{"id":2787,"date":"2014-11-30T12:25:18","date_gmt":"2014-11-30T12:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2787"},"modified":"2014-11-30T12:25:18","modified_gmt":"2014-11-30T12:25:18","slug":"wolverine-and-the-x-men-vol-2-death-of-wolverine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2787","title":{"rendered":"Wolverine and the X-Men vol 2 – “Death of Wolverine”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first volume of Jason Latour’s\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em><\/a>\u00a0run was pretty much an outright catastrophe. \u00a0The main problem was\u00a0an excessively complicated plot, which didn’t\u00a0entirely make sense to start with, and which was told in a massively confusing way. \u00a0So whatever good ideas were in there got lost in a welter of confusion.<\/p>\n

Given such a disastrous start, it is perhaps unsurprising to see that Latour’s second volume is his last. \u00a0In fact, he doesn’t even make it to the end of the volume, with the final issue – originally solicited with his name – turning out to be written by Frank Tieri instead.<\/p>\n

His final five issues do at least avoid the basic comprehensibility problems of\u00a0their predecessors. \u00a0In large part, that’s because they swing off in the other direction and\u00a0keep the plots somewhere between basic and rudimentary. \u00a0There are still some stray subplots floating around that add nothing much to anything –\u00a0though to be fair, they may originally have been intended to pay off down the line – but for the most part Latour keeps it basic in these issues, which at least gives the point an opportunity to get across.<\/p>\n

So this is an improvement. \u00a0But while Latour undoubtedly has ideas,\u00a0that isn’t to say that they’re particularly compelling ideas. \u00a0In fairness, it must have become obvious in the course of writing these issues that whatever long term plans Latour had in mind were never going to get the chance to come to fruition. \u00a0(The greatest impact of the\u00a0run is probably to leave Quentin Quire with a new status quo, from which one suspects future writers will move swiftly to extricate him.) \u00a0On top of that, as\u00a0the title of\u00a0the collected edition suggests, this is\u00a0a classic example of\u00a0a dying book trying to cling on to a bigger storyline. \u00a0So issues #10-11 are official tie-ins to “Death of Wolverine”, and issue #12 is an Axis<\/em> crossover.<\/p>\n

Issues #7-9 aren’t officially crossovers, but\u00a0Wolverine’s imminent death hangs heavily over those issues\u00a0too. \u00a0It’s perhaps understandable that a book with Wolverine’s name in the title feels obliged to do something\u00a0to\u00a0write him out, and since the actual story is taking place elsewhere, that doesn’t leave much option but to operate in its margins. \u00a0Still, the result is that the book spends the better part of five issues lamenting a story which is going on somewhere else. \u00a0Issues #7-9 are titled as a three-parter called “No Future?”, but they’re really a set of issues that are at best thematically related, trying to set up a parallel between Wolverine and Quentin.<\/p>\n

The idea, broadly, is that both are coming to terms with the lack of a meaningful future. \u00a0Wolverine knows that without his healing powers,\u00a0which, after all, have basically kept him alive until this point, he’s bound to die pretty soon, and so he’s putting his affairs in order – and also serving a cease and desist notice to stop Melita Garner from writing a biography that she envisages as a definitive statement of what he stands for. \u00a0Wolverine doesn’t particularly want to be turned into an icon and, from the looks of it, would rather simply fade away. \u00a0(After his death,\u00a0the two official tie-ins see her reviving the project at Beast’s invitation, providing a helpful framing sequence for lots of characters to reminisce about\u00a0the dearly departed.)<\/p>\n

Issue #8 takes advantage of the idea that\u00a0time moves differently within The World to pack Wolverine and Storm off there to spend a year together. \u00a0This is probably the strongest\u00a0issue, in as much as it forces some space to properly resolve the subplot of their relationship. \u00a0I’m not wild about shoehorning that amount of material into somebody else’s story, though. \u00a0Giving Wolverine a whole year in relative isolation from the Marvel Universe to come to terms with his situation and make the decision to return and confront the real world kind of feels like it sits awkwardly with the character arc\u00a0in\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> proper – and\u00a0that sort of tension is a definite problem when the premise of your\u00a0story is premised on piggybacking on events in that series. \u00a0Still, at least it\u00a0does something to offer resolution to a plot thread that would otherwise have been irritatingly aborted, and on its own terms, it’s a sweet little story.<\/p>\n

Then we have\u00a0Quentin (and for that matter Idie), who are both deeply depressed as a result of the events in the previous\u00a0story. \u00a0The basic idea, in both cases, is that they’ve seen the future, they know it turns out disastrously for Quentin in particular, and\u00a0Quentin seems to see his life as being on rails. \u00a0So\u00a0there’s a degree of general raging at the\u00a0world, combined with a heavy dose of fatalism on his part.<\/p>\n

Now, this doesn’t work, for two main\u00a0reasons. \u00a0First, there’s\u00a0the purely logical:\u00a0the basic premise that the future is set in stone is obviously wrong in X-Men mythology, and that ought to be fairly obvious\u00a0to Quentin. \u00a0The X-Men cast already includes\u00a0Rachel Grey, whose whole schtick is that she comes from a future that was averted. \u00a0More directly, the whole bloody point of the Phoenix Corporation trying to separate Quentin from the X-Men in volume 1 was to alter his personal history. \u00a0So Quentin’s future has\u00a0already been<\/em> altered by the mere fact of his taking on his new status quo in the Phoenix Corporation (and now the Hellfire Club). \u00a0His angst point here ought to be whether he embraces his destiny as a hero and risks putting himself back on the path to self-destruction – not\u00a0whether he has the choice at all.<\/p>\n

Second, mopey Quentin isn’t a very interesting character to read about. \u00a0I can understand why Latour wants to evolve the character beyond his established\u00a0set-up, which can very easily teeter into\u00a0a thirty-something writer’s one-note parody of a rebellious teenager. \u00a0He’s certainly a character who would benefit from a bit more nuance. \u00a0But at the same time, his brattish anarchist nihilism, and the question of exactly how seriously he really holds any of those views, is at the heart of the character’s appeal. \u00a0What we really end up with here is basically the same character with less fun.<\/p>\n

Issues #10-11 are a “Death of Wolverine” tie-in, in which Melita revives her book plan, and goes around interviewing various people. \u00a0This allows for two vaguely indie\u00a0artist jam issue, though not one with any big names. \u00a0The theme here is that there are tons of disparate interpretations of Wolverine and that Melita’s role is to help shape the way he’s remembered. \u00a0It’s an attempt to acknowledge\u00a0all the facets of a vastly divergent character and try to find some sort of common thread. \u00a0There’s some very patchy art in here, though; most of it is really quite good, but\u00a0an ugly few page with a ludicrously off-model Evan should never have made it into print. \u00a0A sequence with Nightcrawler toasting Wolverine for some “friends” in the local bar who we’ve never seen before is a nice idea but falls flat; the sequence just doesn’t land\u00a0Kurt’s voice, giving the whole thing\u00a0a presumably unintended\u00a0undercurrent\u00a0of menace, and a bunch of nameless strangers in a bar just won’t pass as a\u00a0gathering\u00a0of Wolverine’s close friends. \u00a0The closing sequence with Quentin making his own private tribute to Wolverine makes some sense in terms of his own arc, but it doesn’t really cohere\u00a0in terms of what came before.<\/p>\n

And then\u2026 we have a random fill-in issue by\u00a0Frank Tieri to round things off, officially serving as the book’s\u00a0Axis<\/em> tie-in. \u00a0This was originally solicited as a Jason Latour story in which Quentin returned to the Mansion, which would presumably have furthered\u00a0his arc. \u00a0Instead,\u00a0we have a story in which an inverted Quentin\u00a0is visited at the Hellfire Club by an inverted Storm – a completely different story, which one rather suspects was developed around the fact that they had already committed to an\u00a0Axis\u00a0<\/em>tie-in with Storm and Quentin on the cover.<\/p>\n

The issue is marred by what appears to be\u00a0a massive continuity error – where issue #9\u00a0simply asserted that Quentin’s Phoenix Corporation had taken over the Hellfire Club,\u00a0issue #12\u00a0shows him as having joined\u00a0Kade Kilgore’s Inner Circle. \u00a0You know, the one that was\u00a0already defeated and disbanded at the end of\u00a0Aaron’s run, which is why two of them wound up as pupils at the X-Men’s school. \u00a0By all appearances\u00a0neither Tieri nor his editors were remotely aware of\u00a0that fact, which is\u00a0excusable in Tieri’s case (it’s not like he’s been writing any of the books during this period) but just baffling in the case\u00a0of the editors.<\/p>\n

Tieri at least has a reasonable go at\u00a0finding something to do with the inversion\u00a0gimmick beyond “good\/evil”. \u00a0Inverted Storm isn’t exactly evil so much as manipulative and scheming to get her way. \u00a0Inverted Quentin is a more\u00a0difficult proposition since he was never clear-cut good or evil to start with; the approach, reasonably enough, is to take away his urge to make grand gestures and give him a desire to reconcile with his friends, but the mopey way he’s been written in preceding issues rather undermines the contrast. \u00a0At any rate, it’s error-riddled filler, though at least it was trying to do something with the remit.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0there ends the short and thuddingly unsuccessful\u00a0second run of\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0It’s a shame that I can’t be more positive about this book, because at least Latour seemed to have\u00a0ambition. \u00a0That’s more than can be said\u00a0for X-Men<\/em> or\u00a0Amazing X-Men<\/em>,\u00a0neither of which seems to be gunning for anything beyond basic\u00a0competence. \u00a0But\u00a0for all that I can applaud Latour for setting his sights higher, there’s no getting away from\u00a0the fact that he misses far more often than he hits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first volume of Jason Latour’s\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men\u00a0run was pretty much an outright catastrophe. \u00a0The main problem was\u00a0an excessively complicated plot, which didn’t\u00a0entirely make sense to start with, and which was told in a massively confusing way. \u00a0So whatever good ideas were in there got lost in a welter of confusion. Given such a […]<\/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-2787","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\/2787","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=2787"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2839,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787\/revisions\/2839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}