{"id":7692,"date":"2022-03-16T22:19:44","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T22:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7692"},"modified":"2022-03-16T22:19:44","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T22:19:44","slug":"x-lives-of-wolverine-5-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7692","title":{"rendered":"X Lives of Wolverine #5 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\/03\/Unknown-27.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7693 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Unknown-27.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"181\" height=\"279\" \/><\/a><strong>X LIVES OF WOLVERINE #5<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Writer: Benjamin Percy<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Artist: Joshua Cassara<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Colourist: Frank Martin<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Letterer: Cory Petit<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Editor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Wolverine fights Omega Red, with a Russian skyline and Omega Wolverine in the background. Needless to say, this is a companion to the cover of\u00a0<em>X Deaths of Wolverine<\/em> #5, which will have the other half of the image (Wolverine fighting Omega Wolverine, with present-day Wolverine and a Krakoan skyline in the background).<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 2.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Omega Red possesses Wolverine and attacks Professor X.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Picking up directly from the end of issue #4. The background is a montage of images of Wolverine (or Logan) at various points in his life, mostly fairly generic. To the extent that they&#8217;re recognisable, starting top left on the first full row:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Row 1: Wolverine in his yellow and black mask.<\/li>\n<li>An unplaceable image of a young Logan.<\/li>\n<li>Logan as Patch in Madripoor.<\/li>\n<li>Logan in Team X.<\/li>\n<li>Old west Logan.<\/li>\n<li>Teen Logan.<\/li>\n<li>Logan in some sort of headband.<\/li>\n<li>Row 2: Morrison\/Quitely era Wolverine.<\/li>\n<li>Weapon X<\/li>\n<li>Just an extreme close-up.<\/li>\n<li>Department H Wolverine.<\/li>\n<li>Wolverine in his classic yellow and black.<\/li>\n<li>Oddly, what seems to be a version of Old Man Logan, despite the fact that that doesn&#8217;t form part of Logan&#8217;s past.<\/li>\n<li>Another image of Logan in his classic mask.<\/li>\n<li>Row 3: Ditto.<\/li>\n<li>Logan in the wilds, probably before\u00a0<em>Origin II.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>World War I Wolverine.<\/li>\n<li>Wolverine in what looks to be Japanese costume, from one of his many stays there.<\/li>\n<li>Fur trapper Wolverine, presumably.<\/li>\n<li>Wolverine in the blue-grey version of his mask from a previous incarnation of\u00a0<em>X-Force<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Wolverine in the modified version of his brown costume from around the time of Jeph Loeb&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Wolverine<\/em> #50.<\/li>\n<li>Row 4 onwards are all quite generic images.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>PAGES 3-4.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Professor X and Marvel Girl struggle to locate Wolverine in the timestream.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Presumably Jean is also doing the hard work of keeping Omega Red subdued during this period.<\/p>\n<p>Page 4 seems to show three more or less random panels of points from Wolverine&#8217;s past where he was dealing with Professor X. The first has him in Xavier&#8217;s study, the second is a Danger Room training exercise (with Nightcrawler in the background), and the third shows Wolverine attacking Xavier. Since there&#8217;s no suggestion of Omega Red being involved in this, it might be the &#8220;Original Sin&#8221; crossover from\u00a0<em>X-Men: Original Sin, X-Men: Legacy<\/em> #217 and\u00a0<em>Wolverine: Origins<\/em> #29, which showed Wolverine attacking Professor X shortly after arriving at the Mansion and before being deprogrammed from Romulus&#8217; influence. The suggestion seems to be that Mikhail&#8217;s attack on Krakoa has left Wolverine simply revisiting all points in his past rather than specifically the points that Omega Red was targetting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 5.<\/strong> Recap and credits. The present-day Wolverine is highlighted in red to show him as possessed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 6-8.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>1900 Logan returns to the wild.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Thanks to losing touch with Jean, Logan has spent months with Benedict Xavier, but is apparently now returning to the woods &#8211; presumably at least in part to make sure that he doesn&#8217;t mess up the timestream.<\/p>\n<p>Oddly, Logan claims here to have allegiance to any country, despite claiming in earlier stories that he had found his homeland in Krakoa. He&#8217;s been away a while, subjectively, and presumably this is meant to indicate him sinking into his past persona in some way.<\/p>\n<p>The watch that Benedict gives to Logan is, of course, the same one that Logan was looking at in the present day in the opening scene of issue #1.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 9-10.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Assorted Logans make their way to the present.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The suggestion here seems to be that this story is literally non-linear, that Logan has been in various points of his past at once, and that all these assorted Logans are now being drawn back by Professor X to reconstitute the present day Wolverine and fight off Omega Red.<\/p>\n<p>The reassembled persona of Wolverine fights off Omega Red and wakes. The bone tentacles just fall off &#8211; presumably that&#8217;s partly due to Wolverine&#8217;s healing factor.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 11.<\/strong> Data page, filling in what actually happened in lives 2 and 3 (which the series never really got around to dealing with).<\/p>\n<p>Both involve an attack on the lives of ancestors of Professor X&#8217;s mother Sharon Xavier. Life 2 is basically a western story that we didn&#8217;t get to see. Life 3 relates to Wolverine&#8217;s service in the Devil&#8217;s Brigade in World War I.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Devil&#8217;s Brigade<\/strong> were a Canadian black ops unit during World War I, apparently connected with Romulus. This was established in\u00a0<em>Wolverine: Origins<\/em> #17, apparently misunderstanding or wilfully re-interpreting a passing reference in\u00a0<em>Alpha Flight<\/em> vol 1 #33 to Wolverine having served with the Devil&#8217;s Brigade &#8211; which, in real life, was a US\/Canadian commando unit in World War II.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 12-14.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Mikhail abandons Omega Red.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Wolverine&#8217;s rejection of Omega Red has apparently caused some sort of explosion. On perfectly sound time travel logic, Omega Red wants to just keep trying, but Mikhail realises that Wolverine is about to show up before that can happen, and so he makes a break for it. The blank-faced guys standing next to him are the &#8220;Russian doll&#8221; genetically engineered soldiers from\u00a0<em>X-Force<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Mikhail&#8217;s parting shot is to dismiss Omega Red as a product of the USSR (which indeed he was &#8211; his back story involves a failed supersoldier programme) and talk cryptically about his plans for a &#8220;new Russia&#8221;. Quite what that means in practice remains rather obscure, and given current events, I wouldn&#8217;t want to be writing a story about Russia on the lead-in times that comics require.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 15-21.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Wolverine fights and defeats Omega Red.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Gateway<\/strong> teleports Wolverine to the location, since there&#8217;s no Krakoan gate already there. We&#8217;ve seen him do this before in <em>X-Force<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Omega Red uses\u00a0<strong>the Cerebro Sword<\/strong> as a weapon in the fight, and considering that it was created as an ornament whose main interest was the data it contained, it seems to be surprisingly viable.<\/p>\n<p>During the fight, we get single-panel flashbacks to assorted fights that Logan had in the past with possessed people, over the course of the series &#8211; one for each of the nine prior &#8220;lives&#8221;. Specifically&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Page 17 panel 2: Logan fights the Xaviers&#8217; groundsman in issue #1.<\/li>\n<li>Page 17 panel 4: Logan fights the possessed whale in issue #3.<\/li>\n<li>Page 17 panel 6: Logan fights Itsu in issues #2-3.<\/li>\n<li>Page 17 panel 8: Team X Logan, possessed by Omega Red in issue #4<\/li>\n<li>Page 17 panel 10: Old West Logan fights Omega Red as described in the data page earlier in this issue, and seen briefly in issue #3.<\/li>\n<li>Page 17 panel 12: Symbiote Logan from issue #4.<\/li>\n<li>Page 18 panel 2: Department H Wolverine fights his unspecified opponent, seen briefly in issue #3.<\/li>\n<li>Page 18 panel 4: World War I Logan, as described earlier in the issue and seen briefly in issue #3.<\/li>\n<li>Page 18 panel 6: Logan attacks Lord Dark Wind&#8217;s kamikaze plane in issue #4.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Logan also gives us a talk about how revisiting his past helps him remember how far he&#8217;s come, but with the combined instability of his history and his erratic memories &#8211; we&#8217;ve long since abandoned the idea that he got all his memories back after\u00a0<em>House of M<\/em>, I think &#8211; the details really aren&#8217;t worth worrying about too much, and what matters more is where he goes from here. All of this feels more than a little anticlimactic to me &#8211; has anything really changed at all as a result of this series, other than Omega Red&#8217;s tentative alliance with the Krakoan authorities being over and the Cerebro Sword (which was never anything more than a macguffin) being written out?<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 22.<\/strong> Data page. The Russian government is unhappy that Mikhail&#8217;s plan failed. Quite why this is described as a &#8220;referendum&#8221; on him, I have no idea &#8211; a referendum is a public vote.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 23-24.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Have you considered picking up our sister title?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Wolverine returns the Cerebro Sword to Sage and is promptly packed off to join the fight against Omega Wolverine, which already began over in\u00a0<em>X Deaths of Wolverine<\/em> #5.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE<\/strong> <strong>25.<\/strong> Data page. The Krakoan reads NEXT: CLAW SCHOOL.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/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 #5 Writer: Benjamin Percy Artist: Joshua Cassara Colourist: Frank Martin Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Mark Basso COVER \/ PAGE 1. Wolverine fights Omega Red, with a Russian skyline and Omega Wolverine in the background. Needless to say, [&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-7692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7692","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=7692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7694,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7692\/revisions\/7694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}