{"id":4269,"date":"2018-08-24T21:14:13","date_gmt":"2018-08-24T20:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4269"},"modified":"2018-08-24T21:16:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-24T20:16:21","slug":"hunt-for-wolverine-mystery-in-madripoor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4269","title":{"rendered":"Hunt for Wolverine: Mystery in Madripoor"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Hunt for Wolverine<\/em> saves the most important story for last. \u00a0Not the most important to\u00a0the return of Wolverine, mind you. \u00a0From the look of it, this series plays into the return of Wolverine mainly by establishing that Soteira are baddies with an interest in Wolverine, which we’ve already established thrice over. \u00a0There’s also a plot about a satellite that does something as yet undivulged, but the big-deal-ness of that is as yet unestablished.<\/p>\n

This week, instead, people will be talking about the fact that Psylocke is now back to her original body, which means she isn’t Asian any more. \u00a0That came out of nowhere – and that’s before you get to the surprise of having it happen in a\u00a0Hunt for Wolverine<\/em> mini.<\/p>\n

There are wider issues to talk about here, of course, but let’s look at the story itself first. \u00a0Hunt for Wolverine<\/em> picks a different side of Wolverine’s mythos for each miniseries, so naturally one of them has to go to Madripoor. \u00a0Our stars this time are the X-Men themselves – Kitty, Psylocke, Jubilee, Storm, and Rogue – plus Domino, for some reason. \u00a0The tenuous basis for going to Madripoor is that Magneto lives there now, and maybe he stole the body, because, hell, it sounds like the sort of thing he might do.<\/p>\n

But this isn’t a Magneto story; instead the X-Men end up fighting Viper and the Femmes Fatales, a bunch of 90s Spider-Man villains who haven’t been seen in ages. \u00a0For added Wolverine content, they also now include Sapphire Styx, from the first Wolverine storyline in\u00a0Marvel Comics Presents<\/em>. \u00a0This isn’t as obscure as it might sound – the story in question was the lead-in to the first\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> ongoing, which established Madripoor as a core part of his mythology – but she’s only appeared once since then, so she’s far from a big name. \u00a0Anyhow, these baddies are all working for Soteira, who have a plan to launch a satellite for those Mysterious Reasons.<\/p>\n

Sapphire’s thing was to stay young by absorbing other people’s life force, and since we last saw her, it seems she’s got a bit addicted. \u00a0She’s also being haunted by the ghosts of people from whom she absorbed energy in the past, including Logan, since apparently she gets a bit of their personality stuck inside her (similar to the stories that have been done with Rogue over the years). \u00a0So while she’s not actually trying to kill any of the prisoners, her overenthusiasm winds up inadvertently killing Psylocke.<\/p>\n

All of which leads to issue #4, which opens with a lengthy sequence of Psylocke inside Sapphire’s mind, along with all the other people who’ve been absorbed by Sapphire over the years. \u00a0For whatever reason, this time her spirit appears in the form of her original body (which I don’t think has always been the case in the past, however much sense it makes). \u00a0She encounters the bit of Logan that’s stuck inside Sapphire, and somehow or other that results in her returning to the real world, back in her original body, because something something. \u00a0I mean, there\u00a0is<\/em> an explanation, but it involves the line “Instinctively, I used the soul power she left behind to create a new body, molecule by molecule”, so that’s, er… how it works, apparently.<\/p>\n

The baddies are captured, the satellite makes it into space because it’s presumably a plot point for the next phase of this storyline, and that’s your lot.<\/p>\n

So… \u00a0On the positives, it’s a fun little romp. \u00a0The Femme Fatales are colourful and underused villains, and it’s nice to see them getting an outing. \u00a0The pacing’s good, the dialogue’s punchy, the X-Men are in character, the Fatales get enough personality to make them more than just gimmicky names. \u00a0It’s a nicely upbeat book – maybe not something that particularly echoes the mock-noir of Wolverine’s Madripoor stories, but quite welcome nonetheless. \u00a0And most of the established Madripoor supporting cast are either not living there any more, or just plain not living, which doesn’t exactly help when you want to call back to old stories.<\/p>\n

Artist Thony Silas is… let’s go with patchy. \u00a0There’s a minimally angular aspect to his work that at best has a fair amount of energy, and reminds me a bit of Geoff Senior. \u00a0At other times, it just looks unfinished. \u00a0Then again, the heavy shadow in the opening of issue #3 looks rather good. \u00a0Still, it’s hard to avoid noticing that the lynchpin sequence of the series – Psylocke inside Sapphire’s mind, in her transition back to her original body – is handed over to Leonard Kirk. \u00a0(Who does it very well, as you’d expect.)<\/p>\n

Like some of the other minis, it’s not very clear what’s actually at stake, nor what it has to do with the return of Wolverine. \u00a0So it’s four issues of fighting over a threat which is at best hazy, at worst merely implicit. \u00a0And what’s more, the rest of the story doesn’t have a great deal to do with Psylocke’s identity, unless you count some brief comments in issue #1 where she notes how Logan always had such a clear idea of who he was. \u00a0The big talking point of the series is Psylocke, and while the first three issues set it up in terms of the plot mechanics, they don’t do so much in terms of the theme.<\/p>\n

But let’s turn to the bigger picture. \u00a0This is a plot development from 1989. \u00a0It’s stood for nearly thirty years. \u00a0Jim Lee’s redesign of the character was a big hit. \u00a0So if it’s an outright reversal then that’s a big deal – though a coda suggests the Lee design is sticking around too in some form, which might imply she’s been divided or something. \u00a0We’ll see.<\/p>\n

Times have changed since 1989 and it’s hardly surprising that if you go back thirty years you’re going to hit things which have not aged well. \u00a0The X-Men in the 80s did okay on gender balance, but their ethnic diversity hasn’t aged so well, particularly when you consider that the premise ought to lead to mutants coming from all over the world, let alone all walks of life. \u00a0(New Mutants\u00a0<\/i>did somewhat better.) \u00a0Chris Claremont was very keen on Japan, but tended to treat it as a collection of genre tropes more than an actual place, or at best a fascinatingly exotic place full of people who felt honour-bound to advance the plot.<\/p>\n

That’s very much how Psylocke’s transformation was played at the time, and I suspect how it was taken by many readers – it wasn’t so much that she’d become Asian as that she’d become a ninja, and being Asian was more a genre convention of that character type than anything else. \u00a0I was going to say that, even at the time, it’s unlikely that someone would have done this story with a white character becoming black, since that\u00a0would<\/em> have been read by American audiences of the time as primarily a story about race and identity, and it would have seemed horrifically crass. \u00a0Then I remembered that Marvel did that story with the Punisher in 1991<\/a>. \u00a0But it lasted three issues, and the writer quit, and it was regarded as a fiasco almost instantly…<\/p>\n

And yet nearly thirty years later, ninja Psylocke is (or was) still around. \u00a0On that side of things, Marvel are probably quitting while they’re still ahead.<\/p>\n

But even aside from that, there have always been problems with this version of Psylocke as a character. \u00a0The accompanying personality change made Psylocke feel like a pod person, with a questionable sense of identity and a lack of organic connection to her own back story. \u00a0She never entirely felt like a transformed version of the earlier character so much as a different character entirely who’d been swapped in; viewed the other way round, her British backstory and link to Captain Britain had become bizarrely irrelevant to the character as now portrayed. \u00a0The early nineties Revanche storyline\u00a0attempted to make some sense of it all by claiming that she’d actually been mentally mixed up with Kwannon, the original owner of her new body, but that didn’t really solve the problem so much as reinforce the idea that Psylocke was a character who had been ground zeroed in 1989. \u00a0In recent years she’s had a lot of stories bemoaning her confused sense of identity and general lack of direction, surely a warning sign that most writers are struggling to make her work, or to find a hook beyond trying to turn “character makes no sense” into a virtue.<\/p>\n

So Psylocke has been in something of a dead end for a while now, and a hard reset is no bad thing as a way of clearing out the clutter and paring her back to something more coherent as a character. \u00a0On top of that, the whole concept of ninja Psylocke is… well, you know.<\/p>\n

Issue #4 of this series handles the reset itself pretty well from a character standpoint, even if the mechanics of it are obscure in the extreme, and its connection with the rest of the series isn’t as strong as you might want. \u00a0The mini as a whole is mixed stuff, but hey, we get a big event at the end, even if it does come out of the blue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Hunt for Wolverine saves the most important story for last. \u00a0Not the most important to\u00a0the return of Wolverine, mind you. \u00a0From the look of it, this series plays into the return of Wolverine mainly by establishing that Soteira are baddies with an interest in Wolverine, which we’ve already established thrice over. \u00a0There’s also a […]<\/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-4269","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\/4269","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=4269"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4272,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4269\/revisions\/4272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}