{"id":2647,"date":"2014-08-31T16:22:44","date_gmt":"2014-08-31T15:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2647"},"modified":"2014-08-31T16:22:44","modified_gmt":"2014-08-31T15:22:44","slug":"wolverine-three-months-to-die-vol-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2647","title":{"rendered":"Wolverine: Three Months To Die vol 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

In December 2013, when Marvel were soliciting issue #1 of the current\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> run, by Paul Cornell and Ryan Stegman, they offered\u00a0retailers a novel\u00a0incentive to order high<\/a>. \u00a0Any unsold copies of issue #1, they said, could be exchanged for an exclusive “Mortal Variant” of\u00a0issue #12 in September 2014. \u00a0And, it was made clear, you would want copies of issue #12, because it was a “double-sized landmark issue” which Marvel expected to receive “national attention for its game-changing story”.<\/p>\n

In April 2014, Marvel announced\u00a0the four issue\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em> miniseries by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven, to ship weekly in September. \u00a0Entertainment Weekly<\/em>, who were given the official announcement story, described\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em> as\u00a0the “culminat[ion]” of\u00a0“Three Months To Die”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Issue #12 has now shipped – in August, not September. \u00a0It does provide a proper conclusion to\u00a0the Paul Cornell run\u00a0which extended over the last two volumes of the series. \u00a0It\u00a0does not on the face of it lead in to anything in particular. \u00a0And no one\u00a0could claim with a straight face that it contains a “game-changing story”, let alone anything that might sanely be expected to achieve “national attention”.\u00a0 As for the “Mortal Variant” that retailers were promised last year, that’s been shifted to\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em> #1 – a change that retailers will probably\u00a0be quite relieved about, given all I’ve just said.<\/p>\n

All this quite obviously suggests a significant change of plans somewhere along the line, with\u00a0Cornell’s originally planned ending having hit the cutting room floor. \u00a0More to the point,\u00a0whether or not that’s what happened behind the scenes, it’s how the\u00a0story reads. \u00a0This volume has been reading a bit oddly from the point where\u00a0Wolverine’s cover within Offer’s gang was blown after only a single story, which seemed to have been paced with a longer stint as a villain in contemplation.<\/p>\n

But by the time we reach the final issue, we have Sabretooth never actually getting around to\u00a0transforming New York\u00a0into a feral paradise in the way he’s been\u00a0planning all series. \u00a0 We\u00a0have Pinch and Lost Boy sidelined into a barely-sketched subplot about alternate reality duplicates which shows every sign of being a vague hint at something that was meant to be more developed – I strongly suspect it only stayed in because Cornell needed it in order to pay off\u00a0the significance of Lost\u00a0Boy’s tattoo and\u00a0complete his character arc. \u00a0Other than providing those duplicates, the reality-altering macguffin is not actually used, but still gets a randomly\u00a0tacked-on resolution about how it’s an intelligent being.<\/p>\n

And as our big finish, we simply have\u00a0Wolverine reconciling with his\u00a0supporting cast, coming to terms with his mortality, and defeating Sabretooth, with an epilogue about how much closure he’s achieved. \u00a0Which is\u00a0certainly a resolution, and very likely\u00a0reflects the character arc Cornell always intended. \u00a0But that doesn’t detract from the\u00a0powerful sense that there was meant to be, and certainly\u00a0ought to be, more. \u00a0After all, as the culmination of twenty-four issues of story, “Wolverine beats up Sabretooth in a shopping mall” can’t help but seem like an anticlimax. \u00a0It’s certainly inadequate to\u00a0set up the idea that Wolverine might now feel free to retire.<\/p>\n

This is disappointing. \u00a0Cornell was a smart choice to write Wolverine. \u00a0He’s not first and foremost an action writer, but his style is very well suited to the\u00a0romantic streak that’s been central to Wolverine’s character\u00a0(and to his\u00a0lasting appeal) since at least the Claremont\/Miller miniseries in the 80s. \u00a0The basic arc of Cornell’s run is standard enough –\u00a0challenge his sense of identity, break him down, and build him up again –\u00a0but it’s a solid structure for exploring the character in a way that plays to Cornell’s strengths.<\/p>\n

But there are problems with the underlying arc here quite aside from the seemingly truncated climax. \u00a0In order to\u00a0have Wolverine re-connect with his supporting cast (and not simply have the result be an X-Men story), Cornell has had to introduce a substantial non-X-Men supporting cast in the first place. \u00a0With the possible exception of Pinch, the resulting relationships never developed the weight that the final act needs them to have. \u00a0And there’s a suggestion that the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor doesn’t merely threaten his identity but actually leads to him having to\u00a0come to terms with his own mortality for the first time. \u00a0That means treating his healing factor as\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0immortality, which used to be fairly common, but\u00a0the more conventional ground rules have largely been reasserted since\u00a0Civil War<\/em>. \u00a0Under those\u00a0rules,\u00a0Wolverine may be very\u00a0hard to kill, but he certainly can be killed,\u00a0especially by the sorts of villains who fight the Avengers and the X-Men. \u00a0You can blast him to smithereens, as the Sentinels did in “Days of Futures Past”. \u00a0Or you can drown him – it worked on Daken, and this very story says\u00a0it would work on Sabretooth.<\/p>\n

Still, there’s something to the idea that Wolverine’s relationship\u00a0to Sabretooth<\/em>, and the courage he needs to face Sabretooth,\u00a0are\u00a0things that are fundamentally altered by the loss of his healing factor. \u00a0Sabretooth has always worked best as a distorted reflection of Wolverine himself – separated from Wolverine, the character isn’t\u00a0all that interesting in his own right. \u00a0He’s the arch-enemy and so he has to be\u00a0the villain for a story like this\u00a0(or at least a story like this was presumably intended to be). \u00a0For Wolverine to lose\u00a0his healing powers poses both restores the original idea of Sabretooth being a threat who was out of Wolverine’s league, and Cornell is clearly trying to bring\u00a0back the sense of fear\u00a0that accompanied Sabretooth’s appearances in the late\u00a01980s.<\/p>\n

As noted, the story spends a lot of time building up Sabretooth’s scheme to acquire a reality-altering\u00a0macguffin and use it to transform the world into a\u00a0feral paradise where there are no\u00a0non-physical powers, no technology, and just an endless fight for supremacy. \u00a0Actually, Sabretooth’s vision of this world may be slightly more nuanced than that, because at one point he describes it as a world where the strong get what they need, but also protect the weak – this seems a little odd for him,\u00a0but\u00a0perhaps even Sabretooth figures that\u00a0there has to be some sort of civilisation in order for him to rule it, and recognises defence of his tribe as one of the things that would prove his\u00a0value and\u00a0superiority.<\/p>\n

Regardless, when you introduce something like that, you’re setting the reader up to expect a story where\u00a0Sabretooth actually transforms the world, and the hero has to\u00a0put it back. \u00a0That’s not what we get. \u00a0This isn’t really a violation of the Chekhov’s Gun principle – the gun\u00a0placed on the mantelpiece in act 1 may not be fired in act 3, but act\u00a03 is still centred on Sabretooth planning\u00a0<\/em>to fire it. \u00a0Still, its rushed role here\u00a0leads me to strongly suspect Cornell’s original plan did involve a temporary transformation of the world, which would presumably have provided a more memorable final conflict, and also been the focus for a stronger\u00a0exploration of the parallels between Wolverine and Sabretooth. \u00a0(Which, of course,\u00a0is just a way of exploring Wolverine himself,\u00a0what with Sabretooth ultimately being his mirror.)<\/p>\n

How that would have played out can only be a matter of speculation. \u00a0So let’s speculate. \u00a0Cornell has Sabretooth repeatedly spelling out the ground rules of simple,\u00a0primal “utopia” he plans to create – essentially survival of the fittest. \u00a0Wolverine, in contrast, gets a speech in\u00a0issue #11\u00a0about zen jokes, about the confusion between high and low culture, and about coming to terms\u00a0with the lack of a clear meaning. \u00a0(“I still keep looking for meaning, for rules to live by, when there’s just life. \u00a0So I’m just gonna keep on stumbling along. \u00a0And I guess that’s okay.”) \u00a0This seems\u00a0plainly intended as a statement of the moral, even if it’s less than clear how it actually emerges from the earlier chapters: Wolverine\u00a0comes to recognise that there is no simple and straightforward ideology to live by. \u00a0All this is fairly consistent with Cornell’s MI-13 stories, incidentally, where he liked to make a point of\u00a0how\u00a0British people reject simple narratives\u00a0in favour of complicated ones, something he evidently viewed as a good thing.<\/p>\n

So\u2026 all this seems<\/i> to point to the idea being\u00a0a clash\u00a0between Sabretooth’s grindingly one-note ideology and Wolverine’s more complex worldview, playing out in an altered world purported designed by Sabretooth’s rules, and with Wolverine ultimately\u00a0coming out on top because the rules themselves are stupidly designed. \u00a0You can see how that could have worked, and could have been a much more satisfying resolution than one we actually got.<\/p>\n

None of which really alters the fact that this doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t satisfy. \u00a0It has the hallmarks of the\u00a0final issues of sudden cancellations of yesteryear – it\u00a0feels like something that doesn’t so much complete the story, as sketch out how it might have been completed. \u00a0Whatever\u00a0may have been\u00a0going on backstage, the fact remains\u00a0that this\u00a0feels like a story that had its\u00a0final act lopped off and a\u00a0mid-story complication awkwardly retooled into a climax. \u00a0In a sense it’s to\u00a0the story’s credit that it still retains some\u00a0workable sense of resolution, but\u00a0it’s a frustrating read that\u00a0could surely have been\u00a0far better. \u00a0It so obviously wants to feel definitive, and it so obviously isn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In December 2013, when Marvel were soliciting issue #1 of the current\u00a0Wolverine run, by Paul Cornell and Ryan Stegman, they offered\u00a0retailers a novel\u00a0incentive to order high. \u00a0Any unsold copies of issue #1, they said, could be exchanged for an exclusive “Mortal Variant” of\u00a0issue #12 in September 2014. \u00a0And, it was made clear, you would want […]<\/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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647","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=2647"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2714,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions\/2714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}