There’s a concept in literary theory called paratext, which (as I understand it) is basically everything that isn’t strictly part of the text\u00a0proper, but\u00a0still frames the text, and affects the way you read it. \u00a0The packaging, the promotion, the design, that sort of thing. \u00a0All things that can prime you to\u00a0respond to the story in a certain way.<\/p>\n
Event stories like\u00a0“Death of Wolverine” are all about the\u00a0paratext. \u00a0If Charles Soule’s four-part story had simply appeared, without\u00a0prior publicity,\u00a0in\u00a0issue #whatever of an ongoing\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> series, and if\u00a0the continuation of that story\u00a0had just appeared in issue #whatever+1 of that same series, all without any pretext of cancellation, the audience reaction\u00a0to the final page would be very different – it would, pretty much, be that the story’s clearly not over, so\u00a0I wonder how Wolverine is going to get out of this one.<\/p>\n And so a vast amount of work goes into priming the audience to respond differently. \u00a0In a sense, of course, people are\u00a0still wondering how Wolverine is going to get out of this one – nobody\u00a0expects this to be anything more than an extended hiatus of the sort that’s been done with several characters before. \u00a0But they do at least expect him to be gone for a while. \u00a0You achieve this by loudly telling everyone that it’s a massively important story, by clearly labelling the story\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em> in what might conventionally be considered a massive spoiler, and by generally going through all the established signifiers\u00a0that the story is a big one that people will be talking about.<\/p>\n The thing to note is that this sort of promotion is not external to the storytelling. \u00a0It is<\/span><\/em> the storytelling; it is part of getting the audience to accept the story as the one that Marvel wants it to be.<\/p>\n Part of this exercise, in 2014, is to signal the story as a big and important one by surrounding it with a cloud of tie-ins. \u00a0I suspect there are two main concepts at work here – first, that\u00a0in an era where continuity is often downplayed and writers regularly feel free to ignore or summarily reverse earlier stories, they send a firm message that this is a story which other people will be expected to honour. \u00a0And second, it’s been done so often for big stories that until somebody comes up with a more imaginative way to send the right signals (or, better yet, more imaginative signals to send), you just have to do it in order to\u00a0avoid making your story look B-list.<\/p>\n Also, the\u00a0accountants probably like it.<\/p>\n So here we have Death of Wolverine: Deadpool and Captain America<\/i>,\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Death of Wolverine: Life After\u00a0Logan<\/em> (a title that sounds like some sort of demented Archie crossover,\u00a0but tragically isn’t), both of which served their primary purpose simply by existing at all, thereby demonstrating how important\u00a0the death of Wolverine is.<\/p>\n In theory, this\u00a0could be potentially liberating for the creative teams, since – precisely because the books fulfilled their remit\u00a0at the moment of solicitation – it doesn’t actually matter what they contain, and so\u00a0there’s no pressing reason why it can’t\u00a0be something interesting. \u00a0In practice, despite largely solid creators,\u00a0they’re both forgettable affairs.<\/p>\n Deadpool and Captain America<\/em> is by regular\u00a0Deadpool<\/em> writer Gerry Duggan, and artist Scott Kolins. \u00a0It’s effectively a bonus issue of\u00a0Deadpool<\/em> (which is\u00a0otherwise occupied right now with an\u00a0Axis<\/em> tie-in). \u00a0From what little I’ve seen of that book lately, Duggan\u00a0is steering Deadpool back in the direction of being a vaguely functional anti-hero who the actual\u00a0heroes will grudgingly tolerate having around – the\u00a0Axis<\/em> tie-in is actually pretty good. \u00a0But without being up to speed on where the character is currently sitting, this story just reads rather oddly, since it takes as its starting point the idea that\u00a0Steve Rogers would ask Deadpool to help him out as an important mission, and offers no explanation whatsoever of why that might be so.<\/p>\n There’s the glimmer of an interesting idea in here –\u00a0the one thing that Deadpool and Captain America both have in common with Wolverine is that\u00a0all three were the product of\u00a0experiments to create a\u00a0super-soldier. \u00a0Cap is the one who worked out great, Deadpool is the one who emphatically didn’t, and Wolverine was somewhere between the two.<\/p>\n But having thrown that idea out there, the story just meanders off into a filler story in which Deadpool and the now-aged Steve Rogers try to retrieve a knife with Wolverine’s blood on it, as part of a project to stop people cloning him. \u00a0This doesn’t really make sense as a premise to begin with – if you were a mad scientist who was minded to clone Wolverine in the first place, why would you wait till he was dead? \u00a0X-23’s creators didn’t. \u00a0Beyond that, it’s a fairly generic runaround; it’s possible the interplay with Cap works better for people following Deadpool’s development in his own series, but for those of us just dropping in, there’s not much\u00a0here. \u00a0Oddly, the final page\u00a0sets up a dangling subplot – Deadpool winds up with the sample and considers using it to make his own Wolverine clone – but\u00a0it feels more like something to be picked up in\u00a0Deadpool<\/em>.<\/p>\n Life After\u00a0Logan<\/em> is an anthology of, well, people mourning Wolverine. \u00a0There’s a fairly obvious format for\u00a0this sort of story – character X is\u00a0mourning, character X\u00a0has an insight about how Wolverine would want to be remembered which helps him come to terms with Wolverine’s death, character X starts to move on –\u00a0and there’s only so many times you can read it. \u00a0And we\u00a0already had it in\u00a0Nightcrawler<\/em>.<\/p>\n Jeff Loveness and\u00a0Mario Del Pennino do a Cyclops story in which he whines a lot and then pays tribute to Wolverine by getting into a bar fight. \u00a0That last bit is quite good,\u00a0but the rest is decidedly overwrought, and strays into\u00a0having Cyclops openly question whether he’s ruined the X-Men – territory best left\u00a0until\u00a0Bendis is ready to go there. \u00a0There’s some fairly routine stuff about their relationship,\u00a0and not really enough about how Cyclops feels about not\u00a0resolving their differences before he died.<\/p>\n Joshua Hale Fialkov and Iban Coello have Nightcrawler and Colossus taking up Wolverine’s annual pilgrimage to Mariko Yashida’s grave, which is a more interesting\u00a0starting point. \u00a0The story then singularly fails to identify anywhere to go from there. \u00a0Yes, going to Japan and getting into a fight is indeed the sort of thing Wolverine would do;\u00a0it’s\u00a0hardly a\u00a0revelation.<\/p>\n Finally, Rex Ogle and Patrick Scherberger go back to the stock mourning arc, as\u00a0Hellion offers hopelessly\u00a0tactless “support” to Armor. \u00a0Since there were occasional attempts to play up Armor as Wolverine’s next girl sidekick (such as the\u00a0Alpha & Omega<\/em> miniseries), she’s a sensible character to check in on. \u00a0Unfortunately, the\u00a0story has some wonky ideas\u00a0about Armor’s powers that should have been straightened out by the editors. \u00a0Its big concept\u00a0is that Armor felt it when Wolverine died, because his spirit joined the ghosts that empower her armour. \u00a0That’s a nice idea, except for (a)\u00a0how’s that going to work when he inevitably comes back from the dead, (b) the idea that Armor is powered by the spirits of the dead comes from a Daniel Way\u00a0Astonishing X-Men<\/em> story which established that\u00a0the spirits in question are those of her family, something this story doesn’t seem to be aware of, and (c) when\u00a0Wolverine died, Armor was tied up in a\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em> subplot about her powers not working, a point also picked up in that book when it did its own scene of her reacting to Wolverine’s death. \u00a0So, oops.<\/p>\n Oh, and it does the exact same “bar fight” angle as the first story. \u00a0At least the second story went for “Japanese fight”. \u00a0Not exactly a fabulous testimony to the multi-faceted nature of the character, though, is it?<\/p>\n So, yeah – we’re firmly in completist-only territory with this stuff. \u00a0None of it’s horrible,\u00a0exactly, but all you really need to know about any of it is that it exists at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a concept in literary theory called paratext, which (as I understand it) is basically everything that isn’t strictly part of the text\u00a0proper, but\u00a0still frames the text, and affects the way you read it. \u00a0The packaging, the promotion, the design, that sort of thing. \u00a0All things that can prime you to\u00a0respond to the story in 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