{"id":3562,"date":"2016-10-07T22:43:10","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T21:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3562"},"modified":"2016-10-07T22:43:10","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T21:43:10","slug":"all-new-wolverine-civil-war-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3562","title":{"rendered":"All-New Wolverine: Civil War II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even in their present depleted condition, the X-books\u00a0still have a knack for skilfully sidestepping mega-crossovers. \u00a0 \u00a0Their contribution to\u00a0Civil War II<\/em> consisted of two books: an X-Men miniseries (which\u00a0I’ll come to), and this storyline from\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> #10-12.<\/p>\n

With that in mind, I haven’t been reading\u00a0Civil War II<\/em> at all, so\u00a0all I know about it is the general premise. \u00a0Fortunately, as tends to be\u00a0the way with Marvel’s\u00a0event crossovers, that’s really all you need to know for this arc.<\/p>\n

That premise is simple: a new Inhuman shows up who can predict the future, and there’s a big argument about\u00a0how far to go in taking pre-emptive action on the basis of what he predicts. \u00a0Let’s leave aside the obvious point that it doesn’t really work as a Marvel Universe premise because\u00a0there\u00a0always were ways of seeing (or even visiting) the future if you were so minded. \u00a0Let’s assume\u00a0the miniseries has either explained that away or blithely ignored it. \u00a0Continuity\u00a0issues aside, the concept is okay. \u00a0It’s\u00a0Minority Report<\/em>, after all.<\/p>\n

And because the prediction can be pretty much anything, it offers precisely what Marvel likes in a line-wide crossover: the concept that can be used as a springboard for\u00a0plenty of other stories, thus allowing vast numbers of comics to be marketed legitimately as tie-ins, without actually contributing anything to, and thus overcomplicating, the central plot. \u00a0This generally doesn’t work out as well as Marvel like to imagine, simply because they produce so very many tie-ins over a period of several months that the big idea winds up looking hopelessly threadbare by the time the whole thing wraps. \u00a0Secret Invasion<\/em> was especially bad for that – how many Skrulls stories can you do, really? \u00a0So if you’re reading tons of these\u00a0Civil War II<\/em> tie-ins, I imagine they all come off looking worse.<\/p>\n

For example, these three issues of\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> are, on the surface,\u00a0a brisk jaunt through precisely the plot beats you’d expect:\u00a0Ulysses has predicted that Logan (the old one) is going to kill Gabby; Captain America and SHIELD show up at Laura’s door to stop him; this only elevates the tensions; and the whole thing winds up looking like a self-fulfilling prophecy. \u00a0There’s a slight\u00a0cop-out where it turns out that\u00a0the prediction is accurate but Gabby isn’t dead after all (thanks to her healing factor, which Laura didn’t know about, but which was quietly established in passing in an\u00a0earlier issue), and Logan gives us a hint that, in his world at least, things\u00a0did indeed turn out quite badly between Laura and Gabby. \u00a0And that’s the plot.<\/p>\n

But the whole thing is worked well\u00a0into the book’s existing stories. \u00a0That’s partly because Tom Taylor’s a very good character writer who can liven up this sort of story with the little asides. \u00a0Ig Guara’s art isn’t always to my taste, and the older Logan feels a bit off model throughout –\u00a0maybe\u00a0the model itself is too close to the normal Wolverine,\u00a0but\u00a0there’s something about the overly elderly head and the overly muscular body that doesn’t work here. \u00a0But Guara does get\u00a0personality into Laura and Gabby,\u00a0whose naive enthusiasm with occasional lapses into momentary darkness\u00a0comes across well.<\/p>\n

Moreover, though, this is\u00a0nicely structured to dovetail with the themes of the series. \u00a0The whole point of the series, after all, is\u00a0that Gabby is literally a younger version of\u00a0Laura who\u00a0may or may not have been rescued in time to avoid her winding up in the same damaged state. \u00a0So to some extent it’s already\u00a0<\/em>a book about destiny and how far it\u00a0can be influenced, which makes Laura particularly touchy about any suggestion that\u00a0anything is writ in stone. \u00a0The future Logan complicates matters by offering both an\u00a0illustration of a future which apparently didn’t come to pass, and by initially choosing not to act on his suspicions about Gabby (beyond the perfectly reasonable decision to keep an eye on her and see what happens). \u00a0Ulysses’ predictions are used in a way which brings\u00a0Logan<\/em>‘s concerns to a head, and also winds up ultimately equivocal about the whole thing: his\u00a0prediction\u00a0turned out to be ultimately self-fufilling, but then again it was still true as far as it went.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The\u00a0preceding issues were billed as a\u00a0Civil\u00a0War II<\/em>\u00a0lead-in arc, and it’s now clear why: they\u00a0introduce Logan and get the character in play for the purposes of this book. \u00a0They have literally nothing else to do with\u00a0Civil War II<\/em>. \u00a0But they do still serve to make this story stronger, because if Logan had shown up\u00a0for the first time in the story about people predicting the future,\u00a0it would look much more forced. \u00a0With him already in circulation, it’s much more organic.<\/p>\n

Captain America – the Steve Rogers version – shows up here as well, playing the seemingly reasonable\u00a0spokesperson of predictive justice. \u00a0This, of course, is Hydra Cap,\u00a0who was brainwashed by the Cosmic Cube when he was returned to normal or had his\u00a0formative memories altered or whatever precisely the idea is, but has still been cropping up in other books acting more or less as a\u00a0regular guest star. \u00a0I haven’t read enough of Nick Spencer’s storyline to\u00a0have any firm view on how it’s panning out over there, but I can see\u00a0the logic of using him here\u00a0to\u00a0argue the case in favour of acting on your knowledge of the future (given that somebody’s got to do it but the story obviously wants us to find the prospect uncomfortable). \u00a0Even this version of Cap isn’t written as untroubled, just as persuaded on balance that’s it’s sensible to act on a source which has always proven reliable so far. \u00a0And\u00a0the story wisely avoids complicating matters by\u00a0actually raising his current status quo. \u00a0He’s just slightly off, slightly more willing to buy into this idea than he might normally be, and that’s all. \u00a0If you know what’s going on with him, it probably adds something; if you don’t, well, he’s just having an off day.<\/p>\n

The story builds to a slightly odd confrontation where Laura rejects Logan and demands that he stay away from them. \u00a0In purely logical terms this doesn’t make a great deal of sense – as Laura recognises, Logan wouldn’t have done anything wrong if it wasn’t for SHIELD provoking him and firing him full of drugs in a botched attempt to capture him. \u00a0And Laura is hardly in a position to complain that Logan is a man of violence who brings trouble wherever he goes. \u00a0But it works on a character level. \u00a0She’s disturbed by the fact that Ulysses’\u00a0prediction was indisputably correct at least on some level, and\u00a0if anything the fact that it was self-fulfilling just reinforces the\u00a0worry that everything is on rails and that she has no real control over it. \u00a0She’s\u00a0taking all that out on Logan, and if what she says doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny,\u00a0that’s not a plot problem, it’s a reflection of the fact that she’s not being completely rational about\u00a0this. \u00a0Again, it’s a better story for leaving that\u00a0as subtext.<\/p>\n

The themes of the book make\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> perhaps\u00a0unusually well placed to do a\u00a0Civil War II<\/em> tie-in, but this story\u00a0does find a way of making the tie-in\u00a0serve the book, and not the other way round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even in their present depleted condition, the X-books\u00a0still have a knack for skilfully sidestepping mega-crossovers. \u00a0 \u00a0Their contribution to\u00a0Civil War II consisted of two books: an X-Men miniseries (which\u00a0I’ll come to), and this storyline from\u00a0All-New Wolverine #10-12. With that in mind, I haven’t been reading\u00a0Civil War II at all, so\u00a0all I know about it is […]<\/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-3562","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\/3562","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=3562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3563,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3562\/revisions\/3563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}