{"id":4043,"date":"2018-02-20T22:21:52","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T22:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4043"},"modified":"2018-02-20T22:21:52","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T22:21:52","slug":"all-new-wolverine-25-30-orphans-of-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4043","title":{"rendered":"All-New Wolverine #25-30 – “Orphans of X”"},"content":{"rendered":"

With All-New Wolverine<\/em>‘s Legacy arc, Tom Taylor has certainly taken the remit to heart. \u00a0“Orphans of X” is, quite literally, a story about the legacy of Wolverine, and the characters left in his wake. \u00a0Taylor and artist Juann Cabal also find themselves in the happy position of being able to this story without the actual, original Wolverine being around. \u00a0So although his shadow inevitably hangs over the whole thing, the focus remains firmly on his legacy, rather than on the man himself. \u00a0Yes, Old Man Logan is in here, but he’s kept to the margins and (wisely, in this context) not treated as an ersatz Wolverine.<\/p>\n

It’s a very simple idea, even though a bunch of guest stars and some side quests get it to six issues without it feeling like much of a stretch. \u00a0There’s a group called the Orphans of X, and they’re basically the relatives of people who’ve been killed off by Wolverine and his ilk over the years. \u00a0Largely, they seem to be the family left behind by the cannon fodder. \u00a0And they basically want to kill off all the Wolverine-type characters, to put a stop to the whole thing.<\/p>\n

Why are they called “Orphans of X”, when they don’t actually seem to have a problem with the X-Men in general? \u00a0Unclear. \u00a0Let’s run with “they’re a bit confused”.<\/p>\n

At any rate, this big plan necessarily involves finding a weapon which can be used to get rid of Wolverines. \u00a0This is a Legacy story, so Taylor trawls through the continuity back catalogue and comes up with the Muramasa Blade. \u00a0That comes from Daniel Way’s\u00a0Wolverine: Origins<\/em>,\u00a0an extensive and convoluted conspiracy-oriented back story which everyone seems to have politely agreed to just ignore. \u00a0Wise move. \u00a0Thinking about the book still brings me out in hives. \u00a0But the Muramasa Blade serves a useful function here, not just because it’s a pre-existing macguffin and that’s simpler, but because it has a magical gimmick of incorporating a bit of the original Wolverine’s soul. \u00a0Aside from giving the absentee original a shadowy presence in the story, it fits rather neatly with the general theme of him being a somewhat malign influence, given that the blade exists mainly to inflict damage on his heirs. \u00a0Also, the story takes the opportunity to destroy it once and for all, which is nice.<\/p>\n

Wolverine: Origins<\/i> did have one element that took root in the Marvel Universe: Daken. \u00a0And he’s the guest star who gets most of the panel time in this story. \u00a0That’s a smart choice too, because on the one hand, he’s probably one of the more deserving targets that the Orphans could have picked on – his depiction these days is somewhat inconsistent (and we’ll get to\u00a0Iceman<\/em> shortly), but he’s still mainly a villain. \u00a0On the other hand, there’s nothing especially villainous about his depiction here. \u00a0He’s been attacked without real provocation; the Orphans are torturing him; and he has no ulterior motives when he does join forces with Laura. \u00a0The main point seems to be to present Laura, Daken and (to a lesser extent) Gabby as Logan’s children, and as damaged goods.<\/p>\n

Cabal’s art is good stuff; he has some imaginative page layouts, with vaguely sinister grids contributing to an aura of surreal oddity that surrounds the Orphans. \u00a0Much of what they do, particularly in the first half of the story, doesn’t actually make a great deal of sense. \u00a0The story is very much having its cake and eating it where the Orphans are concerned. \u00a0It’s keen to stress the idea that they’re basically a group of ordinary people driven off the rails, living normal lives and making contact through a newsletter. \u00a0At the same time, they have to be a threat to Laura, Daken and Gabby, or else there wouldn’t be a plot. \u00a0And so they have elaborate high-tech schemes with clones of Laura’s dead mother, and their forces can pursue Daken through suburbia only to vanish inexplicably when he gets round a corner.<\/p>\n

You can\u00a0sort of<\/em> rationalise this by saying that, well, a lot of the wolverines’ victims were bad guys and henchmen and presumably have contacts in odd places. \u00a0The story itself uses this explanation when a bunch of Hand ninjas show up, apparently on the instructions of a rogue mid-ranking commander. \u00a0But it’s at odds with the central theme of the Orphans’ presentation, which is that they’re essentially mundane people dragged into Wolverine’s world and corrupted by it. \u00a0So it shouldn’t work. \u00a0But the story cleverly uses that tension to create an atmosphere of strangeness around them. \u00a0Cabal’s clean lines and occasional detours into abstract page layouts help nicely with that.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the story also does another solid job with Gabby, who continues to serve as the book’s comic relief by acting as if she was in a sitcom. \u00a0This is the point where she finally gets a codename – Honey Badger, suggested by Daken “because you’re sweet and you have claws”, and prompting a panel of Gabby imagining herself in decades of\u00a0Honey Badger<\/em> comics. \u00a0She’s a great character, and the book is all the better for having her there to undercut any detours into excess grimness.<\/p>\n

I have reservations about the finale. \u00a0I can see that this story maybe needed Old Man Logan for plot reasons, but I’m not convinced it gains from having Sabretooth or Lady Deathstrike. \u00a0She’s a pretty tenuous inclusion in a “Wolverines” category, and besides, neither of them are really descended from Logan in quite the same way. \u00a0The big pay off of this arc is to have Laura give a speech to the Orphans where she convinces them that they too are victims of the same legacy, as they’ve all been exploited as weapons; she convinces them (or at least the majority) that they should be joining forces to go after the people who were giving the orders. \u00a0This could be awfully sentimental, but one of the Orphans does refuse to play along, and I think that does enough to get around it.<\/p>\n

My issue is more this: it’s one thing for Laura to argue that she and Gabby and Logan have been victims of people who used them as weapons. \u00a0But the others? \u00a0You can make a case that Daken and Sabretooth were used as weapons, but they were also pretty awful people to start with. \u00a0And Yuriko doesn’t even really fit that mould.<\/p>\n

So I’m not sure it sticks the landing. \u00a0But the rest of it works, and the ending\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0certainly work for Laura, which I guess is the most important thing. \u00a0Transcending her past, and the tension between doing that and claiming Wolverine’s mantle, is the central theme of this version of the character, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With All-New Wolverine‘s Legacy arc, Tom Taylor has certainly taken the remit to heart. \u00a0“Orphans of X” is, quite literally, a story about the legacy of Wolverine, and the characters left in his wake. \u00a0Taylor and artist Juann Cabal also find themselves in the happy position of being able to this story without the actual, […]<\/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-4043","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\/4043","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=4043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4044,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4043\/revisions\/4044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}