{"id":8858,"date":"2023-03-16T21:53:25","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T21:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8858"},"modified":"2023-03-16T21:53:25","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T21:53:25","slug":"wolverine-31-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8858","title":{"rendered":"Wolverine #31 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>WOLVERINE vol 7 #31<\/strong>
\n“Weapons of X, part 1”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Benjamin Percy<\/strong>
\nArtist: Juan Jos\u00e9 Ryp<\/strong>
\nColourist: Frank D’Armata<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Wolverine fights a whole team of Beasts. This doesn’t happen in this issue, but it’s clearly coming later in the storyline. (For whatever reason, the surprise ending of this issue is not only given away on the cover, it was in the solicitation copy.)<\/p>\n

PAGES 2-5.\u00a0<\/strong>Beast brings the Pointe to life and heads off into the sea.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last issue, Wolverine killed the Beast in revenge for Beast turning him into a weapon. Beast was automatically resurrected as a clone in X-Force HQ from an “auto-backup”. The obvious question is how this fits with the idea that the Five are… well, necessary. In fairness, though, the Five aren’t involved in the process of restoring memories, and we saw in\u00a0X-Force<\/em> #37 that that bit can be done by a machine if need be. So maybe Beast got the Five to create these bodies for him – in defiance of the normal rules against multiple resurrections – and has them all stored in the Pointe, but he can’t make any more. The other possibility is that this Beast isn’t\u00a0truly<\/em> a resurrection, but just a regular old clone.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Either way, the game is finally<\/em> up for the Beast as leader of X-Force (even if he casts it as himself firing the rest of the team), and he heads off to pursue his agenda single-handedly. Beast considers himself to be a heroic nationalist, and page 2 makes a point of having him in a more traditional heroic pose than we normally see him in. Beast’s worldview is vaguely recognisable as a warped version of Wolverine’s; Wolverine also sees himself as someone who does the dirty work so that other people don’t have to know about it, but he at least feels conflicted about doing so. Nonetheless, it does seem to be the case that Beast’s ultimate motivation here is nationalism, albeit filtered through considerable self-importance.<\/p>\n

Beast’s moral reasoning is garbled, which is no doubt mostly intentional. Comparing Wolverine to a nuclear weapon, on an island that has actual Omega mutants lying around, doesn’t really make sense. Beast also seems inconsistent about whether he’s rejecting morality entirely (as something that gets in the way of serving the greater national good) or whether he’s justifying himself morally by an appeal to a version of utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number). But of course Beast’s worldview doesn’t have to be internally consistent.<\/p>\n

It’s probably just being done for intelligibility purposes, but for all his nationalism, Beast’s computer screens don’t actually use Krakoan text.<\/p>\n

PAGE 6.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 7-10.\u00a0<\/strong>Wolverine fights Beast’s booby-trapped body.<\/em><\/p>\n

Self-explanatory. In amongst this, Wolverine’s narration makes clear that he suspects Beast allowed himself to be killed and that he has something wider in mind.<\/p>\n

PAGES 11-12.\u00a0<\/strong>Beast destroys a submarine.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is his idea of “remain[ing] covert”, is it? March a giant skull monster into the sea and attack the very submarine that’s presumably reporting back on you constantly? Well, I suppose he’ll be able to do what he wants now it’s out of the way.<\/p>\n

PAGES 13-14.\u00a0<\/strong>Beast wakes his clones.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is (kind of) the new X-Force – an entire team of Beasts.<\/p>\n

PAGE 15.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page: the Beast’s views on morality. As already noted, this is rather garbled, since he was making an appeal to utilitarianism earlier in the issue, but you can decide for yourself whether that’s Percy’s error or Beast’s. It’s not true that morality depends on a fear of divine punishment – but it’s an argument that religious people have been making for centuries.<\/p>\n

In practice, though, most religious people have no difficulty seeing moral rationales that exist independently of God. If you ask a Christian why murder is bad, they’re unlikely to reply “Because God says so, even if we have no idea why.” What Beast is really identifying here is the question of\u00a0why<\/em> people should behave morally if there are no sanctions not doing so. One conventional answer is that there\u00a0is<\/em> a sanction, which is the way you are treated by other people, and also the fact that you contribute to making the world a worse place that you then have to live in.\u00a0If pushed, this version of Beast would probably say that he’s a moral nihilist – morality, on this view, is a social phenomenon, but not an objective truth that exists to be discovered in the real world like the laws of maths or physics. But heck, he’s a deranged nationalist, not a philosopher.<\/p>\n

The other problem with all this, of course, is that as an active superhero in the Marvel Universe, Beast knows perfectly well that gods and afterlives exist. The Waiting Room is literally right there.<\/p>\n

PAGES 16-17.\u00a0<\/strong>Cecilia Reyes operates on Jeff Gardiner.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wolverine is now saying that they’re all to blame for following Beast. Well, yes, it might have been an idea to shut him down when he mind controlled an entire country over a year ago now.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-19.<\/strong>\u00a0Wolverine asks for Beast’s memory files.<\/em><\/p>\n

According to the data page on page 19, Beast has wiped all of his back-ups “since the founding of Krakoa … along with a good deal of what precedes them”. This is a slightly odd way of expressing it if he’s actually left files from as far back as his membership of the Avengers – he left the team in\u00a0Avengers<\/em> #211 (1981).<\/p>\n

Sage infers that Beast has left files from his Avengers period untouched because he didn’t see them as important. But it’s fairly obvious where this is heading: this storyline ends with Beast getting killed and resurrected as the classic cheerful Beast, who then gets to do a storyline about whether he bears moral responsibility for things he doesn’t remember doing. It also seems likely that this is precisely Beast’s endgame – he expects to get himself killed and sees this as a route to resurrection without responsibility.<\/p>\n

PAGES 20-23.\u00a0<\/strong>Beast tells X-Force that they’re all fired.<\/em><\/p>\n

Apparently Beast is merrily cloning himself a whole team of Wolverines now. I do like the art on this – Ryp has got the sense of these characters all being identical and not merely similar.<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.\u00a0<\/strong>Trailers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. WOLVERINE vol 7 #31 “Weapons of X, part 1” Writer: Benjamin Percy Artist: Juan Jos\u00e9 Ryp Colourist: Frank D’Armata Letterer: Cory Petit Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen Editor: Mark Basso COVER \/ PAGE 1. Wolverine fights a whole team 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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8858","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=8858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8860,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8858\/revisions\/8860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}