{"id":4126,"date":"2018-04-30T21:56:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T20:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4126"},"modified":"2018-04-30T21:56:10","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T20:56:10","slug":"weapon-x-15-16-happy-birthday-old-man-logan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4126","title":{"rendered":"Weapon X #15-16: “Happy Birthday, Old Man Logan”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have I mentioned – I think I may have done once or twice – that I didn’t greatly care for\u00a0Axis<\/em>? \u00a0You remember\u00a0Axis<\/em>. \u00a0It was the crossover back in 2014 where people had their moral compass “inverted” so goodies became baddies and vice versa. \u00a0And that’s fine as a bit of short-term gimmickry, but Marvel decided to leave some of the characters like that permanently.<\/p>\n

So four years later, Havok and Sabretooth are still kind-of-sort-of inverted. \u00a0They had a go at an ongoing series with\u00a0an inverted Iron man too, but unless I’m very much mistaken, that one just kind of petered out without a proper resolution.<\/p>\n

The thing is that as a short-term thing, you can maybe do something with\u00a0Axis<\/em>. \u00a0You can play it for laughs or maybe you can find some other aspect of the character’s personality and bring it out in a vaguely interesting way. \u00a0But as a long-term direction, in the hands of most writers, it’s a dead end. \u00a0You’re not really writing the character at all, there’s no logical progression from events in their past, and there’s nowhere you can really go other than backwards to restore the status quo ante.<\/p>\n

With Sabretooth, the general approach has been to downplay Axis<\/em>, and (towards the end of Cullen Bunn’s\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> run) to show him backsliding somewhat. \u00a0Basically, let it fade unobtrusively away to the point where you can treat him as a proper character again. \u00a0 In this two-parter, Greg Pak and Fred van Lente try a slightly different approach: foreground the problem, and play up the incoherence of Sabretooth’s current personality, as the inversion effect begins to lapse.<\/p>\n

Logan is trying to figure out how he’s going to keep a pair of maniacs like Sabretooth and Lady Deathstrike occupied, when midnight comes, and Sabretooth decides it’s time for his annual attempt to kill Logan on his birthday. \u00a0This is, of course, supremely pointless, but in Sabretooth’s mind it’s a defining part of their relationship that reminds them both of what monsters they truly are. \u00a0It’s a kind of displaced self-loathing for Sabretooth, even if he seems rather gleeful about it. \u00a0By bringing Logan down to his level, he thinks he’s proving some sort of point.<\/p>\n

All sorts of random chaos ensues, with Sabretooth seeming to have absolutely no concern for collateral damage or his own life. \u00a0There’s kind of a plot where they brawl into a holding facility for a bunch of monsters, but it’s pretty rudimentary. \u00a0The pay-off is a brief flashback (drawn by Andrea Sorrentino) to the Wastelands, which reveals what actually happened to Sabretooth in Old Man Logan’s timeline: he degenerated into an animal and Logan killed him easily, because he’s really not much of a threat without his mind. \u00a0Meanwhile, midnight strikes and Sabretooth goes back to acting like a regular antihero as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n

I have mixed feelings about Roland Boschi’s art – it’s muddy at times, and the storytelling doesn’t always flow. \u00a0But it does get across Sabretooth’s sheer delight at going on a rampage again, and he’s one of the rare artists who actually makes this version of Logan look\u00a0old<\/em>, like he’s supposed to. \u00a0It’s perhaps at the expense of making him look instantly recognisable as Wolverine, but I’d rather artists erred in this direction than simply making him a greying Logan.<\/p>\n

So basically we’ve got a story in which Sabretooth’s real personality reasserts itself for 24 hours, seemingly without him fully realising what’s happening. \u00a0It’s the first time in years that a story has gone to town on the idea of Sabretooth as the primal, murderous force of nature. \u00a0And it kind of works, since this Sabretooth’s apparent obliviousness to his own contradictions is, in its own way, as scarily random as his normal personality.<\/p>\n

Sabretooth as a hero\u00a0can<\/em> work – it’s been done in\u00a0Age of Apocalypse<\/em> and\u00a0Exiles<\/em> – but it tends to involve him being driven by circumstances to fill the Wolverine role. \u00a0With an actual Wolverine to hand, that doesn’t work, and there’s really more mileage in going back to his classic function as Wolverine’s foil – the debased version of Wolverine and argues that he’s just a more honest version of Logan. \u00a0It’s not been done in a while, after all. \u00a0Come to think of it, it might actually work better with Old Man Logan, who does at least spend a lot of time angsting about how he killed his world’s version of the X-Men, than with regular Logan, who got over those hang-ups a while ago.<\/p>\n

These issues could use a stronger story as a backdrop – it’s pretty much just throwing some monsters at the page to crank up the chaos and draw some hazy parallel with Logan and Sabretooth. \u00a0But it is surprisingly fun to see Sabretooth revisiting his glory days just for a couple of issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have I mentioned – I think I may have done once or twice – that I didn’t greatly care for\u00a0Axis? \u00a0You remember\u00a0Axis. \u00a0It was the crossover back in 2014 where people had their moral compass “inverted” so goodies became baddies and vice versa. \u00a0And that’s fine as a bit of short-term gimmickry, but Marvel decided […]<\/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-4126","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\/4126","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=4126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4127,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4126\/revisions\/4127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}