Despite the title, this really has very little to do with the original “Enemy of the State” storyline by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. \u00a0There’s the very loose general idea of Wolverine\u00a0being used as a weapon… but in this six-issue\u00a0storyline, that phase lasts for less than an issue. \u00a0After all, the schtick of Laura as a brainwashed human weapon has been done. \u00a0It’s her origin story.<\/p>\n
Laura’s back story is not what you’d call subtle. \u00a0It is relentlessly grim. \u00a0You may have seen it recently being used in the\u00a0Logan<\/em> film, which is, shall we say, on the melancholy side as superhero movies go.<\/p>\n But compared to\u00a0the original, movie Laura’s story is noticeably cheered up. \u00a0She’s still institutionalised, but\u00a0some of the staff are at least shown trying to give the children\u00a0birthday parties and the like. \u00a0She’s been\u00a0created as a weapon but never successfully used as one. \u00a0She’s killed, but apparently only the baddies who were holding her prisoner. \u00a0All the stuff about the trigger\u00a0scent is completely absent. \u00a0Plus,\u00a0by positioning her alongside an\u00a0ageing Logan on his last\u00a0ride, she essentially becomes the optimistic symbol\u00a0of the next generation.<\/p>\n And all of this is for the best, because the original stories are one-dimensional. \u00a0Softening them is no bad thing. \u00a0Particularly in the last couple of years,\u00a0and since taking over the\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> title, Laura has drifted\u00a0from her original, flat-affect persona and\u00a0been given an older sister role with Gabby,\u00a0a cheerful younger clone of herself who\u00a0helps to\u00a0bring out other sides in Laura. \u00a0“Enemy of the State II” feels like a story designed to reconcile this\u00a0take on Laura with the original, but mainly in order to emphasise the distance and draw a line under\u00a0that part of the character.<\/p>\n The story involves\u00a0somebody harassing Laura with the trigger\u00a0scent from old X-23 stories, which can be used to drive her into an uncontrollable killing frenzy. \u00a0After apparently wiping out a small town, Laura hands herself over to SHIELD but quickly does a runner so that she and Gabby can track down the culprits in Madripoor. \u00a0That turns out to be Kimura, the handler who probably qualifies as Laura’s personal arch-enemy, who has Bellona in pay (as well as Roughhouse, for some reason), and is planning a takeover of Madripoor with Laura as a weapon. \u00a0But when Laura actually gets sent on a mission,\u00a0Gabby and Gambit show up to drag her away before anything too bad can happen, and then Jean Grey helps cure Laura in time for her to beat Kimura and win the day. \u00a0There’s a whole subplot about child smuggling in there too, but that’s basically a device to keep other characters occupied while Laura is running around with Kimura.<\/p>\n Nik Virella, who draws most of the arc,\u00a0is pretty impressive. \u00a0She gets the still-waters side of Laura well, and she does some great storytelling for the set pieces\u00a0like\u00a0Laura fighting her way out of a\u00a0plane in flight. \u00a0I’d be happy to see more of her work. \u00a0The final issue is a bit more scrappy, but that might be because there are so many characters wandering around. \u00a0Djibril Morisette-Phan, who covers parts 3 and 5,\u00a0is rougher around the edges, and gives everyone a slightly harsher look, but it still gets the job done.<\/p>\n The general thrust of the story is sound. \u00a0In\u00a02017, many writers\u00a0would just have taken the view that stuff like the trigger scent hasn’t been mentioned in a good few years and could\u00a0be allowed to fade into obscurity. \u00a0It’s rather welcome to see Taylor go out of his way to close it off,\u00a0but then he’s got an angle on it, which is to emphasise Laura’s growth and give her the satisfaction of definitively overcoming her tormentors. \u00a0But\u00a0some of the details aren’t quite as successful.<\/p>\n Fair enough, Kimura is a completely one-note character. \u00a0That’s not a problem. \u00a0She’s there as the personification of the otherwise-absent Facility, to give Laura somebody to beat. \u00a0She’s the symbol of everything Laura is meant to be transcending here, so\u00a0depth is the last thing she needs. \u00a0But Bellona’s role is a bit more obscure; perhaps\u00a0she’s meant to be the Laura who failed to transcend and surrendered to her destiny, but\u00a0she’s\u00a0still\u00a0independent-minded enough for that not to work, and the story never really gives her very much to do\u00a0that plays into the main plot.<\/p>\n There’s a plain\u00a0effort to make sure that Laura never actually kills anyone in this arc, presumably\u00a0to avoid saddling her with anything more to atone for, in the story\u00a0which is supposed to mark her finally\u00a0transcending her origin. \u00a0It’s fudged reasonably well with the small town (it turns out that Laura didn’t actually kill them\u00a0in a red mist, because\u00a0she took herself out when she saw the gas coming), but feels a bit contrived when it gets to Tyger Tiger’s guards. \u00a0And there’s a weird overload of extra characters, particularly in the last couple of issues, which feels like it’s reaching for the epic scale of Millar’s “Enemy of the State” – Jean is required by the plot, but does this story really need Gambit and Nick Fury?<\/p>\n Then there’s the deprogramming issue. \u00a0I go back and forth on whether this works. \u00a0It’s intended to get rid of the trigger scent once and for all by\u00a0establishing that it no longer has any effect. \u00a0But I’m not sure\u00a0about the way it’s done. \u00a0The basic idea of Gabby putting herself forward as the guinea pig\u00a0in order to try and break through to Laura is\u00a0good;\u00a0but at\u00a0one issue\u00a0it feels rushed, perhaps because Jean shows up just for the purpose. \u00a0And it’s\u00a0never\u00a0really clear why somebody couldn’t have done this years ago – you can rationalise it as saying that Laura needed to get so far on her own before Jean could help her over the line, or that\u00a0Gabby is the game-changer, but\u00a0either way it could have been\u00a0played up more successfully.<\/p>\n My reservations here, I think, are that I want this to be a small-scale character story and\u00a0Tom Taylor wants it to be an epic, and that results in it spiralling a little bit out of control at times. \u00a0But there’s\u00a0still plenty of good stuff in here, and this remains one of the most consistently enjoyable X-books.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite the title, this really has very little to do with the original “Enemy of the State” storyline by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. \u00a0There’s the very loose general idea of Wolverine\u00a0being used as a weapon… but in this six-issue\u00a0storyline, that phase lasts for less than an issue. \u00a0After all, the schtick of Laura […]<\/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-3747","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\/3747","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=3747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3748,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3747\/revisions\/3748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}