{"id":4536,"date":"2019-03-23T20:16:05","date_gmt":"2019-03-23T20:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4536"},"modified":"2019-03-23T20:16:05","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T20:16:05","slug":"x-23-7-10-x-assassin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4536","title":{"rendered":"X-23 #7-10: “X-Assassin”"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-23\u00a0<\/em>is always going to lend itself to stories about identity. \u00a0You’ve got Laura herself, the emotionally scarred hero grown and raised in the lab, and then you’ve got her clone Gabby, who’s literally a younger version of the same character, but diverted at an earlier stage and inappropriately gleeful. \u00a0The nature versus nurture thing is kind of built in, and it comes up a lot.<\/p>\n

And here’s another one. \u00a0Mariko Tamaki and Diego Olortegui’s “X-Assassin” sees our heroes capture a mysterious assassin who turns out to be another clone, except a mute, seemingly soulless one.<\/p>\n

That’s not a bad idea, as far as another spin on the theme goes. \u00a0Genetically, Laura and Gabby are identical, but with seemingly different personalities. \u00a0Here’s another version, but with no personality at all. \u00a0The main interest here lies in how Laura and Gabby respond to that. Laura either sees this clone as just a soulless weapon, or at least prefers not to contemplate the alternative. \u00a0Gabby, in contrast, immediately accepts her as another “sister”, and sets about trying to bring out her personality – in which she makes slender progress over the course of the four issues, before the assassin clone naturally does her heroic sacrifice in the final issue.<\/p>\n

Diego Olortegui’s art works well for the story; he gets Gabby and Laura’s personalities across, and the cyborg has a suitably glassy-eyed vibe to her, even when she is starting to interact with the others. \u00a0There are some great layouts for the key action sequences, too. \u00a0It’s somewhat reminiscent of Art Adams, and there’s a nice sense of controlled chaos in the scenes that need to be crowded.<\/p>\n

Where this story kind of loses me is with the actual bad guy. \u00a0We’re back to Dr Chandler, the evil scientist from Taylor’s\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em>\u00a0run, who had a hand in making Gabby. \u00a0(This story also tries to credit him with being involved in Laura’s creation, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t in the original story, but I guess you can make him a former Facility scientist too.) \u00a0Having run into trouble with the previous plan of making fully-formed clones of Laura, he’s decided that the best plan is disposable, damaged clones that aren’t as independent or powerful, and are designed to conk out after a while, but make up for it with a combination of cyborg implants and weight of numbers.<\/p>\n

Chandler is a straightforward moustache-twirling bad guy of a standard type for X-23 villains: the amoral scientist who doesn’t particularly care about the implications of making living people as tools. \u00a0And sure, outright commodifying them makes sense as an extension of that. \u00a0But Chandler himself isn’t all that interesting, because he’s so one dimensional. \u00a0That’s not a problem when he’s there for other characters to react to – a certain facelessness is no bad thing where evil corporations are concerned – but he’s a bit too pantomime to be very compelling in his own right.<\/p>\n

And for much of the time, this story does seem to be setting him up as something for Laura and Gabby to react to. \u00a0The thing is that Laura’s reaction is the more intriguing one, yet it doesn’t really go anywhere. \u00a0Most of the focus is on Gabby, but Gabby does the fairly obvious thing: she tries to bond with the clone and treat it as a human being. \u00a0That’s conventional heroic behaviour, and so it’s what you’d expect from her. \u00a0The clone herself, by the nature of the plot, only gets to display flashes of personality, which again boil down to rebelling against her creator and sacrificing herself to destroy him – but again, what do you expect? \u00a0I suppose part of the idea is that all versions of Laura, however compromised, will eventually turn on their creators. \u00a0Except if that’s the idea, it’s undermined by the fact that there’s a horde of them in this story, and most of them don’t turn at all.<\/p>\n

Laura’s response is more interesting: she treats the clone more as a practical problem and doesn’t want to think of the clone as a version of her. \u00a0Even though we’ve seen her willingly accept her other clones as people, she seems to draw the line at this one – or perhaps just won’t allow herself to think too closely about someone who’s as different from her as Gabby is, but in the other direction towards dysfunctionality.<\/p>\n

But this thread doesn’t really come to anything very satisfying. \u00a0It’s not like Laura comes round to talking about the clone as a person – that’s all rendered largely academic for her. \u00a0And she was determined to go after the bad guys already. \u00a0So it becomes an interesting notion that’s placed on the table, but isn’t particularly followed up. \u00a0Instead, it’s the more predictable elements that wind up providing the climax.<\/p>\n

This is fine. \u00a0It just feels like it missed an opportunity to do more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-23\u00a0is always going to lend itself to stories about identity. \u00a0You’ve got Laura herself, the emotionally scarred hero grown and raised in the lab, and then you’ve got her clone Gabby, who’s literally a younger version of the same character, but diverted at an earlier stage and inappropriately gleeful. \u00a0The nature versus nurture thing 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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4536","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\/4536","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=4536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4537,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4536\/revisions\/4537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}