wolverine here, or conceivably he’s being driven to think about the consequences of his own actions. Wolverine simply doesn’t engage with what Sabretooth is saying – either he’s in professional mode or it’s just not penetrating to him through the illusion.
PAGES 15-16. The Exiles set off towards the base.
The “vision” was the psychic message that Oya got from Quentin in issue #43.
Nekra’s concern that Quentin’s message could be a trap is completely reasonable; after all, that’s how Wolverine was drawn to Krakoa. But Sabretooth has both practical and character-based motivations to bring in Wolverine; he has no real reason to drag the Exiles into this plot. So it seems more likely that Quentin was trying to get a message to someone that wasn’t on Sabretooth’s radar.
PAGES 17-19. Wolverine (Laura) kills some Sabretooths and gets her hands on a control collar.
The captions describe Sabretooth and his group of alt-Sabretooths as “Sabreteeth”.
The collars are what Graydon Creed used to control the bodies of the alt-Sabretooth that he’d beheaded. Graydon himself was (apparently) retrieved from another dimension last issue, but we don’t learn anything further about that in this issue.
PAGE 20. Wolverine rescues Sabretooth from Forge’s defences.
Quentin spells out for us that Sabretooth can’t use his experiences as an excuse for the sort of person he became, since Wolverine went through much the same. Of course, Sabretooth doesn’t make excuses for his behaviour – he revels in it. Or at least, that’s what he does openly; Quentin clearly thinks there are some buttons to be pushed here.
PAGES 21-24. The Exiles try to stop Sabretooth.
Unsurprisingly, poor old Toad – not even a core member of the Exiles’ cast – doesn’t do very well against Sabretooth. We can probably add him to the list of characters who are going to get resurrected in one final burst before the end of the Krakoan era.
Wolverine apparently does help Sabretooth to decimate the Exiles – though the only one we see him attack directly is Melter. There are echoes here of the back story of Old Man Logan, set in a timeline where Wolverine is manipulated through illusions into killing the X-Men. Note that we don’t clearly see Nekra on the ground, and she’s the one with the Death Seed.
Anyway, we finish up with Sabretooth getting the depowering gun, shooting Wolverine, and attacking.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads BAD SEED.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Toad stayed dead for a good long while. Very few people *care* about him, after all. Sure, as a Lee-Kirby creation, he can’t possibly stay dead forever, but such characters do sometimes spend years or even decades of publication-time being dead.
I think Third Eye, Idie and Nekra are still alive, but I’m also not sure if Toad died. His arm got torn off but that’s the kind of thing you can usually walk off in comics.
Melter will probably need some magic to get back on his feet.
Agreed that the Toad might stay dead a while. Boomerang’s also a Lee-Kirby villain and he’s been dead the past two-and-a-half years.
I’m not sure there’s going to be a mass resurrection at the end of the Krakoan era. The three major “dead” characters that we know are going to be back to normal by July are Sinister, Quentin and Angel. Sinister died in a clone of Doug’s body, so we’ll probably learn that he had some failsafe to return him to his true body. Quentin’s currently alive as a head, so they just need a way to restore his body. The only other major dead character other than them is Daken. So we really just need explanations how Daken and Warren survived and those can be done individually.
Holy shit they killed Boomerang?
This upsets me.
I’d forgotten about Boomerang’s death. 🙁
I do think that we’ve seen enough characters killed off one way or another in the Fall of X that something will be done to revive the majority of them. Especially ones like Quentin, Fang, and Warren who we know the franchise won’t let stay dead. The “Dead X-Men” were already revived, but there were enough other random casualties at the Gala and after (not that I can name them offhand) to make one last mass resurrection worthwhile. (Lourdes, perhaps?)
If they do take full resurrection off the table as a result of Fall of X, I’d like a nice level of ambiguity so that any mutant we know to be dead but not already specifically revived, has the potential to still be brought back offscreen. (Larry Bodine, for instance, poor guy deserves a second chance.)
Wait, so did Toad actually die? I thought he was just unconscious.
He’s the kind of character who’ll turn up fine in a crowd shot regardless of if we see a resseruction. Though with the way magic is portrayed these days, it feels like if he got sent through the Waiting Room, things might go wrong.
@The Other Michael- Infectia showed up in Dark X-Men 1, having been resurrected by the Five off panel. There’s no reason the writers can’t do that with anyone who died before the Gala.
This is your regular reminder that Rusty Collins is now alive.
Huh.
I always thought that given their comparative power sets
Toad could take Sabertooth in a fight.
Moira X was depowered with Forge’s run in Inferno #4, not X Deaths.
She was indeed depowered in Inferno #4. I’ll fix that.
And yet they never bothered to show him reunited with his girlfriend Skids , when she is the relatively rare example of a female character whose husband/boyfriend was killed or “fridged” to give her character development tsk tsk tsk