Legacy characters, then. \u00a0It’s not a phenomenon that’s\u00a0come up that often in the X-books. \u00a0We’ve had duplicate versions of the same character, but not many cases of the same identity being passed on. \u00a0Off the top of my head,\u00a0Thunderbird and Phoenix spring to mind, and only Rachel Summers really had\u00a0a full-blown\u00a0legacy to inherit.<\/p>\n
Sensible comics readers have been trained to be cynical. \u00a0Top-tier heroes get replaced with temporary stand-ins all the time. \u00a0For every Wally West, who actually did\u00a0become established as the real Flash, there are many more John Walkers and Eric Mastersons and Jean-Paul Valleys. \u00a0Of course, in\u00a0many of those cases, the\u00a0fact that they weren’t the “real” version of the character was kind of the point. \u00a0Still, it’s a\u00a0device heavily associated with gimmickry.<\/p>\n
And some\u00a0concepts are better suited to legacy characters than others. \u00a0The likes of Iron Man, Thor and Green Lantern\u00a0are easy –\u00a0just pick\u00a0a new character and give them the armour, hammer or ring, delete as appropriate. \u00a0At the other end are concepts that are more character-driven, or so tied to some specific event that it feels horribly contrived to claim it happened twice. \u00a0A\u00a0new Deadpool wouldn’t work, because the hook of Deadpool is the voice of the character, and if that’s going to stay the same, why bother?<\/p>\n
Where does Wolverine fit into that spectrum? \u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> wants\u00a0to present Laura as having taken up the mantle of Wolverine after his death. \u00a0Let’s gloss over the fact that we already had a lengthy series following on his death,\u00a0which with hindsight never got anything approaching a proper ending, and which it seems we’re now just going to pretend didn’t happen. \u00a0Is Wolverine really a “mantle” kind of character?<\/p>\n I’m not really convinced that he is, but\u00a0that’s\u00a0not to say that there isn’t some interest in the concept here. \u00a0Laura’s on-panel relationship with Logan was decidedly understated, but\u00a0given her suppressed personality, there’s some logic in the idea of her\u00a0feeling more strongly about it than she let on. \u00a0Logan isn’t directly a heavy presence in these issues, save for a dream sequence in issue #1. \u00a0But he’s certainly implied, and issues #4 and #5 both see guest stars turning up to spell out what the contrast between the two Wolverines is supposed to be. \u00a0From all this, it seems clear that writer Tom Taylor\u00a0sees Laura as\u00a0someone who’s similar but more controlled, and less prone to fits of rage. \u00a0I can see where he’s coming from, but it’s been many years since\u00a0Logan was regularly written that way\u00a0either.<\/p>\n Still,\u00a0both this title and\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> have probably made a good move by breaking Laura out of her established, rather flat persona and making her a bit more communicative and emotionally savvy. \u00a0There were limits on what could be done with her before, and at some point she had to start integrating back into society. \u00a0It’s not\u00a0that she’s any more emotional than\u00a0we’ve seen in the past, it’s more that she seems\u00a0better able to read situations,\u00a0something which used to leave her permanently freaked out and marginalised. \u00a0You can do more with her this way.<\/p>\n The story involves a group of X-23 clones\u00a0on the run from their creators in a rogue division of Alchemax. \u00a0Rather oddly, Laura initially agrees to help hunt them down (well, maybe she\u00a0just wants info), but it’s not long before she’s hooked up with three other X-23s and helping them fight back. \u00a0This is quite a neat inversion of the legacy set-up, casting\u00a0this more functional version of Laura in the mentor role against three younger\u00a0versions of herself who are at different ages,\u00a0and\u00a0different points\u00a0on the\u00a0same character arc. \u00a0Bellona, the oldest, is bitterly vindictive; Gabrielle is a relative innocent who can still be diverted before anything too awful happens to her. \u00a0All of them seem a bit out of touch with the real world. \u00a0(“How did they find us so quickly?” \u00a0“I don’t know. \u00a0Maybe because we’re basically driving a tank through a city street?”) \u00a0If these characters are going to stick around – and it seems at least a couple of them\u00a0are – then there’s going to be a lot of possibilities in following up these divergent versions of Laura, now that they’ve been split off from her life story.<\/p>\n The art is by David Lopez and\u00a0David Navarrot, with Nathan Fairbairn on colours. \u00a0It’s a nice looking series. \u00a0I’m always delighted to see Lopez’s name on a book; he’s a great character artist, who\u00a0can keep the multiple Lauras distinct, not just in costume, but in age, body language and demeanour. \u00a0The costume designs for the other Lauras are great as well, with\u00a0vaguely unsettling blank masks that keep them out of conventional superhero territory. \u00a0And the potential for confusion is used very nicely in the final issue – something which only really works because the book has been so careful to avoid in\u00a0the rest of\u00a0the arc.<\/p>\n I’m not sure about\u00a0the decision to devote\u00a0issues #4 and #5 to guest appearances by Dr Strange and the Wasp, which pretty much serve to\u00a0provide a bit of busy work in order to\u00a0delay the finale. \u00a0If the idea is to show Laura as integrated into the Marvel Universe, and\u00a0ascended into Logan’s role, it seems strange to choose characters who had so little to do with him. \u00a0And\u00a0the bad guys are thoroughly one dimensional,\u00a0though that’s not a huge issue – it’s not their story, and giving us any real reason to be sympathetic to them would just cloud the issue of how the various Lauras feel about them.<\/p>\n I’m interested, then. \u00a0There are a\u00a0couple of odd choices, and the attempted contrast with the original Wolverine doesn’t work for me at all, largely because it seems to be calling back to the Wolverine of thirty plus\u00a0years ago. \u00a0But the art is great, the retooling of Laura broadens her range, and I like the idea of casting her in the same role towards her clones that Logan had\u00a0for her (even if it’s a role he never actually performed). \u00a0If we’re going to see more of\u00a0Gabrielle, the child X-23, that’ll keep\u00a0me happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Legacy characters, then. \u00a0It’s not a phenomenon that’s\u00a0come up that often in the X-books. \u00a0We’ve had duplicate versions of the same character, but not many cases of the same identity being passed on. \u00a0Off the top of my head,\u00a0Thunderbird and Phoenix spring to mind, and only Rachel Summers really had\u00a0a full-blown\u00a0legacy to inherit. Sensible comics […]<\/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-3312","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\/3312","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=3312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3388,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3312\/revisions\/3388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}