{"id":11124,"date":"2025-06-05T21:15:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T20:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11124"},"modified":"2025-06-05T21:15:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T20:15:29","slug":"laura-kinney-wolverine-7-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11124","title":{"rendered":"Laura Kinney, Wolverine #7 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>LAURA KINNEY, WOLVERINE #7<\/strong>
\n“My So-Called Perfect Life, part 2”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Erica Schultz<\/strong>
\nArtist: Giada Belviso<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

WOLVERINE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last issue consisted entirely of Laura hallucinating about a world in which she lived a happy family life with Logan as her father and Gabby as her younger sister, with Julian Keller (Hellion) showing up at the end of the issue. As it turns out, all of this is the result of Beautiful Dreamer (see below) being used to sedate Laura while the Badoon try to experiment on her.<\/p>\n

Laura’s dream life\u00a0 includes Julian as her boyfriend, which fits with the way their relationship was written in NYX<\/em> #8. For some reason, Julian’s arrival also seems to destabilise what was previously a fairly ingrained illusion: not only does he lead her to step outside the house (which she didn’t do at all in the previous issue), but he proposes marriage to her.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Apparently Laura’s mind rebels so much at the idea of this degree of contentment that it breaks the illusion for her. In fact, despite Beautiful Dreamer claiming that she “saw your desires” and “tried to give you the perfect life”, the world she actually created in the previous issue was one where Laura was mentally ill and her mother was dead with Laura carrying some of the blame.<\/p>\n

While Beautiful Dreamer\u00a0could<\/em> be deliberately trying to botch her assignment, she doesn’t claim to be. So the idea seems to be that Laura’s mind simply rebels at this attempt to give her happiness. Naturally, Laura is appropriately miserable at the thought that this sort of life is inaccessible to her.<\/p>\n

Logan, Gabby and Julian don’t actually appear in this story, but clearly figure in her mind as the people she’d be with given a free choice – which reinforces the question of where Gabby as and why Laura left her. Her brother Akihiro doesn’t make the cut, but then she’s spent much less actual time with him, and she barely knows her mother. In that sense, it’s understandable that they don’t figure in her ideal world.<\/p>\n

GUEST STAR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beautiful Dreamer.<\/strong> Beautiful Dreamer is one of the Morlocks. She debuted in Power Pack<\/em> #12, where Masque tried to enlist her assistance in wiping Power Pack’s memories with her “dream smoke” so that they could be abducted as replacement children for the Morlock empath Annalee. Annalee’s own children have died, and the story claims that her distress is affecting those around her. Beautiful Dreamer doesn’t actively assist with this plan, on the grounds that it would be against Callisto’s orders. Frankly, her involvement in the plot is minimal.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #195, Masque has another go at the same plot, and this time most of Power Pack do get transformed into Morlocks with Beautiful Dreamer’s involvement. Callisto ends up ordering her to reverse it. Once again, she’s more a plot device than a participant in the plot.<\/p>\n

Despite her doing very little in these two appearances, she seems to have been memorable enough to keep cropping up as a background Morlock in later years. She survived the Morlock Massacre, hung around with X-Factor for a few issues afterwards, and somehow even made it into the 198 mutants who kept their powers after M-Day. She was last seen among the Morlocks who were hiding out on a yacht in Dark X-Men<\/em> vol 2 #2-3 during “Fall of X”, but she didn’t really do anything there either.<\/p>\n

Basically, she’s a perennial background Morlock who’s been just recognisable enough to stick around in that role without ever actually doing very much.<\/p>\n

In her early appearances, her “dream smoke” comes from a cigarette, but times have changed and she now seems to just produce it from nowhere. Although she does always wear a patched dress with a hat, in her early appearances she has nothing of the glamorous look seen here – instead, the art is clearly going for “homeless and mentally ill”.<\/p>\n

She claims not to trust surface dwellers, and says that she’s always been used by them (not really a claim that’s backed up by her previous appearances).<\/p>\n

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

The Badoon.<\/strong> Reptilian alien race who’ve been around for ages, serving here as all-purpose baddies. There were some Badoon among the aliens pursuing Corsair in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #11-12, but that seems unlikely to be connected. So far as I can see, their last significant appearance as villains in the main Marvel Universe was in the “Reckoning War” storyline towards the end of Dan Slott’s run on\u00a0Fantastic Four<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These particular Badoon have a vaguely gestured-at plan to “create hybrids from your mutant cells”, dominate the Badoon, and then… conquer stuff, I guess. They seem to have captured several other mutants as well as Laura, and it’s not clear where they came from. They don’t look<\/em> like Morlocks, but in this issue, nor does Beautiful Dreamer. Issue #5 ended wth Laura being shot with an energy weapon by a hooded attacker as she was returning home, but their dialogue here suggests the Badoon were particularly interested in her for some reason.<\/p>\n

The Badoon refer to Laura fighting the Brood in Captain Marvel<\/em> #49. In fact, the reference is to the whole “Revenge of the Brood” storyline from Captain Marvel <\/em>vol 10 #43-49, which has Laura among multiple guest stars, and also tied in to Gerry Duggan’s X-Men<\/em>. The storyline involved the Brood trying to infect various superheroes for their power, which at a push might have some similarities to what the Badoon are doing here. But the Badoon themselves weren’t in that storyline, and seem to be referencing it just as a relatively recent Laura \/ aliens fight that they’ve somehow heard of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LAURA KINNEY, WOLVERINE #7 “My So-Called Perfect Life, part 2” Writer: Erica Schultz Artist: Giada Belviso Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Mark Basso WOLVERINE Last issue consisted entirely of Laura hallucinating about a world in which she lived a happy family life with Logan as her father and Gabby as her younger […]<\/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-11124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11124","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=11124"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11127,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11124\/revisions\/11127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}