{"id":11331,"date":"2025-08-21T22:36:37","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T21:36:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11331"},"modified":"2025-08-21T22:36:37","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T21:36:37","slug":"wolverine-12-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11331","title":{"rendered":"Wolverine #12 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>WOLVERINE vol 8 #12<\/strong>
\n“Mother and Master”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Saladin Ahmed<\/strong>
\nArtist: Mart\u00edn C\u00f3ccolo<\/strong>
\nColourist: Bryan Valenza<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit\u00a0<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:<\/strong> Wolverine defends his mother. Despite what it says on the cover, Elizabeth Howlett isn’t really in this issue.<\/p>\n

PAGES 1-2.\u00a0<\/strong>Logan gets his “mother” to the car.<\/em><\/p>\n

We established last issue that the whole scenario of Wolverine’s mother asking him for help had been contrived by Mastermind. That still left open the question of whether any part of it was true, but it looks from this issue as if the answer is basically “no”.<\/p>\n

In Wolverine’s mind, he’s just rescued his mother from Sabretooth, and wants to get away before Sabretooth recovers. The whole thing is a little dreamlike, with Sabretooth simply vanishing, and no terribly clear explanation of how Elizabeth supposedly got a chance to write the letter asking Wolverine for help in the first place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A nice touch is that Elizabeth is shorter than Logan while Mastermind is taller, which alters the power dynamic depending on which version of reality we’re seeing – unlike in previous chapters, this issue cuts back and forth between the two versions. Mastermind seems to be writing Elizabeth as more or less a pastiche, fretting about her “frail constitution”.<\/p>\n

PAGES 3-5.\u00a0<\/strong>Wolverine sees through the illusion.<\/em><\/p>\n

In rather melodramatic fashion (“That cruel night, our home became the stage for a bllody revenge tragedy…”), “Elizabeth” claims that following her suicide in\u00a0Origin<\/em> #3, she remembers nothing until being brought back from the dead by Sabretooth, who wanted to use her to hurt Logan. This is all plausible enough as far as something Sabretooth might try.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, Mastermind panics when Wolverine says they’ll “touch base with my friends”. This surely can’t come as a complete surprise, and while it’s understandable that Mastermind doesn’t want to take on the whole of the X-Men (either team) single handedly, you’d have thought he could work around it with illusions. Perhaps he isn’t confident of his ability to pull this off – after all, during this very scene, he’s struggling to stop Wolverine from noticing that they’re going round in circles.<\/p>\n

PAGE 6. <\/strong>Wolverine confronts the illusions.<\/em><\/p>\n

Having failed to maintain a “realistic” illusion, Mastermind goes for disorientation instead, or perhaps just hopes to overwhelm Wolverine with his feelings for his mother. Either way, Logan seems to find it much easier to keep his rationality here, presumably because it’s so obvious an illusion.<\/p>\n

PAGES 7-11.<\/strong>\u00a0Wolverine confronts Mastermind.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mastermind claims that while on Krakoa, he learned to “listen to the minds of my victims for inspiration in creating my illusions” – which is apparently meant to explain how he knows any of this stuff about Elizabeth Howlett in the first place. He says he’s not a telepath, but presumably he means that he doesn’t have more general telepathic powers – there’s clearly mind-reading going on here.<\/p>\n

There is some precedent for Mastermind doing more than just illusion-casting – in\u00a0X-Factor<\/em> #243, a flashback shows him rewriting the memories of a young Lorna Dane. (He claims this only works on young and “pliable” minds.) In terms of what we actually saw him do in Krakoa, if you squint a bit, there’s some basis for this expansion of his abilities in Hellions<\/em> #10-11, where his illusions for the Hellions are very personal, although still with some gaps.<\/p>\n

Mastermind claims that his original plan was simply to manipulate Wolverine into attacking the X-Men for him – he doesn’t really specify what he wanted revenge on the X-Men for, but general past defeats, I guess. He then claims that he decided he wanted to “parent” Wolverine instead, on seeing inside his mind.<\/p>\n

At first glance he seems to just be taking pleasure in exploiting Wolverine’s emotions, but Wolverine concludes that Mastermind has gone mad, perhaps through exposure to Wolverine’s mind. It’s entirely possible that there is <\/em>no wider plan any more – indeed, Mastermind claims that “it was all real to me” and almost seems to think he’s making Wolverine an attractive offer when he says that “we could make it real again”. He also seems to feel sad about Wolverine’s rejection in the final scene.<\/p>\n

Then again, in the same scene, Logan refers to Mastermind’s “twisted game” as “mocking every bit of pain I’ve ever felt”.<\/p>\n

PAGES 12-15. <\/strong>Wolverine escapes Mastermind’s illusions.<\/em><\/p>\n

Basically, Logan gives us a speech about how his mother was a victim who lashed out at him in a moment of weakness, and how he’s needed to come to terms with it. Logan seems to conclude that his self-loathing has been tied to taking his mother’s rejection at face value.<\/p>\n

PAGES 16-20.\u00a0<\/strong>Wolverine defeats Mastermind.<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, presumably. As noted above, Mastermind seems to read this sequence as Wolverine proving that he really is just a monster who would kill his own “parent”. Wolverine apparently kills Mastermind, but is left with the fact that he can’t prove he’s truly escaped the illusion. (But we’re onto a different story next issue… so he has.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WOLVERINE vol 8 #12 “Mother and Master” Writer: Saladin Ahmed Artist: Mart\u00edn C\u00f3ccolo Colourist: Bryan Valenza Letterer: Cory Petit\u00a0 Editor: Mark Basso COVER: Wolverine defends his mother. Despite what it says on the cover, Elizabeth Howlett isn’t really in this issue. PAGES 1-2.\u00a0Logan gets his “mother” to the car. We established last issue that the […]<\/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-11331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11331","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=11331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11333,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11331\/revisions\/11333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}