{"id":3418,"date":"2016-05-03T22:22:33","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T21:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3418"},"modified":"2016-05-03T22:22:33","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T21:22:33","slug":"all-new-wolverine-7-father-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3418","title":{"rendered":"All-New Wolverine #7 – “Father Lost”"},"content":{"rendered":"

All-New Wolverine<\/em>‘s next storyline leads into\u00a0Civil War II<\/em>. \u00a0But first, it has an issue to spare. \u00a0So, in this issue, Wolverine\u00a0finds a lost squirrel.<\/p>\n

More precisely, Wolverine teams up with Squirrel Girl to find a lost squirrel. \u00a0It surely goes without saying that this is an excellent idea. \u00a0Squirrel Girl is great – not just because\u00a0her own series is one of the best things\u00a0in the line right now, but because\u00a0of the character herself. \u00a0After years\u00a0languishing in obscurity as a footnote for Ditko enthusiasts,\u00a0she’s\u00a0turned into a surprisingly workable character\u00a0who balances her relentless optimism, goofball\u00a0enthusiasm\u00a0and baffling naivety with\u00a0a legitimate superhero core that makes her perfectly workable across the wider Marvel Universe. \u00a0She is a ray of sunshine wherever she goes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And this makes her a perfect foil for\u00a0a character like Laura –\u00a0reserved, brooding, and with a horrific torture-ridden back story. \u00a0There are\u00a0broadly two ways\u00a0a story can go with her. \u00a0One is to make the whole story as grim\u00a0as she is. \u00a0In small doses that can work – it was fine in her origin mini, for example – but in the long run it\u00a0winds up with the less enjoyable incarnations of\u00a0X-Force<\/em>, in which a bunch of disturbed\u00a0antiheroes\u00a0gather in low lighting for a bleak-off. \u00a0If you don’t really nail the psychology, it gets a bit wearing.<\/p>\n

The other approach, which is a lot more fun, is to play up the contrast between her and everyone around her,\u00a0in which case you actually want to surround her with relatively cheerful types. \u00a0This is kind of how\u00a0Logan worked; he was a much more memorable character for being\u00a0paired with the likes of Nightcrawler, than he ever would have been if he’d been\u00a0hanging around with more similar characters like the Punisher or even\u00a0Nick Fury. \u00a0In the X-Men, he stood out.<\/p>\n

Clearly, writer\u00a0Tom Taylor is going for option 2. \u00a0Artist Marcio Takara isn’t familiar to me, but\u00a0he’s a solid artist for \u00a0comedy superheroes,\u00a0who knows how to sell the contrast between Wolverine and Squirrel Girl without going over the top. \u00a0He can also draw a good squirrel, which is vitally important. \u00a0But this is a character-driven humour issue which needs lightness of touch, and he delivers that.<\/p>\n

There are some darker bits even in this story, mostly in the form of flashbacks to Laura remembering her relationship with Logan. \u00a0But they’re probably more effective for being the moments of shade in a story about hunting for a lost squirrel (which, by the way, spins off a throwaway line of dialogue in issue #3, where Laura stuck a tracker on a squirrel to confuse the baddies). \u00a0It’s also evident that Gabby – the pre-teen clone of Laura who got out before she was as badly damaged as the original – will be sticking around as a supporting character and daughter figure, which seems like an excellent idea.<\/p>\n

The drama here\u00a0turns on Laura’s decision\u00a0about what she’s going to do with Gabby. \u00a0It was pretty obvious in the first arc that the idea\u00a0of bringing in the clones was that\u00a0in dealing with them, Laura would have to take on the role of the absent Logan. \u00a0That becomes explicit here, as we have Laura initially dealing with Gabby in the same way Logan dealt with her, but then changing her mind\u00a0on seeing\u00a0the importance of family. \u00a0Having that point illustrated by a squirrel is the sort of thing that could easily be desperately corny and rather painful, but\u00a0the book pulls it off, which\u00a0is some pretty neat balancing of tone in itself.<\/p>\n

Up to now,\u00a0this series – or at least, its recap pages – have largely tended to\u00a0play up Laura’s relationship with\u00a0Logan as something that was highly important to her, so that his death has driven her to take up the mantle. \u00a0This always seemed a bit dubious, in terms of anything we actually\u00a0saw on the page. \u00a0While it would have made\u00a0a lot of sense for\u00a0him to take her under his wing, he never really did so. \u00a0In fact,\u00a0the most prominent storyline I can recall about their relationship was in X-Force,\u00a0with the idea being that Logan was choosing to exploit her as a weapon rather than help her.<\/p>\n

This issue suggests that the book isn’t going for quite such a glowing take on their relationship after all. \u00a0It does show Laura being more comfortable\u00a0with him than\u00a0anyone else at the school, but\u00a0it also has that as a distinctly relative concept. \u00a0The reality, and this is rather closer to the way they were actually written in the past, is that Laura is kind of sort of tentatively reaching out to him as somebody who understands her, and he’s pretty much telling her to\u00a0stick it out at the school, before buggering off for another solo adventure. \u00a0It’s a relationship that both characters feel they\u00a0ought<\/em> to have, but never actually develop. \u00a0That’s fine by me; it’s a much more natural outgrowth of\u00a0previous stories, and it adds a slightly sad undercurrent to her taking on the Wolverine identity.<\/p>\n

What makes this a good issue, though, is that all that sits very happily alongside a story where Laura teams up with a mad girl to\u00a0find a lost squirrel. \u00a0She\u00a0should do that more often.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All-New Wolverine‘s next storyline leads into\u00a0Civil War II. \u00a0But first, it has an issue to spare. \u00a0So, in this issue, Wolverine\u00a0finds a lost squirrel. More precisely, Wolverine teams up with Squirrel Girl to find a lost squirrel. \u00a0It surely goes without saying that this is an excellent idea. \u00a0Squirrel Girl is great – not just […]<\/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-3418","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\/3418","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=3418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3419,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3418\/revisions\/3419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}