{"id":7804,"date":"2022-04-24T21:46:28","date_gmt":"2022-04-24T20:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7804"},"modified":"2022-04-24T21:46:28","modified_gmt":"2022-04-24T20:46:28","slug":"x-deaths-of-wolverine-1-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7804","title":{"rendered":"X Deaths of Wolverine #1-5"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #1-5<\/strong>
\nWriter: Benjamin Percy<\/strong>
\nArtist: Federico Vicentini<\/strong>
\nColourists: Dijjo Lima with Frank Martin<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

If\u00a0X Lives of Wolverine\u00a0<\/em>felt like a Wolverine arc pressed into service as an event, then its sister title\u00a0X Deaths of Wolverine<\/em> is more obviously conceived for the role. That’s because much of the story here involves Moira MacTaggert, and what happens to her after being banished from Krakoa at the end of\u00a0Inferno<\/em>. That plot thread marks the book out as continuing a major storyline for the X-books as a whole.<\/p>\n

There’s still maybe a bit of overhyping going on here.\u00a0X Deaths<\/em> was never going to do anything as game changing as\u00a0House of X\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Powers of X<\/em>, and maybe inviting those sort of comparisons so directly was unnecessary. It doesn’t really do anything to change the status quo for the line, either –\u00a0Inferno<\/em> did that, by getting Moira out of the picture, bringing back Destiny, and letting the whole Quiet Council know what Xavier and Magneto were up to. But what\u00a0X Deaths<\/em> undoubtedly does do is take Moira to her new status quo.<\/p>\n

We’ll come back to that, though, because this is also a\u00a0Wolverine comic. It doesn’t tie very directly to its sister book X Lives\u00a0<\/em>in plot terms, though a macguffin from\u00a0Lives<\/em> is dutifully used to resolve the plot of\u00a0Deaths<\/em>. But the thematic links are there, and on reflection, they’re maybe stronger than I thought the first time around.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The point of\u00a0X Lives<\/em> is to send Wolverine back to revisit his sprawling, unwieldy history, and to show him existing over a massive expanse of history.\u00a0X Deaths<\/em> extends that into the future, with a Wolverine from the far future, infected by the Phalanx, coming back in time. He’s set up to look like a villain – he’s the Phalanx, after all – but it turns out that he’s actually here for one last mission before he succumbs, trying to stop Moira from setting post-humanity on the path to domination.<\/p>\n

Future Wolverine doesn’t talk much in the first few issues, but he does loosen up a bit when he’s faced with his family members. The “X Deaths” of the title is a bit of a strain, and perhaps could use a bit more space, but the idea is that future Wolverine outlived everyone else to become the last of the mutants. He’s long-lived already, as seen in\u00a0X Lives<\/em>; he’s going to stick around forever, as seen in\u00a0X Deaths<\/em>. (Let’s not worry for now about how this fits with him succumbing to old age in the relatively near future in\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em>. Hickman already ignored that in\u00a0Powers of X,\u00a0<\/em>after all.)<\/p>\n

By the end, you get a Wolverine distilled to his essence as a lethal last man standing, and finally, by the end, distilled still further into the living weapon he’s always resisted being. At the same time, the real – or rather, the present day – Wolverine shows up to fight him and defeat him. That bit’s muddied somewhat by working in the Cerebro Sword, which can save the day for Reasons, but it means that Wolverine gets to symbolically bring his life to an end and show that it will in fact have an end point and a resolution. It’s maybe interesting also to see that Laura, Daken and Scout, all of whom have similar healing powers, don’t make it into the future with him. In a way it reasserts him as, maybe not the only Wolverine, but the prime or template version of the character.<\/p>\n

Phalanx-corrupted Wolverine also degenerates into a skeleton, which makes the further point that on an island where we’re supposed to be alarmed about the third force of posthumanity, Wolverine was\u00a0always<\/em> a mutant post-human. Sure, it’s not machinery, but he’s a little bit cyborg already, contributing to the sense of him having a slightly awkward relationship with the rest of the island.<\/p>\n

Federico Vicentini is a very different sort of artist to Joshua Cassara on\u00a0X Lives<\/em>, and it’s a smart piece of casting. X Lives<\/em>\u00a0is organic all, maybe in a rather grimy way, complete with Omega Red making bone extensions from his host bodies in place of his usual metal tentacles. Vicentini’s art is more angular and cleaner, harsher in some ways. The crisp, regular, parallel lines in Wolverine’s Phalanx infection are a nice interpretation of the techno-organic concept, and appropriately understated.<\/p>\n

It’s also a bit more conventionally superheroic than X Lives<\/em>, which is perfectly fine for what’s basically an action chase book. It also allows the book to pull off a cute callback to\u00a0House of X<\/em> in the final issue, in Moira’s dying moments, when it parodies her first meeting with Xavier. I’m not sure that would have worked with Cassara – his style is too far removed from the original – but it fits here. The one thing that I’m really not sure about, visually, is that weird suit of armour Moira’s wearing in the last couple of issues, which feels awkward and undercuts some moments that feel like they want to be taken more seriously. But on the whole it’s a good looking book.<\/p>\n

Moira, then. Let’s recap.\u00a0House of X<\/em> revealed that Moira had lived through multiple previous lives, and that in one of the earliest, she developed a cure for mutant powers. Mystique and Destiny promptly hunted her down and killed her. She spent multiple lives trying to find a way for the mutants to win, and it always failed. And she sold Professor X and Magneto on some sort of plan for Krakoa, claiming that the big idea was to have all the mutants together. In fact, according to\u00a0Inferno<\/em>, her plan was apparently to get the mutants onto a nice happy island where they could be sidetracked, and then wipe out new mutants by using her cure on pre-manifestation children. She had Mystique and Destiny out of circulation in this timeline and she finally had a chance to get back to the original plan. The implication is that she was going to somehow include her cure in the Krakoan drugs. How that was going to work with mutants whose powers were visible from birth, I’m not entirely sure, but that was the idea.<\/p>\n

So, Moira is exposed by Destiny, Mystique and Cypher and driven out of Krakoa, with Mystique still determined to hunt her down. This story basically sees Moira on the run from Mystique and the future Wolverine, hooking up with apparently well-meaning tech entrepreneur Arnab Chakladar, and basically giving herself that final life that Destiny mentioned, by eventually “resurrecting” herself in a robot body. So it completes Moira’s turn to outright villainy.<\/p>\n

Does this actually\u00a0work<\/em> for Moira? The obvious objection is that it trashes the character. To be honest, if you go back to Claremont-era stories, it’s not as if Moira actually\u00a0does<\/em> all that much. There are vague hints in the early days of a secret, it basically turns out to be a break-up with Xavier, and from that point on her role is mainly to serve as an in-house scientist. She has close relationships with Banshee and to some degree Wolfsbane. She gets to be a prominent supporting character in\u00a0Excalibur<\/em>. She seems to be very upset about the deaths of her students in Deadly Genesis.\u00a0<\/em>Mostly, she’s a part of the X-furniture; her value to the Krakoan era rests as much as anything in subverting the sense of familiarity she provides.<\/p>\n

Still, to the extent that Moira did stuff, it’s uncomfortable to try and rationalise it all as her maintaining a facade for all these years. And I don’t think you need to do that. You can believe that Moira’s plan requires the mutants to survive; that she’d prefer the world to be rid of mutant powers but sees her cure as an opportunity; that she genuinely believes she’s providing the mutants with the best possible world, given how all the others turned out; and that she can care about individual mutant characters alongside her plans for mutants as a whole. You can also make the point that in the most Moira-centric storyline, the Proteus arc, she’s a gun-toting badass who kept her own child locked in an empty room; Hickman’s Moira can be seen without too much of a stretch as a throwback to that version of the character.<\/p>\n

Having her join the post-human forces doesn’t seem too much of a stretch once she’s been kicked out of Krakoa – after all, she’s got to find a place somewhere, and she’s allied with all sorts of people in previous lives. But having her feel quite so vindictive towards mutantkind doesn’t ring true. Part of the problem here is that she\u00a0wasn’t<\/em> rejected by mutants generally, in\u00a0Inferno<\/em>. The whole point was that almost nobody even knew she was there, and she left before more than a handful of characters found out. Anger at Charles kind of makes sense; he failed to protect her and screwed up all her plans., or at least she could see it that way. But when you have her straightforwardly embracing the anti-mutant angle, I don’t really buy that. And when she’s killing and skinning Banshee… that’s too much, and it feels like it\u00a0is<\/em> trashing the stories based on that relationship. Maybe it’d work if you played it as desperation, and taking her only card to get back onto the island, but that’s not how it comes across.<\/p>\n

Then again, the early issues cast her more as a victim, so maybe she’s meant to come across as more ambiguous even at the end than she actually does. Perhaps the problem is just that she ends up feeling like an uncomplicatedly straightforward villain, and the book comes down rather more decisively in favour of that interpretation than it was meant to. Poor Arnab feels like a more rounded character than her by the end of the story. I can’t say I really understand what the point was of giving her cancer, either – why allow her to escape, if you’re already planning to kill her?<\/p>\n

It works pretty well as a chase book, and there are some nicely done set pieces, such as the motel sequence. The Wolverine aspects have grown on me with a bit of further reflection. But if the aim is to convince me about Moira as an outright villain, I’m not yet sold.\u00a0There’s a lot of work still to be done in unscrambling her actual motives and turning her from a plot device back into an active character again, if that’s where we’re going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #1-5 Writer: Benjamin Percy Artist: Federico Vicentini Colourists: Dijjo Lima with Frank Martin Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Mark Basso If\u00a0X Lives of Wolverine\u00a0felt like a Wolverine arc pressed into service as an event, then its sister title\u00a0X Deaths of Wolverine is more obviously conceived for the role. That’s because much of […]<\/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-7804","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\/7804","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=7804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7806,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7804\/revisions\/7806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}