{"id":2833,"date":"2015-01-25T12:42:43","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T12:42:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2833"},"modified":"2015-01-25T12:42:43","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T12:42:43","slug":"death-of-wolverine-the-weapon-x-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2833","title":{"rendered":"Death of Wolverine: The Weapon X Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re running a few weeks behind here – the first\u00a0Wolverines<\/em> arc will be finished imminently, come to think of it – but let’s not allow\u00a0Weapon X Program<\/em> to completely pass us by. \u00a0That said. we probably need to say a few worlds about\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> first, don’t we?<\/p>\n

The official line from Marvel is that\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> represents the end of the Marvel Universe and the Ultimate Universe, after which we’re going to get\u00a0“Battleworld”, which seems to be some sort of mash-up of\u00a0alternate worlds and such forth. \u00a0This is, pretty obviously, what Jonathan Hickman has been building to in\u00a0Avengers<\/em> for a while, and also what Brian Bendis has been\u00a0moving towards with\u00a0all the stuff about time breaking down, as which of course forms the central premise of\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Fairly obviously, Battleworld is not going to be a long-term status quo. \u00a0A more immediate concern is that, from the looks of it, it’s going to sprawl across the entire line for several months. \u00a0Marvel has a pretty bad track record of taking a vaguely cool concept and spreading it so thin that any halfway sensible reader grows to hate it by the time the story is halfway through, and warning bells are already ringing for me that this could be another case of the interminables. \u00a0But leave that aside and let’s ask what comes next. \u00a0The obvious implication is, if not a reboot, at least some sort of continuity streamlining.<\/p>\n

Claiming that the Ultimate Universe is going to be folded into the Marvel Universe is not much of a selling point, because we all know what that means – it means the Marvel Universe with added Miles Morales. \u00a0Aside from him, the Ultimate Universe is basically a shuffling corpse, and it’s\u00a0hard to imagine a serious\u00a0attempt to\u00a0simply import these failed versions of the same characters. \u00a0More likely, we’re going to get something that smushes a bunch of\u00a0histories together and tries to fudge it all,\u00a0Crisis<\/em>-style, by claiming that the result is\u00a0both<\/em> a reboot\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0a continuation of what went before.<\/p>\n

Remember,\u00a0Crisis<\/em> was not conceived specifically as a reboot, but as a folding of multiple continuities into one. \u00a0The problems started mounting up when\u00a0DC decided to completely rewrite the history of several major characters, screwing up the\u00a0histories of those books that\u00a0were<\/em> trying to continue as\u00a0before, ultimately resulting in a continuity train wreck that DC never really managed to sort out before eventually dynamiting the whole thing and starting over. \u00a0Hopefully, if Marvel\u00a0are going down\u00a0the partial reboot route, they’ve\u00a0planned it out more carefully. \u00a0The fact that this has evidently been in the works for ages is promising in that regard. \u00a0But we’ll see.<\/p>\n

The other problem, once you announce something like\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>, is how to\u00a0stop the stories appearing now from looking like lame ducks that are marking time until the\u00a0shake-up. \u00a0Of course, if your story is actually building to the\u00a0shake-up, as\u00a0Avengers<\/em> and\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> are (at least notionally) doing, that’s one thing. \u00a0But\u00a0– to bring us back to the notional topic of this post – something like killing Wolverine is in a trickier position. \u00a0After all, it’s precisely the sort of supposedly universe-breaking stunt that you can do really quite easily if the universe itself is\u00a0imminently heading for the reset button anyway.<\/p>\n

Perhaps all you can do in these circumstances is work to convince the reader that you\u00a0do have a story to tell, and you will be completing it with\u00a0a proper ending rather than a cosmic reset button. \u00a0Charles Soule wisely isn’t doing stories about people trying to bring Wolverine back from the dead;\u00a0the characters in\u00a0Weapon X Project<\/em> barely know who he is and don’t greatly care whether he’s alive or not. \u00a0Their story – which is about a bunch of Dr Cornelius’ experimental subjects escaping from his facility in the confusion after Wolverine’s death – is about things that have nothing much to do with wider Marvel Universe continuity at all, which at least promises that the story is likely to resolve on its own terms.<\/p>\n

This series is largely an exercise in introducing\u00a0five new main characters, and setting up the premise of the\u00a0Wolverines<\/em> series to follow, by introducing the organisation that\u00a0sat behind Cornelius and was sponsoring his work. \u00a0And the new cast\u00a0are a fairly appealing bunch, with distinctive personalities and an intriguing group dynamic. \u00a0They’re not really heroes so much as people stuck together by force of circumstances. \u00a0Neuro is plainly an outright scheming villain\u00a0who is only\u00a0sticking around so long as it makes sense as an alliance of convenience, and by the end, everyone knows it. \u00a0Sharp\u00a0is the obvious hero, but stuck with a voice in his head that keeps trying to steer him in the wrong direction. \u00a0Skel and Endo are likeable\u00a0if confused. \u00a0(Endo is probably the weakest of the characters thus far, in as much as she’s not really bringing anything to the table beyond\u00a0bursts of panic.) \u00a0And Junk seems to be the dark horse; a couple of references imply\u00a0a fairly nasty criminal past which he wants to keep to himself, but unlike Neuro, he appears to\u00a0be a genuine team player.<\/p>\n

It’s\u00a0pretty decent on the whole, and it’s a nice change for an X-book to commit unequivocally to telling stories about entirely new characters. \u00a0Granted, it may have been a mistake to start the series by teasing that the voice in Sharp’s head is Wolverine. \u00a0It works in terms of the book’s plot. \u00a0It seems vaguely like something that could happen in the Marvel Universe, and the actual\u00a0explanation (it’s a weakened Ogun who can’t quite possess Sharp and is trying to string him along) makes sense. \u00a0But it also means that the book kicks off by teasing something that would\u00a0have been entirely\u00a0groan worthy –\u00a0namely, bringing back Wolverine only a couple of weeks after he died – which\u00a0isn’t a great way of setting the tone.<\/p>\n

Oh, and while it starts off with Salvador Larroca on art, he vanishes after three issues, to be replaced by Angel Unzueta. \u00a0The style is pretty consistent, though,\u00a0and Unzueta’s work doesn’t feel rushed.<\/p>\n

As five issue set-up arcs go, this\u00a0is\u00a0fine. \u00a0If nothing else, it clearly achieves its main goal of\u00a0establishing key concepts and giving us reasons to care about\u00a0the characters. \u00a0There have been better Wolverine stories than Soule is writing, but considering the tricky remit he’s been landed with, the fact that he’s landing consistently in the B+ range is no small achievement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re running a few weeks behind here – the first\u00a0Wolverines arc will be finished imminently, come to think of it – but let’s not allow\u00a0Weapon X Program to completely pass us by. \u00a0That said. we probably need to say a few worlds about\u00a0Secret Wars first, don’t we? The official line from Marvel is that\u00a0Secret Wars […]<\/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-2833","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\/2833","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=2833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2900,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833\/revisions\/2900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}