{"id":7614,"date":"2022-02-16T21:54:24","date_gmt":"2022-02-16T21:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7614"},"modified":"2022-02-16T21:54:24","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T21:54:24","slug":"x-lives-of-wolverine-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7614","title":{"rendered":"X Lives of Wolverine #3 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/Unknown-24.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7615 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/Unknown-24.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"182\" height=\"277\" \/><\/a><strong>X LIVES OF WOLVERINE #3<\/strong><br \/>\nWriter: Benjamin Percy<br \/>\nArtist: Joshua Cassara<br \/>\nColourist: Frank Martin<br \/>\nLetterer: Cory Petit<br \/>\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> In the foreground, western hero Wolverine stands over the defeated bone coils of an Omega Red that he&#8217;s evidently defeated. In the background, Department H-era Wolverine (recognisable by his mask) faces off against the real Omega Red.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 2.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Professor X and Marvel Girl continue to monitor Wolverine.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Wolverine&#8217;s opening narration continues the theme of time. He casts his long lifespan as more of a curse. Bear in mind that one of the signature achievements of Krakoa is supposedly to enable all mutants to live forever; Wolverine apparently sees that as a bad thing that makes life less meaningful.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 3.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Wolverine experiences flashbacks to various parts of his life.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Apparently, just like us, present-day Wolverine is in some sense experiencing all these events together. From left to right, the four recognisable flashbacks show:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Top left, Logan in World War I, probably as a member of the Devil&#8217;s Brigade, fighting a German soldier possessed by Omega Red. We haven&#8217;t seen this segment in the main story yet.<\/li>\n<li>In the main panel (X shaped to mirror the Cerebro helmet), old west Logan fights an Omega Red gunslinger. We haven&#8217;t seen this in the main story yet either, and with only two issues to go, you have to wonder if we&#8217;re actually going to.<\/li>\n<li>At the top, Logan as a member of Team X, in a plot thread we&#8217;ve already been following.<\/li>\n<li>Department H Wolverine fighting what seems to be some sort of north African merchant possessed by Omega Red (bearing no resemblance to the fight seen on the cover).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 4.<\/strong>\u00a0Recap and credits. There are many more &#8220;life&#8221; panels at the top of the page this time, and by combining this and the earlier issues we can say that the numbering runs like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Life 1: Wilderness Logan, from just after\u00a0<em>Origin<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Life 2: Logan in the old west, apparently from the period of his life shown in <em>Loki<\/em> vol 3 #5. If so, it&#8217;s 1911.<\/li>\n<li>Life 3: Logan serves in World War I, as shown in\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> vol 3 #57-60 and <i>Savage Wolverine<\/i> #21-22 (and mentioned in <em>Wolverine: Origins\u00a0<\/em>#17).<\/li>\n<li>Life 4: Not yet identified.<\/li>\n<li>Life 5: Jasmine Falls, where he marries Itsu and fathers Daken.<\/li>\n<li>Life 6: The birth of Professor X, shown in the previous issue. Oddly, the recap page tells us that this scene took place in England.<\/li>\n<li>Life 7: Team X, another of the book&#8217;s major plot threads.<\/li>\n<li>Lifes 8-9: Not shown, but presumably one of them is Department H. The other is most likely either Weapon X or the pre-Krakoan X-Men, though Madripoor would also work.<\/li>\n<li>Life 10: The present day.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>PAGES 5-7.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Omega Red tries to kill Benedict Xavier.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Benedict gets a first name here. This is all largely self-explanatory &#8211; Omega Red possesses various crew members before settling on a giant whale, and Logan arrives to help.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 8-10.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Logan fights a possessed Itsu.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This continues directly from the end of the previous issue. Omega Red&#8217;s reasoning is that since Wolverine has blocked all his previous attempts to assassinate Xavier, this time he&#8217;s going to deal with Wolverine first.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;I thought you wanted privacy&#8230;&#8221;<\/strong> Jean left Logan alone with Itsu last issue.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Can you save Daken?&#8221;<\/strong> In other words, if Logan kills Itsu, can they stop Logan and Itsu&#8217;s as-yet-unborn son Daken from being erased from history. The answer is pretty obviously no. The bit about putting a Cerebro unit in a black hole as a possible solution doesn&#8217;t make a great deal of sense, but presumably the idea is to isolate it from the timestream somehow or other.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Romulus<\/strong> shows up at the end to attack Itsu, even though she&#8217;s currently possessed by Omega Red. The data page following tells us that in the original timeline, Romulus attacked Wolverine and Itsu on the day that Daken was conceived, but Wolverine drove him away. This is new, and frankly a bit odd. Romulus&#8217;s schtick &#8211; generally ignored by most writers since, but hard to gloss over if you&#8217;re doing a series about Wolverine&#8217;s history &#8211; is that he&#8217;s a shadowy manipulator who Wolverine never dealt with directly. In this story, however, he\u00a0<em>does<\/em> attack Wolverine directly, and acts as if Logan knows perfectly well who he is.<\/p>\n<p>This seems to contradict the premise of\u00a0<em>Wolverine: Origins<\/em>, which was that Logan regained his full memories as a result of\u00a0<em>House of M<\/em>, and set out to investigate the conspiracy that he now remembered being a part of. Getting his unredacted memories back was the impetus for the plot. Despite that, he didn&#8217;t start off knowing who had been in charge of it, and didn&#8217;t seem to know anything Romulus before hearing about him in\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> vol 3 #50-55. Percy seems to be retconning that into a story where Romulus keeps his distance from Wolverine because he&#8217;s been so comprehensively beaten in direct confrontation in the past.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 11.<\/strong> Data page, essentially spelling out in less accessible form what we already established in the previous scene. Itsu&#8217;s death at the hands of the Winter Soldier is shown in flashback in\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> vol 3 #40, and Daken&#8217;s abduction by Romulus was shown in flashback in\u00a0<em>Wolverine: Origins<\/em> #5.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 12-13.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Mikhail&#8217;s pitch to Omega Red.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This continues the flashback thread showing how Omega Red was roped into this. At this point, it&#8217;s still rather vague what the Cerebro Sword has to do with anything, though evidently this plan somehow involves taking advantage of its residual ability to access the regular Cerebro network. Last issue, Mikhail&#8217;s ability to use the Sword in this way was flagged as a possible source of inside information.<\/p>\n<p>From here on, we&#8217;re in fairly straightforward territory (well, as this sort of plot goes).<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 14-15.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Team X Wolverine shakes off Sabretooth and pursues his mission.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Sabretooth wants revenge because Wolverine turned on the team and abandoned their mission last issue, refusing to preserve the timeline if it meant re-enacting his past atrocities.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 16-17.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Wolverine defends Benedict Xavier.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Pretty self-explanatory. Benedict is blown away by all this and evidently sees it as a revelatory signal in some way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 18.<\/strong> Data page. In plot terms, the main point of interest here is that Professor X is using the Cerebro Sword&#8217;s connection to try and monitor Mikhail and Omega Red in turn.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 19-20.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>More of Itsu and Romulus.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Romulus is driven away, Itsu is freed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 21-23.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Team X\u00a0Wolverine reaches Charles Xavier.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Quite why Charles Xavier is taking an interest in this sort of campaigning isn&#8217;t exactly clear, but okay. The pay-off, of course, is that Mikhail and Omega Red have finally figured out that the simple solution is just to possess Wolverine himself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 24.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: WOLVERINES.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X LIVES OF WOLVERINE #3 Writer: Benjamin Percy Artist: Joshua Cassara Colourist: Frank Martin Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Mark Basso COVER \/ PAGE 1. In the foreground, western hero Wolverine stands over the defeated bone coils of an Omega Red that [&hellip;]<\/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":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7614","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=7614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7616,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7614\/revisions\/7616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}