{"id":10886,"date":"2025-03-14T23:36:22","date_gmt":"2025-03-14T23:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10886"},"modified":"2025-03-14T23:36:22","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T23:36:22","slug":"hellverine-4-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10886","title":{"rendered":"Hellverine #4 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>HELLVERINE vol 2 #4<\/strong>
\n“The Drowning Man”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Benjamin Percy<\/strong>
\nArtist: Raffaele Ienco<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Bryan Valenza<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Travis Lanham<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

HELLVERINE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even as Hellverine, he doesn’t want to fight either the Mother or her children. But he has another option: from reading the Book of Lamentation, he’s learned some “hell magic” which “conjures horror” and “makes others see me as their worst nightmare”.\u00a0It even works against the Mother’s enchanted children, who were perfectly willing to attack a burning skeletal Wolverine. That might suggest that it’s also cutting through their enchantment, although it clearly doesn’t free them entirely, since the art still shows them all with yellow eyes.<\/p>\n

When Hellverine uses this power, a burning symbol appears on his chest. From the dialogue, I think the idea is that he has to carve the symbol into his chest using his claws in order to activate the spell, but the art struggles to get that idea across. Seems a very specific sort of spell, but I suppose maybe any old knife would do.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t noticed this before, but Hellverine’s hands – which are only partially gloved – still have flesh on them even in demonic form. It’s weird.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Akihiro interprets the face in Mother’s belly (which has its own arms and is obviously meant to be a “baby” of sorts) to represent himself as “Daken”. That’s not a name he uses these days, but he seems to interpret this aspect of Mother as representing the part of himself that wanted to “infect others with his pain”, i.e. his original villain persona.\u00a0Destroying the Mother seems to provide Akihiro with some sort of closure, as well as making him feel like he’s atoning for his sins. So apparently that’s the format.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, Akihiro cooperates in burning Logan and Itsu’s old house. Presumably because they saw him defeat the Mother, and perhaps thanks to the testimony of the freed children, the locals are happy to agree that mutants were not to blame for what happened to their town.<\/p>\n

His next port of call is Genosha, which is important to him because it’s the place where Wolverine killed him in Uncanny X-Force\u00a0<\/em>#34. Wolverine drowned Akihiro in water from a fire hydrant, and so this time the demon is water-themed and kills people by drowning.<\/p>\n

And if you’re thinking: hold on, Genosha still had functioning fire hydrants despite the eradication of its entire population? Well, yes. But that’s what happened in the original story. And if you have an issue with the fire hydrant, then boy are you going to have problems with the rest of this story. We’ll come to that.<\/p>\n

VILLAINS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Mother.<\/strong> It’s never made clear whether this is actually Itsu or merely some projection of Akihiro’s own hang-ups about her. Akihiro himself describes her as “my mother, Itsu, or some warped reflection of her”, but also calls her “a demonic manifestation of my pain”. And presumably he’s just guessing anyway.<\/p>\n

As implied last issue, her child followers have leaves on them. Akihiro interprets Mother has having “built a new family” to replace her loss of him. Then again, she can’t be that concerned about the well being of the kids, since she sends them to figth Hellverine.<\/p>\n

Once the kids are scared off, Hellverine can defeat the Mother in normal combat. Decapitating her frees the children from her control.<\/p>\n

The unnamed water demon<\/strong> appears as an Akihiro made of water. There’s not much going on with him beyond that – like the Mother, he’s not really a character as such.<\/p>\n

Mephisto.<\/strong> He shows up right at the end to tell Akihiro to “stop fighting me… or I’ll return you to the grave”. Mephisto uses the name “Daken”, presumably wanting him to backslide to his villain days.<\/p>\n

GEOGRAPHY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Genosha.<\/strong> Oh boy.<\/p>\n

So. As everyone knows, Genosha was reduced to ruins in New X-Men<\/em> #115. It was comprehensively a wasteland whenever we saw it during the Krakoan era, the final time being\u00a0Marauders<\/em> vol 2 #11.<\/p>\n

In X-Factor<\/em> #7, we were told that Ethan Fortune had bought the place, and had built a city called “Gigosha” in the ruins of Genosha’s capital Hammer Bay. Gigosha was run by an AI and populated by “millions” of immigrants who had signed away their freedom as part of the terms of service. This was obviously a reference to the sort of crypto-libertarian projects that get bandied about from time to time in the real world.<\/p>\n

Aside from the apparent speed of Gigosha’s construction, there was no real continuity problem with any of this. In fact, X-Factor<\/em> #7 states outright that until Gigosha came along, “Genosha was an uninhabitable ruin, almost no population or resources to speak of.”<\/p>\n

But that was X-Factor<\/em> #7, way back in the dim and distant past of February 19th! According to\u00a0this<\/em> issue, an entire human city was already on the site of Gigosha, with reluctant inhabitants being displaced to the outskirts when Gigosha came along. This is the location that Akihiro visits here. And it’s not even a shanty town – it’s a completely normal (if somewhat crime-ridden) city complete with functioning docks, bars, apparent waste collection services, a surprisingly well stocked greengrocer, a bookshop, running water, printed newspapers, a book shop and numerous apartments with normal-looking furniture and bathrooms.\u00a0 There’s an anti-mutant militia called the Pro-Mans but it’s hard to see how this city could be functioning in the way we see without some form of actual administration.<\/p>\n

It looks like a run down part of New York, basically. It makes no sense at all.<\/p>\n

FOOTNOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Page 3 panel 3: Dr Strange gave Akihiro the Book of Lamentation last issue.<\/p>\n

Page 9 panel 2: Sabretooth killed Akihiro at the North Pole in Wolverine<\/em> #41 (2024); Romulus killed Itsu at Jasmine Falls in a flashback in\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> #40 (2006).<\/p>\n

Page 9 panel 5: Wolverine drowned Daken in Genosha in Uncanny X-Force<\/em> #34 (2012).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HELLVERINE vol 2 #4 “The Drowning Man” Writer: Benjamin Percy Artist: Raffaele Ienco Colour artist: Bryan Valenza Letterer: Travis Lanham Editor: Mark Basso HELLVERINE Even as Hellverine, he doesn’t want to fight either the Mother or her children. But he has another option: from reading the Book of Lamentation, he’s learned some “hell magic” which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10888,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10886\/revisions\/10888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}