{"id":3451,"date":"2016-06-08T22:32:58","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T21:32:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3451"},"modified":"2016-06-08T22:32:58","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T21:32:58","slug":"all-new-wolverine-8-9-the-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3451","title":{"rendered":"All-New Wolverine #8-9 – “The Box”"},"content":{"rendered":"

After\u00a0Squirrel Girl dropped by for issue #7,\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> stays in surprisingly flippant mode for this two-parter, bafflingly billed as a “Road to\u00a0Civil War II<\/em>” tie-in. \u00a0Now, I’m not reading\u00a0Civil War II<\/em>, because\u00a0from the sound of it it’s basically\u00a0Minority Report<\/em> with Inhumans, which\u00a0doesn’t sound like an improvement. \u00a0So I\u00a0can’t say for sure that\u00a0these two issues contain nothing that’s relevant to\u00a0Civil War II<\/em>, but it’s certainly tempting to conclude that a\u00a0“Road to…” banner is\u00a0Marvelese for “even we couldn’t bring ourselves to claim this was an actual tie-in\u00a0story”.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The plot, then. \u00a0SHIELD\u00a0raid a baddie\u00a0(who I guess might be something to do with the crossover, but if so, it doesn’t matter) who’s auctioning off a\u00a0dangerous box. \u00a0The box is\u00a0retrieved but a bunch of agents go missing. \u00a0Maria Hill drags Wolverine in to help investigate, then reveals that she’s actually the second choice, because they previously sent\u00a0old Logan in, and they’ve lost him too. \u00a0Wolverine\/Laura isn’t best impressed by this, since she doesn’t regard him as the real Logan. \u00a0At which point it turns out that the dangerous weapon in the box is a pheromone that drives Fin Fang Foom\u00a0into a violent rage, and the\u00a0whole thing goes utterly nuts.<\/p>\n

So the second part of this\u00a0story\u00a0consists, pretty much entirely, of\u00a0Wolverine travelling down Fin Fang Foom’s gullet in order to retrieve Logan from his stomach,\u00a0having a brief team-up with some Avengers which I guess might be setting something up for the crossover, and then luring the big dragon out to sea where he can be dealt with safely. \u00a0It’s all pretty much insane.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0I said\u00a0with regard to issue #7,\u00a0I’d much rather read Wolverine played this way – as the put-upon voice of reason in a lunatic world – than in an entire world which\u00a0is as grim as she is. \u00a0Not only is the contrast better this way, but it’s just a\u00a0more cheerful book to read. \u00a0We’ve seen over the years that Laura can easily turn into a grindingly bleak character, which can work in small doses, but as a lead, she’s more effective when she’s\u00a0allowed to just be cool as well.<\/p>\n

And there are some very smart character bits in here too. \u00a0Tom Taylor and artist Marcio Takara do a fantastic job with the rapport between Laura and her younger clone Gabby, who’s settling into a role as the cheerfully enthusiastic one. \u00a0It’s a bit of a Batman and Robin relationship, come to think of it, which has always been an influence in pairing the original Wolverine with teen sidekicks. \u00a0The added element here is the idea that Gabby is illustrating what Laura could have been,\u00a0with the uncertainty about whether it’s something she could ever recapture. \u00a0But she serves a great job in keeping the tone light and in helping to bring Laura out of herself by forcing her into a mentor role. \u00a0(Probably wisely, the story is careful to describe them as sisters rather than to position Laura as a parent.)<\/p>\n

Granted, you can query the\u00a0evident assumption that everyone’s already heard of Fin Fang Foom, since there’s no real attempt to explain what the big dragon actually is. \u00a0And you can certain raise an eyebrow at the\u00a0“driven into a frenzy by pheromones” thing,\u00a0given that the “trigger scent” schtick was\u00a0pushed so heavily with Laura herself for such a long time, and doesn’t\u00a0get raised here at all. \u00a0Yes, Laura’s a bit busy in this story, but you’d think that\u00a0would be more of an issue for her here. \u00a0That said, it’s hard to tell whether or not this is a deliberate choice – it would be a very strange thing to overlook. \u00a0It’s\u00a0conceivable that Laura’s failure to rise to the bait might be intended as a deliberate character point, but\u00a0there are no real clues here one way or the other.<\/p>\n

Then again, Taylor started off the series seeming to grossly overstate Laura’s relationship with the original Logan, and it became clear\u00a0as time went on that it was more a case of Laura overstating it. \u00a0Which brings us to the old\u00a0Logan. \u00a0He’s used a little oddly here, running errands for SHIELD, which really isn’t quite right for the character as Jeff Lemire has been writing him. \u00a0Lemire’s version of the character largely seems minded to stay out of everything he doesn’t have a direct stake in, and it’s far from obvious why this particular mission would have been of any great interest to him. \u00a0Again, depending on your level of charity, you might assume Taylor is getting to this, but there’s not really anything in the story to suggest it.<\/p>\n

At any rate, despite his involvement being a big reveal in part one, Logan actually has very little to do in part two, where is job is mainly to get rescued. \u00a0It’s clear that he’s in this story mainly to bring him into the book so that Laura can interact with him properly next time. \u00a0Laura is instantly dismissive of him when he’s first mentioned – she’s happy enough to rescue him, of course, but she resents any suggestion that she ought to acknowledge him as a\u00a0proper version of\u00a0Logan\u00a0or feel any particular affection towards him. \u00a0(“He’s from another dimension, or the future, or both. \u00a0He’s not Logan.”)<\/p>\n

So\u00a0there’s a\u00a0good kick to the epilogue, which establishes that this version of Logan actually\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0act as a father figure for his version of Laura, precisely the sort of relationship that\u00a0Laura wanted to have with the original. \u00a0That’s a nice set-up which makes me really interested to see\u00a0what happens in the next story –\u00a0which will hopefully be as marginal a\u00a0Civil War II<\/em> crossover as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After\u00a0Squirrel Girl dropped by for issue #7,\u00a0All-New Wolverine stays in surprisingly flippant mode for this two-parter, bafflingly billed as a “Road to\u00a0Civil War II” tie-in. \u00a0Now, I’m not reading\u00a0Civil War II, because\u00a0from the sound of it it’s basically\u00a0Minority Report with Inhumans, which\u00a0doesn’t sound like an improvement. \u00a0So I\u00a0can’t say for sure that\u00a0these two issues contain […]<\/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-3451","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\/3451","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=3451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3452,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3451\/revisions\/3452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}