There’s a time honoured tradition in the X-books\u00a0of following up a vaguely regrettable crossover with a rather better\u00a0single-issue character\u00a0piece. \u00a0Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley actually had the best of the\u00a0“Apocalypse Wars” crossovers,\u00a0even if that still fell short of completely working,\u00a0but this issue gives us the traditional change of gear, as the series turns its attention back to Warren and Laura.<\/p>\n
So this is a nice,\u00a0simple, light story on which a bigger point can be hung.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While everyone else is off doing their own thing,\u00a0Laura is\u00a0stuck in the X-Men’s mobile HQ with the recuperating Cyclops. \u00a0Being a detail-oriented obsessive himself, he’s\u00a0come up with a list of solo missions she might want to have a crack at if she wants to get out of the house. \u00a0(The\u00a0fact that we’ve got Scott in a wheelchair\u00a0as he’s starting to morph into\u00a0his more familiar leadership role is\u00a0cute and understated.) \u00a0What follows is Laura trying to\u00a0work her way through the list only to discover that someone keeps getting there before her. \u00a0The pay-off is that it turns out to be Warren, who said he was off to Milan Fashion Week, but actually needs to indulge the violent impulses of the wings he got from the Black Vortex.<\/p>\n
Yes, I thought they’d forgotten that storyline too. \u00a0Nice to see they haven’t.<\/p>\n
Anyway. \u00a0The cover\u00a0has\u00a0Warren and Laura together\u00a0in a pinkish-purple glow that looks rather lovely on screen,\u00a0taking the light from his wings and\u00a0using it to make more of a Valentine’s\u00a0card effect. \u00a0It’s a great image but it risks blowing the twist. \u00a0The start of the story gets rid of him very quickly and gives him only slightly more prominence than the rest of\u00a0the cast, who we never see again. \u00a0The fact that he’s on the cover ought to make it\u00a0abundantly\u00a0obvious that he’s coming back.<\/p>\n
But\u00a0Hopeless and Bagley get away with it,\u00a0thanks to some pretty decent misdirection\u00a0– not so much\u00a0in terms of the mystery of how someone is getting there first, but by using this as an excuse to chuck out the sort of throwaway ideas that imply a cool story we’re not getting to see (an environmentalist Hand splinter group called the Green Thumb, or the Right trying to hoover up the Terrigen Cloud in a stupid flying tanker truck with a big smiley face). \u00a0One of them actually is a subplot setting up a future story.<\/p>\n
More to the point,\u00a0these scenes\u00a0have some strong ideas on Laura’s character and on the fairly obvious change in the way she’s been written since the Secret Wars\u00a0<\/em>eight-month gap. \u00a0This story makes it clear that she’s rather confused about what she’s trying to achieve by taking on the Wolverine identity – to some extent she’s trying fake acting normal\u00a0in the hope that it’ll eventually come naturally to her,\u00a0but mixed in with this are some garbled\u00a0notions that being more like Logan is a part of acting\u00a0less cold and more “normal”. \u00a0In her mind, her over the top recklessness in earlier issues wasn’t some sort of ostentatious self-harming, but a clumsy attempt at extroversion, from someone whose notion of normalcy is sufficiently skewed that\u00a0she thinks Logan qualifies. \u00a0There’s a degree of self-justification and rationalisation in here too, but that’s a good thing; this is a\u00a0well rounded take on Laura.<\/p>\n At any rate, the point of all this is to have Warren and Laura reunited as a couple, partly by getting them to clear the air, and partly on the more ominous basis that Warren’s need to control his new violent impulses has given them common ground.<\/p>\n Quite how any of this ties up with Laura’s status quo in her own series, by the way, where she’s in her own apartment and has a little sister, and so forth, I have no idea. \u00a0I suppose all of this is taking place before anything that’s happened yet in\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em>? \u00a0It’s a bit awkward, to put it mildly. \u00a0And the opening scene with Laura and Scott, where she seems surprised to realise how much they have in common, feels like it’s forgotten the fact that the two of them were being teased as a couple for a\u00a0while back in the Bendis run.<\/p>\n And yes, I’m a bit wary of going back to “Warren has more powerful wings but they’re evil now”, which surely ran its course back in the 80s and 90s. \u00a0Still, it feels like we’re taking a subtler approach to it this time round, at least to start with – more of a nagging sense of habit and a shortened temper with a sense that it could be more. \u00a0And besides, it’s the status quo that the\u00a0current creative team inherited, so\u00a0it has to be dealt with\u00a0somehow.<\/p>\n All told, this is a decent issue. \u00a0It’s got some genuinely\u00a0worthwhile ideas about\u00a0these two characters,\u00a0Laura in particular – and it\u00a0works them into a fun\u00a0one-shot story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a time honoured tradition in the X-books\u00a0of following up a vaguely regrettable crossover with a rather better\u00a0single-issue character\u00a0piece. \u00a0Dennis Hopeless and Mark Bagley actually had the best of the\u00a0“Apocalypse Wars” crossovers,\u00a0even if that still fell short of completely working,\u00a0but this issue gives us the traditional change of gear, as the series turns its attention […]<\/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-3508","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\/3508","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=3508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3509,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3508\/revisions\/3509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}