{"id":11253,"date":"2025-07-25T22:36:33","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T21:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11253"},"modified":"2025-07-26T11:58:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T10:58:02","slug":"wolverine-11-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11253","title":{"rendered":"Wolverine #11 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>WOLVERINE vol 8 #11<\/strong>
\n“Only a Mother”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Saladin Ahmed<\/strong>
\nArtist: Mart\u00edn C\u00f3ccolo<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Bryan Valenza<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

PAGES 1-2.\u00a0<\/strong>Wolverine and Sabretooth start to fight.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, okay, let’s stick with this format…<\/p>\n

“He’s found us!”\u00a0<\/strong>Elizabeth’s comment doesn’t make much sense logically – they’re in the room where she was kept chained up. If Sabretooth was her captor, what would he need to find? But the whole point of this story is that the sense memories cause Wolverine to gloss over the logical problems, as we’ll see.<\/p>\n

PAGES 3-5.\u00a0<\/strong>Wolverine and Sabretooth fight.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Disappointed I ain’t dead?”<\/strong> Wolverine killed Sabretooth in\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> vol 7 #50, just last year.<\/p>\n

“This ain’t the first time you proved too stupid to die, Victor.”<\/strong> Sabretooth has indeed come back from apparent death on plenty of previous occasions. He was beheaded in Wolverine<\/em> #50; mind you, he was also beheaded in\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> vol 3 #55, and that turned out to be a clone. Oh, and he was beheaded for real in War of the Realms: Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #3, but that was just before Krakoa, when everyone was conveniently dropping dead. Since it was presumably resurrection that brought him back that time, he\u00a0ought<\/em> to be dead for real this time, but… come on, it’s Sabretooth.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That being said – while Sabretooth himself is bound to come back in the end, the cliffhanger of this story makes fairly clear that all of this is an illusion.<\/p>\n

PAGES 6-7.\u00a0<\/strong>Elizabeth helps against Sabretooth.<\/em><\/p>\n

“I won’t leave you alone again!” <\/strong>Again, given that this is apparently an illusion, it’s obviously playing off Wolverine’s feelings of abandonment.<\/p>\n

PAGES 8-11.<\/strong>\u00a0Wolverine gathers his senses and tackles Sabretooth through a window.<\/em><\/p>\n

The footnotes to\u00a0Origin<\/em> #3 are self-explanatory.<\/p>\n

“He ain’t a telepath, but somehow he’s getting into my head.”\u00a0<\/strong>This line becomes more significant in light of the reveal at the end of the issue: on some level, Logan seems to be recognising that this is an illusion, or at least vaguely Not Right. His response is to fall back on his usual techniques for dealing with psychic attack: essentially, mindfulness and focussing on what his senses are telling him. This ties in with previous issues. On receiving Elizabeth’s letter in isue #8, Logan’s narration talks about the scent of the letter convincing him that it’s genuine even though he knows that it’s rationally impossible. He also talks about Sabretooth’s scent getting stronger as he approaches the house in issue #9, and about the scent of his childhood still being recognisable in issue #10.<\/p>\n

PAGES 12-13.\u00a0<\/strong>Elizabeth tries to stop Logan from killing Sabretooth.<\/em><\/p>\n

Within the logic of the illusion, Elizabeth is apparently horrified by the violence of both men – but she seems to be trying to steer Logan towards going somewhere.<\/p>\n

PAGES 14-17.\u00a0<\/strong>Wolverine kills Sabretooth (again).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.<\/strong><\/em> There are various paintings of that name, but the art in the accompanying panel is clearly modelled on the one by Gustav Dor\u00e9 (1832-1883). The painting depicts an incident from Genesis 32:22-32, where Jacob spends the night alone on a riverbank and encounters a man who proceeds to wrestle him until dawn, for reasons that are not directly explained; some interpretations have him as an angel, others as a symbol of god or something else. It’s unlikely that Ahmed is particularly interested in the underlying biblical story, since the main moral which Genesis itself invites us to draw from the incident is that we shouldn’t eat the sciatic nerve.<\/p>\n

“I’m still a monster, ma.”\u00a0<\/strong>Logan thinks that his mother’s instinctive horror towards him in\u00a0Origin<\/em> #3 was basically correct (and accords with his own self-loathing).<\/p>\n

“I can feel in my soul that any dark deeds you’ve done, you’ve done to help others.”\u00a0<\/strong>This is, objectively, not true – it really doesn’t account adequately for Logan’s time in Team X, or as an agent of Romulus. However, the obvious theme of this illusion is to have Elizabeth forgive him. She claims again that she’s going to explain and answer his questions, but doesn’t.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-19.<\/strong>\u00a0Elizabeth is revealed as Mastermind.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mastermind.<\/strong> He’s an illusionist who was a member of the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants back in the Silver Age. His other main claim to fame is a botched attempt to manipulate Phoenix into joining the Hellfire Club, which inadvertently led to the Dark Phoenix Saga. He didn’t do much of importance after that, until he died of the Legacy Virus in 1993’s\u00a0Uncanny X-Men Annual<\/em> #17. He showed up again on Krakoa, notably in\u00a0Hellions<\/em> and\u00a0X-Corp<\/em>, but this is the first time he’s been used as a major villain in many years.<\/p>\n

(EDIT: As the comments point out, I should have remembered that Mastermind’s main history with Wolverine is\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #172, where an overall scheme of revenge on the X-Men includes him manipulating Mariko Yashida into calling off her wedding to Wolverine at the last minute.)<\/p>\n

The idea seems to be that, instead of being a conventional telepath, Mastermind’s powers work by tricking the senses – therefore, he’s peculiarly well placed to manipulate Wolverine by taking advantage of the very things that he normally uses to ground himself against such attacks, which cause him to overlook the logical glitches. This is, shall we say, not a million miles from the Sara Grey storyline in this week’s\u00a0Phoenix<\/em>, though that seems much more likely to be a case of poor co-ordination than a deliberate echo.<\/p>\n

An obvious question raised by this story is how Mastermind actually knows anything about Logan’s back story in order to exploit it. After all, Logan pointed out in issue #9 that Sabretooth was one of the only people who would have this knowledge. Presumably we’re coming to that; Mastermind has rarely worked as a solo villain, so it’s entirely possible that there are allies out there somewhere.<\/p>\n

It also begs the question: what was the deal with the random yokel in the previous issue? Did Mastermind actually force him to try and fight Wolverine? (His dialogue only referred to “he”, which Wolverine assumed to be Sabretooth.) Or was he an illusion too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WOLVERINE vol 8 #11 “Only a Mother” Writer: Saladin Ahmed Artist: Mart\u00edn C\u00f3ccolo Colour artist: Bryan Valenza Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Mark Basso PAGES 1-2.\u00a0Wolverine and Sabretooth start to fight. So, okay, let’s stick with this format… “He’s found us!”\u00a0Elizabeth’s comment doesn’t make much sense logically – they’re in the room where she was kept […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11253","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=11253"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11260,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11253\/revisions\/11260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}