{"id":5374,"date":"2020-08-02T14:59:25","date_gmt":"2020-08-02T13:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5374"},"modified":"2021-07-23T14:15:32","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T13:15:32","slug":"the-incomplete-wolverine-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5374","title":{"rendered":"The Incomplete Wolverine, Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Part 1: Origin to Origin II<\/a><\/em>
Part 2: 1907 to 1914<\/a><\/em>
Part 3: 1914 to 1939<\/a><\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

We’ve reached the Second World War – and this is a busy period, though still quite a scattershot one.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Flashback in WOLVERINE: ORIGINS #9<\/a><\/strong>
“Savior, part 4” by Daniel Way & Steve Dillon<\/strong>
December 2006<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It’s somewhere on the eve of World War II. And we have to begin by unscrambling a continuity problem, since Daniel Way’s timeline gets garbled at this point. In narrating this flashback, Wolverine calls it his first mission “after being picked up in Jasmine Falls”. We’ll get to Jasmine Falls in a future instalment, but suffice to say that it’s the town where Logan fathered Daken.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The trouble is, Daniel Way had already showed Logan’s extraction from Jasmine Falls in Wolverine<\/em> vol 3 #38 and #40, and it clearly happened after<\/em> World War II, because the Winter Soldier was involved. So whatever this issue may say, it’s not<\/em> after Jasmine Falls. (It’s an unusual lapse, since whatever else you say about Wolverine: Origins<\/em>, Daniel Way certainly did his research.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Anyway… Logan is back working for Romulus. He’s sent to Russia to protect young Natasha Romanova<\/strong> (the future Black Widow). He’s recently undergone one of his periodic memory wipes at the hands of Romulus, and he doesn’t know who his superiors are getting their orders from. As pointed out in the comments to a previous post, the notion that Wolverine has massive gaps in his memory is a late addition; Claremont merely had him with a memory gap around the implantation of his adamantium skeleton, and it’s not until the Larry Hama run that Wolverine becomes aware that his earlier memories have been extensively tampered with. In Way’s run, it’s just routine for Logan to be periodically mindwiped, and at least it helps account for some of his inconsistent portrayals.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Logan spends “a little over two years” with Natasha’s custodian Taras Romanov, learning from him, and secretly training Natasha at night. Logan’s timeline no longer has space for him to spend two years here, but it’s certainly an extended stay, and he’s still in Russia in 1940. When Logan asks Taras who they ultimately work for, Taras dodges the question and advises against investigating it further. Throughout Way’s stories, Logan seems to be surrounded by characters who know more about what’s going on than he does, presumably because Romulus is treating Logan as a weapon rather than a proper agent.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Logan’s stay in Russia ends with one of those pointlessly convoluted schemes that show up so often in Romulus stories. Taras engineers a scenario where Natasha will kill Logan as her final test, but Logan kills Taras instead (thinking that Taras knows too much), and encourages Natasha to go underground and stay dead. Broadly, the idea is that Logan is aware of someone manipulating him, and he’s trying to steer Natasha away from that life. We’ll pick up this thread a little later on, because quite obviously Natasha doesn’t take his advice.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

This story is re-told in Black Wid<\/strong><\/em>ow: Deadly Origin<\/em> #1<\/strong> – that version sticks to the general thrust of Way’s original, but differs wildly in many of the details.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

After Russia, we have a batch of minor flashbacks:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n