{"id":3063,"date":"2015-06-14T21:31:14","date_gmt":"2015-06-14T20:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3063"},"modified":"2015-06-14T21:31:14","modified_gmt":"2015-06-14T20:31:14","slug":"wolverines-vol-4-destiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3063","title":{"rendered":"Wolverines vol 4: “Destiny”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fourth and final collection of\u00a0Wolverines<\/em> is a very, very strange comic. \u00a0Granted, “final” in that sentence should come with an asterisk, for reasons I’ll get to, but Charles Soule and Ray Fawkes’ story\u00a0winds up building to a bizarre anticlimax\u00a0that makes the book read like an exercise in trolling the readers.<\/p>\n

Not that trolling the readers is necessarily a bad thing, mind you. \u00a0X-Statix\u00a0<\/em>did it all the time. \u00a0But in this case, it winds up with\u00a0a comic\u00a0which leaves us with the intriguing puzzle of\u00a0trying to distil it down to the key elements that presumably looked promising at the pitch stage. \u00a0After all, Soule clearly\u00a0knows how to put a story together; if he produces something as odd as this, it’s presumably by design. \u00a0A misconceived design, possibly, but still a design.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At this point it’s probably useful to lay out the plot. \u00a0You’ll recall that\u00a0the series started out with\u00a0a group of\u00a0characters who had\u00a0escaped from “Paradise” with new powers given to them by\u00a0Dr Cornelius’s experiments, and a genetic time bomb that would kill them unless they\u00a0found a way to cure it. \u00a0They press ganged a bunch of Wolverine-related characters into helping them try to recover Wolverine’s corpse, in the hope of (somehow)\u00a0using his healing factor to cure them.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0this pretty straightforward set-up then proceeded to fly apart over the course of the next few volumes, as half of the Paradise characters blundered off to join Mr Sinister, Wolverine’s body was carted off by the X-Men never to be seen again, a bizarrely out-of-character Fang showed up to pay a perverse tribute to the late hero, and\u00a0Mystique seized control over the remaining cast as part of a plan to\u00a0bring Destiny back from the dead, following instructions left by Destiny herself.<\/p>\n

This volume opens with the\u00a0Paradise characters who are\u00a0still hanging out with Mystique realising that they’re starting to die. \u00a0The\u00a0other<\/em> Paradise characters show up again, and lure\u00a0everyone into a trap on behalf of Mr Sinister, who apparently just wants revenge for\u00a0them smashing up his lab in the early issues. \u00a0This leads to a big fight that fills a couple of issues and pretty much leads to nothing conclusive beyond a big explosion and the Wolverines getting freed from their control words (remember those?). \u00a0Oh, and Junk dies, but\u00a0it’s not like he\u00a0was doing much beyond padding out the cast. \u00a0And somewhere in here, Shogun ends up\u00a0submerging Ogun’s personality for good.<\/p>\n

So far,\u00a0a bit unfocussed but that’s about it. \u00a0But then the book takes a 90 degree left turn into\u00a0what passes for its climax, as Mystique enlists Portal – yes, the\u00a0guy from\u00a0Darkhawk<\/em>, who\u00a0was introduced into this series\u00a0in the previous volume with no real attempt to explain who he is – to\u00a0teleport everyone in the cast to the Nexus of All Realities. \u00a0Put shortly, her big plan is to get Siphon to absorb the healing factors of everyone else in the cast who still has one (Sabretooth, X-23 and apparently Lady Deathstrike), so that Portal can then take the energy from Siphon and use it to open the portal which will bring Destiny back to\u00a0Earth. \u00a0Everyone else tries to stop Mystique and gets defeated. \u00a0Everything seems to be building to a climax.<\/p>\n

At which point – three pages from the end – a further note from Destiny shows up,\u00a0explaining that actually the plan isn’t going to\u00a0bring her back at all. \u00a0Instead, Destiny has foreseen that bringing Wolverine back from the dead will (somehow or other) avert the destruction of the universe in\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> #1, and she’s trying to manipulate Mystique into doing that. \u00a0Mystique promptly refuses to do any such thing, closes the portal and goes home. \u00a0The end.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hmm.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with an obvious point. \u00a0While it’s dressed up to look like a climax,\u00a0solicited as a final issue, and has “END” on the final page,\u00a0the fact that X-23 and Sabretooth both lose their powers and are left bleeding on the floor is a pretty clear indication that\u00a0issue #20\u00a0should be better thought of as a cliffhanger. \u00a0The bizarrely abrupt finish works a lot better viewed in that light, and much of what goes before by way of secondary resolution seems to be a case of tying up some subplots in order to maintain the feint. \u00a0Of course, there’s no indication of where you might expect to find the next chapter (though whatever replaces\u00a0Wolverines<\/em> after\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> would seem a pretty obvious place to start looking), and the bait and switch will still have a lot of readers\u00a0throwing their copies across the room. \u00a0But it does work somewhat better\u00a0if you take it as a mid-story twist.<\/p>\n

Even then, it’s a story that pretty much invites the reaction: what the hell? \u00a0Twenty issues of Mystique working on a plan and then just abandoning it at the last minute?<\/p>\n

Well, there’s\u00a0a motif here. \u00a0I’ve pointed out\u00a0in reviewing earlier volumes\u00a0that a strikingly curious feature of\u00a0Wolverines<\/em> is how little any of it has to do with\u00a0Wolverine. \u00a0The Paradise characters are only interested in him as a means to an end; the so-called Wolverines have been dragged into the story because of their healing factors and even the ones who do mourn his passing are\u00a0mainly concerned with more pressing matters. \u00a0Fang has to show up in volumes 2 and 3 to even keep the question of Wolverine’s legacy on the page at all. \u00a0This may be\u00a0Wolverine’s stand-in title during\u00a0his death-compelled absence, but\u00a0it’s not like his presence is particularly felt.<\/p>\n

And this comes front and centre on the final page as Mystique refuses to go through with Destiny’s plan: “This is not about Wolverine. \u00a0I will not allow it. \u00a0This is my story.”<\/p>\n

So\u00a0perhaps the starting point here was\u00a0to take the obvious fact that everyone is expecting Wolverine to come back, and subvert it. \u00a0Hence Wolverine’s body being hunted for in the early issues, and then simply vanishing from the plot when it disappears into the X-Men’s custody. \u00a0I’m guessing that what Soule and Fawkes were going for was a story where Wolverine casts a long shadow over the book,\u00a0but\u00a0all the characters ignore it, trying to assert their own identities and agendas in a story that keeps trying to drag them back to Wolverine’s orbit.<\/p>\n

I say “guessing”, because\u00a0while that’s my best estimate of how this might have looked at the pitch stage, it really doesn’t work on the page. \u00a0Wolverine’s presence is pretty much absent from the second half of the story\u00a0except for the ludicrously off-kilter stuff with Fang. \u00a0The series ends up as a series of plots starting off purposefully and meandering into the long grass; Wolverine just\u00a0doesn’t have enough impact for Mystique’s closing tantrum to pay off.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0theory<\/em> there’s a great comic\u00a0in the idea of all these characters\u00a0finding that Destiny is literally forcing them to return to their established roles, and\u00a0some of them fighting against that role. \u00a0But\u00a0in practice there are two major problems with that. \u00a0One, it’s such an unfocussed mess that it doesn’t work. \u00a0And\u00a0two, the same basic idea is being done infinitely better by\u00a0Loki: Agent of Asgard<\/em>, which also has the advantage of\u00a0featuring a lead character who is a myth, making the theme of being trapped by narrative inevitability and by the tendency of stories to return to their classic form one that actually resonates.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There’s\u00a0quite probably an interesting book trying to get out here, but it’s buried very deep. \u00a0I’ll be charitable and call it a well-meaning misfire, since\u00a0if the creators were phoning it in they’d have produced something infinitely more coherent; this is the sort of bad that suggests a genuinely ambitious idea has\u00a0got hideously lost in translation on its way\u00a0to the page. \u00a0Either way, though, it really doesn’t work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fourth and final collection of\u00a0Wolverines is a very, very strange comic. \u00a0Granted, “final” in that sentence should come with an asterisk, for reasons I’ll get to, but Charles Soule and Ray Fawkes’ story\u00a0winds up building to a bizarre anticlimax\u00a0that makes the book read like an exercise in trolling the readers. Not that trolling 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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3063","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\/3063","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=3063"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3064,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3063\/revisions\/3064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}