Yes, “#1”. \u00a0I know.<\/p>\n
This is going in the second “Three Months to Die” trade\u00a0paperback. \u00a0But\u00a0that’s largely\u00a0a case of “got to stick it somewhere” (despite the cover banner billing it\u00a0as part of the story). \u00a0So we might as well give it a post of its own.<\/p>\n
Although it has nothing much to do with the “Three Months” storyline,\u00a0this story does take as its starting point the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor and his\u00a0sudden feelings of mortality. \u00a0Its actual point is to give him a chance to say goodbye to Jubilee. \u00a0She hasn’t been\u00a0a regular in his stories for years, but she was his main sidekick back in the 90s, and\u00a0Paul Cornell hasn’t used her, so\u00a0it makes sense for the\u00a0Annual to\u00a0give her a visit.<\/p>\n
Wolverine’s\u00a0fear that he’s going to die soon\u00a0is quite interesting in its own right; it’s one of those things that works more on our instinctive knowledge that this is Wrong in terms of the story, since in purely logical terms it just leaves him as an ordinary human. \u00a0Admittedly, an ordinary human with a lot of people wanting to kill him, but as Jubilee points out, it’s not like\u00a0he’s the only mutant ever to have lost his powers. \u00a0She did. \u00a0So did Storm, actually. \u00a0Oh, and pretty much all of the others. \u00a0But for all that,\u00a0it\u00a0does<\/em> work in terms of the sense of the character being derailed. \u00a0We’ll come back to that when we get to\u00a0“Three Months To Die”\u00a0itself, though.<\/p>\n Wolverine takes Jubilee\u00a0(and Shogo, since they come as a package deal these days) into the forest\u00a0to pass on some more survival skills to her, and introduce her to the pack of wolves he checks in on every few years. \u00a0The plot is pretty straightforward. \u00a0Another pair of campers show up – a rather sullen soldier in the course of recovering from a brain injury, and his Air Force wife who’s dragging him on this expedition\u00a0because she maintains it’s good for him. \u00a0A\u00a0horrible misunderstanding ensues, which results in\u00a0Brad and Kim heroically rescuing poor Shogo from the nasty wolves, shooting\u00a0Wolverine, and making a break for it with Jubilee in pursuit – Wolverine being reduced by this stage to helping track them.<\/p>\n For the most part, it’s\u00a0pretty decent. \u00a0It’s\u00a0a nicely paced story, and the parallels of the two couples work well. \u00a0It’s written by Elliot Kalan, the head writer on\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>, but this is not\u00a0a gimmick story, nor is it played particularly for comedy. \u00a0What it does have is excellent dialogue\u00a0which\u00a0nails the Wolverine\/Jubilee relationship, makes Jubilee’s “vampire single mom” thing actually work, and also sketches Brad and Kim as interesting characters to boot, with a rather more subtly established relationship than you might expect.<\/p>\n Artist Jonathan Marks\u00a0is not a familiar name – as far as I can see,\u00a0he’s\u00a0done a bit of work for Aspen. \u00a0His work here is\u00a0\u00a0good stuff – clear\u00a0storytelling, strong characters, a good sense of place. \u00a0And it has the immeasurable benefit of being coloured by Jose Villarrubia, one of the best in the business. \u00a0He can make\u00a0pretty much anything look good, but he’s got plenty to work here. \u00a0Hopefully\u00a0Marks will get some more work on the strength of this.<\/p>\n The\u00a0pay-off is a problem, though. \u00a0It’s heavy-handed, and Wolverine gives us a little speech in narrative captions just in case\u00a0we need it explained to us. \u00a0On top of that,\u00a0it’s a rather awkward\u00a0moral about how we men think we’re taking care of women (um, do we?), but actually they’re taking care of us, because they’re strong and nurturing and stuff. \u00a0Kalan would have been better off leaving this one to interpretation –\u00a0if he’d just left the readers to have their own thoughts about the quiet power of motherhood or whatever, he’d probably have got away with it. \u00a0Instead\u00a0the story leave us with a painfully reductive bit of gender essentialism that also has some weird\u00a0assumptions about what men think to start with. \u00a0I could buy\u00a0Wolverine\u00a0thinking that way, but\u00a0the story holds\u00a0it out as an epiphany that it expects readers to share (his narration isn’t “I think”, but “we”).<\/p>\n It’s a shame about that, because it’s the one bum note in an otherwise very good comic. \u00a0Given that it’s the moral and the ending, it takes a bit of goodwill to overlook it\u2026 but\u00a0the rest of the comic almost deserves it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, “#1”. \u00a0I know. This is going in the second “Three Months to Die” trade\u00a0paperback. \u00a0But\u00a0that’s largely\u00a0a case of “got to stick it somewhere” (despite the cover banner billing it\u00a0as part of the story). \u00a0So we might as well give it a post of its own. Although it has nothing much to do with 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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2707","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\/2707","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=2707"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2708,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707\/revisions\/2708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}