X Deaths of Wolverine #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #4
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Federico Vicentini
Colourist: Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Omega Wolverine going through a Krakoan gate.
PAGES 2-4. Flashback: the fall of Krakoa in Omega Wolverine’s timeline.
Although the caption calls this the “near future”, the grey hairs on Forge suggest that we’re a good few years into the future. Wolverine is also shown with some grey hairs, though not as many. Despite the suggestion in X Lives that Wolverine is basically immortal, that’s not really true; we’ve seen in Old Man Logan that his natural lifespan is still something under 200 years.
Basically, Forge is implanting an organic-tech time travel device in Wolverine so that when he finally figures out what caused this timeline, he can go back in time and avert it. This is the back story of Omega Wolverine; we see him next in the flashback in the previous issue, where he was still hanging around in the far future trying to find the key information, and Moira seemingly killed him.
Krakoa is being destroyed by a bunch of fairly conventional-looking Sentinels, though Nimrod can be seen up in the top right. This is basically the destruction of mutants by artificial intelligence that Moira had always been warning about, and that Xavier and Magneto were keen to avert throughout the Hickman run. Evidently Moira wasn’t lying about that.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. I have issues with the description of Laura, Gabby and Daken as Wolverine’s “closest allies” – they’re his closest relatives, but it’s not like he works with them all that often.
PAGES 6-8. Flashback: the origin of Omega Wolverine.
This continues directly from the flashback in the previous issue. Moira whines that she gave the mutants Krakoa, and that they responded by stripping her powers and exiling her. That’s Inferno #4, though really it was specifically an act of Emma, Mystique, Destiny and Cypher, not mutantkind as a whole. As we’ve said before, all of this is made a bit obscure by the failure to spell out in Inferno what exactly Moira’s secret plan was that led to her being driven out, but the implication was that Krakoa was meant to be a utopia to sideline mutants while preventing any more from being born in the outside world.
As mentioned last issue, the whole “Preserve” set-up echoes a timeline in Powers of X where Moira and Logan survived to the end of the human race, but this is a different timeline.
PAGE 9. Data page. This is all calling back to Powers of X and the potential ascent of humanity into post-humanity. More fundamentally, Moira’s death apparently resets the timeline; but if she were to live forever as part of the Phalanx collective consciousness, that could presumably be averted.
Digression: Quite how Moira’s timeline resets work, if indeed that is how they work, remains a little obscure. I think the simplest approach is to view it as just straightforward time travel where she goes back and alters the course of history. Or, if you prefer, it’s like Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the whole timeline exists from start to end, even though the event that leads to the destruction of everything happens to take place in the middle. What wouldn’t work is any suggestion that the future doesn’t exist beyond Moira’s death, since that would contradict all manner of time travel stories. Of course, precisely because time travel exists in the Marvel Universe, the whole timeline exists at once, even if its actual content is subject to change.
PAGES 10-15. Omega Wolverine, Scout, Daken and Wolverine (Laura) confront Arnab Chakladar.
Moira has already left, so they’re too late.
Why does Chakladar, a regular tech mogul, have a Cable-style gun lying around his lab?
According to Omega Wolverine, all of his children died in various ways in his timeline. Daken’s death might be a callback to Wolverine’s death in Days of Futures Past. Scout is apparently depowered by Nimrod, which I don’t think we’ve seen Nimrod having the power to do yet. Maybe he picks up the designs for Forge’s Neutraliser somewhere, but that suggests a possible future development. Wolverine / Laura (and Omega Wolverine is clear to assert her as the real Wolverine here) is tortured by the “Homo Novissima” – the far-future posthumans from Powers of X, who presumably also dominate the world in his far future.
PAGE 16. Data page.
Singing stone recordings. The singing stones are stone-based recording devices from X-Force. Bugs, basically.
Banshee. Moira asks Banshee to help her get back onto the Island. Banshee was, of course, her lover for many years in the Claremont run and beyond. Evidently he says no, given the next scene.
PAGE 17. Moira returns to the island, tricking Krakoa using Banshee’s skin.
Um. So apparently you can get through the gates by holding bits of a mutant corpse? Anyway, I really don’t like this; aside from being generally grotesque, it feels like it’s going out of its way to trash the Moira/Sean relationship, which may not exactly fit with the current direction of Moira’s character, but didn’t need to be actively destroyed. I suspect the intention was to convey Moira’s sense of desperation, but if so, it doesn’t read that way.
PAGE 18. Destiny in the Hatchery.
Destiny is waiting for Mystique to be resurrected after she was killed in the previous issue. As a member of the Quiet Council, Mystique will be fast tracked.
The panel of Logan and Xavier in the background is the cliffhanger of X Lives of Wolverine #4.
PAGES 19-24. Omega Wolverine stops Moira and succumbs to the Phalanx.
Moira’s initial plan is to get her powers back by using the Neutraliser twice, but that doesn’t work. Apparently Moira’s preferred option is still to reset time by suicide; this is effectively what she did in the Powers of X far future timeline, albeit that she let Wolverine actually kill her.
Professor X is bleeding from the shoulder because he was stabbed by a possessed present-day Wolverine in X Lives of Wolverine #4.
Moira shoots Forge with the Neutralizer. This is, in principle, reversible – Storm got her powers back in the end, and presumably Forge could be resurrected like many other depowered mutants who have gone through Crucible.
There’s some really, really clunky storytelling where Moira somehow gets into a suit of plant-tech armour that happens to be lying around. The art really struggles with that.
Moira uses the Neutralizer on Omega Wolverine, thus removing his healing factor and causing him to succumb entirely to the Phalanx.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: TIME’S UP.
I don’t think the Phalanx collective consciousness would work with Moira in that way.
In Life Six, the post-humans tell Moira they are going to remove her from Earth, because after the Phalanx assimilate all of the planet’s information for their hive mind, they are going to scour the planet of all physical life.
Moira would presumably have been killed and reset the timeline.
If this would have worked with Moira in Life Six, the Phalanx could have just assimilated her with everything else, but they had to protect her physical body.
I’m not reading this comic, so I don’t know if the intent was something else.
Also, so glad I’m not reading this travesty. It sounds hilariously terrible.
I picked up this issue because a friend told me that it was crazy, and he was definitely right.
I liked the art. And the breakneck pace. And Wolverine’s dedication to his kids. I’m also impressed that they turned Hickman’s original idea into a ’90s-era disaster, but I can’t say I like that part very much.
Who thought Moira skinning and wearing Banshee’s entire head would be a good idea? The simple logistics of that are horrifying. Hickman’s Moira was ethically dubious, but she wasn’t a monster.
Also, why does every scientist character have guns just hanging around his lab? That’s dumb.
Well, that was.. something. Before this issue, Moira’s characterization was careening around wildly, but this is where it really went off the rails. We’re past a ‘sense of desperation’ and onward to screaming kill you all you all each and every one betrayed me I’ll wear your skins.
Inferno raised serious questions about her true feelings and motivations, but rather than answer them we’re basically told they don’t matter. She’s (in her mind) righteously angry and willing to do anything, so she doesn’t have to explain herself. It doesn’t matter what she was planning, now she’s going to just destroy it all. Sigh.
The Banshee thing is hilarious. It’s exactly like something Millar would have done; entirely for shock value and lasting barely a page, except this has none of the intentional meanness behind it that Millar would have had, making it all the more funnier.
I wonder if Moira’s new cyberarm came with a mutant skinning attachment.
Banshee-as-skin-suit was possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever read in an X-Men comic. Just… wow. Remember in the Chuck Austen run when Iceman was just a head and Havok offered/threatened to urinate him some moisture to make a body? If the characters had actually gone through with it, that might be dumber than a Banshee skin-suit, but by no more than a hair.
The depowering gun just lying around a lab! The plant mech suit Moira would have had no time to get inside! Omega Wolverine stabbing Tech Guy in the knowledge-section of the brain! This comic was bonkers, and my hope for issue 5 is wild inexplicable nonsense on every single page.
I’m sorry but Percy has been one of the worst writers during the whole Krakoa period and to give him the follow up to Hickman’s swan song is just bonkers. Kieran Gillen, Al Ewing and Gerry Duggan are all just waiting in the wings and probably could have put together something pretty awesome. X-Office editorial really screwed this whole thing up. It seems like this happens every time the writer who is the shepherd of the line leaves the X-books from Claremont on.
Hickman’s run was interesting because each of the sides did horrible things, but the reader understood their reasons. Not too shabby for a writer not known for characterization. Orchis are the villains we’ve been hating for years in the X-comics, but during Hickman’s run they had a point. Just like each of the other sides.
Moira was amoral, but she had an agenda and a reason for performing those actions in each life. Somehow, even with the threat of genocide with her “cure”, Moira was still a sane and understandable character.
It may not have been what fans really want in a comic after cheering on the persecuted mutants for years, but it was a creative narrative.
Hickman’s gone one month and Moira becomes a villainous genocidal psychopath.
Hahaha, oh no. Moira’s gone full Bishop! She’s even got the robot arm!
In regards to Wolverine aging, portrayals vary wildly. We’ve seen him thousands or even billions of years in the future, youthful as ever. But we’ve seen him just ten years in the future with grey sideburns. My headcanon says that Old Man Wolverine was old because his healing stopped for a while, and even when it came back it wasn’t as strong. I don’t know about Days of Future Past Wolverine, maybe he had power issues too.
And Forge, I think he was always meant to be older than the average X-Man, maybe in his 40s. He was a Vietnam vet in his first appearances in the 80s, after all. Grey hair could be as little as a couple of years away for him.
Before Marvel retconned it Old Man Logan was supposed to be the same Wolverine who had shown up in Millar and Hitch’s Fantastic Four run, who had started deaging again. No idea what it’s supposed to be now.
I’d guess mid-30s for Forge.
We don’t know what year he got drafted, but we could guess maybe 1967. We also don’t know what age he got drafted, but we could assume probably young…we could guess 19. Then, he debuted in 1984, so that would make him around 36 during his debut.
He was dating Storm and she was only in her early-20s when she was first with the X-Men. I think she was 24 when she joined the team.
‘Scout is apparently depowered by Nimrod, which I don’t think we’ve seen Nimrod having the power to do yet.’
Didn’t he use a depowering gizmo in his confrontation with Xavier and Magneto in Inferno? Or was that Omega Sentinel’s gizmo? Was there a depowering gizmo in that scene? I seem to remember there was.
Banshee-as-a-suit is so dumb, I didn’t even realize that that was what was happening. I saw there was something very weird going on with Banshee, but I didn’t get… that.
Looking at it now, I see the panel where Moira takes off the… facemask. But I read it as Moira killing Banshee from behind or something.
The art is actually quite clear on what’s happening. I guess it’s just… so stupid my brain refused to comprehend it.
What a choice. Amazing.
The only way X Lives can top it now is if in the last issue we go back to the first issue, except this time Omega Red takes over Sharon Xavier as she’s in labor and gives birth to Chuck himself.
@Jenny ‘Before Marvel retconned it Old Man Logan was supposed to be the same Wolverine who had shown up in Millar and Hitch’s Fantastic Four run’
As far as I understand it, this hasn’t been retconned. The Old Man Logan who came to 616 via Secret Wars / Battleworld, hung around with the X-Men in Extraordinary and had his own ongoing by Lemire and later Brisson was an alternate Old Man Logan.
Everything about his history was the same as the original flavor, up to and including the ending of Millar’s ‘Old Man Logan’ arc, but he was from a completely different timeline/dimension/what have you.
I feel bad for the Indian guy, but not really surprised, he was like the only nonwhite character of any consequence in this series and he’s not a member of the herrenvolk so like, obviously he wasn’t making it out okay, this is X-men.
@Krzysiek Ceran “As far as I understand it, this hasn’t been retconned. The Old Man Logan who came to 616 via Secret Wars / Battleworld, hung around with the X-Men in Extraordinary and had his own ongoing by Lemire and later Brisson was an alternate Old Man Logan.”
Huh. Well that seems overcomplicated but not entirely surprising.
@Chris V: Claremont has Storm at 6 years old during the 1956 Suez Crisis, implying she is 25 in 1975’s GSXM#1. She would have to be early 30s by now at least
We know other age markers from that time too. Jean/Phoenix is 24 when she dies according to her headstone, making Scott and Angel ~25, Hank ~27, and Iceman 23. Hank turned 30 around 1994 in Nicieza’s X-Men.
Nightcrawler has a 21st birthday in X-Men Annual #4.
I believe Colossus is 17 when he joins, though I can’t remember the specific issue that has his birthday in it (was it in space?).
Kitty is 13.5 when she joins, and we see her 14th and 15th birthdays.
This entire X Lives/Deaths of Wolverine thing is a flaming hot mess and the sooner it’s over, the better.
Moira killing and skinning her ex-lover to wear him as a meat suit to fool the Krakoan gates so she can continue on her plan to end the mutant race is just… mindbogglingly awful on so many levels.
The sad thing is that if any writer ever wants to rehabilitate her, it’s going to take a hell of a reset or reboot back to the last viable point, and I’m not sure there really is one anymore, given everything that’s been established.
The X-Franchise has had bad authors, mediocre ones, and fundamentally wrong ones, and I’m really feeling like Benjamin Percy fits into the same category as Matthew Rosenberg: potentially good ideas but catastrophically bad execution and a complete lack of grasp on what makes many of the characters tick.
I don’t know that Moira would need to be rehabilitated, she’s a minor character who was dead and unmissed for decades. I don’t think anyone would mind if she just went back in the ground at the end of this.
But if someone did want to reuse her, I again raise Bishop. The man committed genocide in his quest to murder a baby, and he was made a hero again by, well as far as I can tell they just never mentioned it.
I’m not loving Jordan White handwaving away how Marvel time travel has worked.
Deciding to want time travel to work like Terminator (and tell the same story as the movie) doesn’t help when the resulting story is nonsensical.
I don’t know if I want this fixed or ignored.
Pretty sure Percy got Moira in a situation worse than Wanda lmao. With Wanda at the very least there is /some/ wiggle room since she was unstable and didn’t act on the worst intentions. I’m gonna assume if Moira ever comes back, it will be firmly on a villainous position, and her powers will be retconned.
By the way, authors don’t know what to do with Banshee either, huh? I’m not very knowledgeable on late 00s and 10s books but afaik he’s spent a good time dead, did pretty much nothing during this krakoa era and now is at the center of one of the worst recent storytelling decisions. Starting to miss his gen X teacher era.
One complaint that just came to mind – less about this issue specifically but the premise of this series as a whole: Krakoa literally giving Moira a cancer kinda undercuts how Doug found an alternative to break the cycle of violence through machine and organic alliance and I don’t dig that at all. His little arc was easily one of my favorite things on Inferno so I guess I’m just going to pretend this schlocky mess of a series is not canon at all.
(looks like I care too much for someone who claims to not care, rip)
@Si, Bishop got a redemption story in Uncanny X-Force vol. 2 (the one that came after AVX, with Storm and Spiral and the Demon Bear). I don’t really remember the mechanics of it being any good, but it was clearly intended to draw a line under the whole thing and ended with Hope forgiving him.
“The art is actually quite clear on what’s happening. I guess it’s just… so stupid my brain refused to comprehend it.”
This is a perfect review of this series.
Miyamoris-Yes, but then KrakLock (WarKoa?) evolved in to a Titan and sent Omega Sentinel back in time to hasten the creation of Nimrod.
It also makes me wonder if Doug’s story wasn’t meant to have an ulterior motive that Hickman never got around to telling. I wonder if Doug’s agenda was to see the mutants fail and the Machines succeed.
“Pretty sure Percy got Moira in a situation worse than Wanda lmao”
I don’t think so. They can just kill her off again and retire her for another two decades, just like last time.
@Chris V, do you mean the stuff on Inferno #3? Omega refers to the Titan as a betrayer but other than that, I didn’t catch anything else that could point to them being related to either Warlock and/or Krakoa.
In the case the Titan is really them, I’d speculate the point is more Cypher’s absence than a hidden agenda. Because the Titan’s choice of sending Omega back just escalates a conflict while Cypher’s choice of letting go of Moira is one of de-escalation.
I say this cause I don’t read Doug as a potential schemer – I think he genuinely wants to believe in the promise of Krakoa but he isn’t so naive as to be blindsided by it. It’s neat how Hickman plays with the character’s history – by the nature of his own mutant abilities and close personal relationships he’s perfecty opposed to the hubris of the leadership who got too wrapped up in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There were other hints that the “trickster” Titan was Warlock, and I’d assume that it is the merging of Krakoa and Warlock which allowed the evolution in to a Titan based on Hickman’s mythology about the origin of a Titan.
Of course we don’t know what happened in that alternate future and it may be true that it had nothing to do with Doug.
I am also thinking about the ending of the Giant Size X-Men: Storm issue where Doug talks to the Phalanx-entity. He says, “I’ll be seeing you soon.”…which sounded creepy, but like I said, that’s total speculation on my part.
I’m not sure how Doug letting Moira go free deescalated anything though.
Yes, you could argue he was actually making a moral decision and choosing a path forsaking vengeance. That is one way to read it and I’m sure it is the decision going forward now. On the one hand, it is almost comforting to think that one character in this set-up has a conscience and is still acting like a hero.
If Mystique and Destiny killed Moira it would have led to the two being removed from the equation.
In the long run, that may have actually deescalated the tension on Krakoa more than Mystique and Destiny remaining. There is the potential for a schism to arise between Xavier/Magneto and Mystique/Destiny on the Council with Emma playing both sides for her own advantage. It seems as if this would only serve to weaken Krakoa. Plus, it allows Moira to continue pursuing her own agenda which isn’t to the benefit of mutants.
I mean, no one could expect she’d turn in to a serial killer, but….
I get the feeling that Hickman may have wanted Doug to grow disillusioned with the arrogance of Xavier and the mutants on Krakoa and decide that mutants don’t deserve to inherit the future and that he’s come to feel closer and more sympathy for the Machines.
That part is, again, my speculation.
At least Moira didn’t kill and skin her foster daughter Wolfsbane. Maybe that’s besty issue?
This book is insulting on so many levels. To the characters being trashed, to the readers to have to believe that Wolverine or Mystique couldn’t just eliminate Moira pretty much in a heartbeat, and also to the story foundations Hickman laid before. Bah!
Between Comixology shutting down and… this, it’s been a great time to go back to reading about comics rather than reading them.
Waiting to see what Gillen manages to make of all this!
“[Bishop] committed genocide in his quest to murder a baby, and he was made a hero again by, well as far as I can tell they just never mentioned it.”
That’s because none of those people he murdered happened to be his wife. That’s why he’s okay. You absolutely must not disrespect wives in the MU or it’ll stick to you forever. Anything else, you can recover from.
Bishop’s rep can survive slaughtering loads of innocents. Wolfsbane’s rep can withstand her getting romantic with a friggin’ minor (and not only a minor- a student whom had been entrusted to her care).
But decades later, Cyclops and Hank Pym are still shit on because the former abandoned his wife (and son) and the latter struck his wife.
I don’t see Doug as siding with machines, but what if he got the transmode virus from having Warlock on his arm for months? He might be corrupted by the Technarch/ Phalanx and switch sides.
Moo: On the other hand, both Peter Parker and Reed Richards have hit their wives and (occasional blog post or video about it excepted) have gotten away with it. I know, there was insanity or possession involved or it was an accident, but it still happened. Technically, the Hulk has hit his wife because they fought when she turned into Harpy or Red She-Hulk, but that’s a whole different mess.
More generally, if a character hurts another character and that other character sticks around, the damage will stick, too. Both Cyclops and Hank Pym did things that affected longtime cast members, and those cast members didn’t instantly go away.
Readers also haven’t forgotten Professor X lying to and manipulating the X-Men or characters siding with Superhuman Registration or pre-crime during the two Civil War crossovers either. Doing emotional damage to a main character or betraying them in a high-profile way does tend to stick in the audience’s minds.
But having a character kill hordes of nameless characters — especially largely off-panel — simply won’t connect with readers, because it’s too abstracted. Unlike real-world atrocities, there’s not some big trove of documentary evidence, since the imaginary masses are…well, imaginary. They aren’t characters with well-founded narrative roles to which readers form attachments.
Similarly, Mark Millar deciding that Electro was blowing up cars containing children via an incidental line of dialogue during a fight scene in Marvel Knights Spider-Man didn’t make readers start seeing Electro as some kind of loathsome monster forever after. And that was a pretty high-profile run at the time. Electro got played as a potentially sympathetic, if broadly villainous character pretty quickly again after that series.
One test of the likely impact on readers would be to see if we can name any of the people Bishop destroyed and say anything about their lives or emotional connections.
If the writers and artists can’t bother to create this kind of narrative detail or spend any time on it, then they really have just created an arbitrary statistic or vague plot point with minimal narrative significance.
And unlike real-world history, the narrative is literally the entire available substance and context here; there are no “real” characters being erased or effaced. So what is horrific for Stalin to (apocryphally) say about real people is quite true of entirely imaginary ones.
Honestly, “character slaughtered tons of background ciphers” is a tiresome trope for exactly this reason: it’s a lazy, hackish way to make them a monster without having to spend much narrative space on what’s so terrible about it, and so it should be unsurprising that it has little long-term narrative weight for readers.
Bishop was a crazy villain doing big crazy villain things for a while, but in the end all the characters we actually know came out of it alright, Bishop seems to be back to his usual characterization, and none of it really matters for any of the characters we actually know and connect with.
Part of it might just be the nature of comics. There used to be heavy use of continuity and the classic period of comics is ingrained in comic fans’ minds.
Something like Hank Pym striking his wife is going to be heavily dealt with in concurrent comics and treated like a major event. The readers are going to remember the event.
As time has passed, big events happen all the time with little follow-up or lasting repercussions. Modern comics seem like a series of random events which happen with little substance.
The period around Civil War was sort of that changing point. House of M and Civil War were huge events because Marvel was returning to sweeping, line-wide crossovers like they used to do in the early-1990s again. It seemed like major events were occurring which were changing the entire Marvel Universe again.
Then, they just kept happening and unlike the first two, it seemed like an event would end and everyone would move on back to what was occurring with the characters beforehand.
With Civil War, Marvel tried to ignore the implications of Tony Stark’s actions, but readers felt betrayed by the character assassination and Marvel expecting fans to move on. Now, fans have grown to accept this is how Marvel operates.
If Bishop had done this in the 1980s or 1990s, we’d all be talking about it to this day. Marvel would treat it like a defining moment and play off that story as much as possible…either trying to make Bishop a viable character again (ala Scott and Hank) or leaving him as an unredeemable villain going forward.
In modern comics, something like that Bishop story is just another random event that took place in a Marvel comic. There’s little follow up. It’s rarely mentioned again. It’s just diminishing returns.
Long-time fans remember every detail of comics from the 1960s or the 1980s. Post-2006, everything seems like a blur.
Also, that scene of Reed Richards slapping Sue while Franklin cheers him on is completely ridiculous out of context.
I agree it’s more about hurting existing and continuing characters than just wives. That would explain the seemingly impossible task of getting the Scarlet Witch back on track.
In Scott’s case, I think the main reason why the readers never forgave him was that it took 34 years for Maddie to rejoin the X-Teams. (And Ayala is only now starting to redeem her- at least, that’s where she seems to be going.) If the Goblin Queen had just been treated as the 895th time an X-Man tried to kill their friends under the influence of magic or mind control, and Maddie had rejoined the X-Men shortly after Inferno, just with less clothing a la Psylocke, some readers would have complained about Maddie’s new look being exploitative like they did with Paylocke but Scott’s actions would have probably been eventually forgotten about.The fact the writers’ desire to “redeem” Scott cost us Maddie as a hero is what made Scott’s actions unable to forget.
“Something like Hank Pym striking his wife is going to be heavily dealt with in concurrent comics and treated like a major event.”
Nah, it wasn’t referenced by any writers of any other Marvel titles in publication during the period. I was reading almost everything in those days. Unless a character happened to bring it up in an issue of Team America or ROM Spaceknight. I wasn’t reading those. Seems unlikely, though.
Chris V said: If Bishop had done this in the 1980s or 1990s, we’d all be talking about it to this day. Marvel would treat it like a defining moment and play off that story as much as possible…either trying to make Bishop a viable character again (ala Scott and Hank) or leaving him as an unredeemable villain going forward.
In modern comics, something like that Bishop story is just another random event that took place in a Marvel comic. There’s little follow up. It’s rarely mentioned again. It’s just diminishing returns.
Long-time fans remember every detail of comics from the 1960s or the 1980s. Post-2006, everything seems like a blur.
I do think some characters from the 1980s and 1990s have gotten by with some pretty awful stuff.
Emma Frost, for example, was an unrepentant murderer, emotional abuser, and, as the commentator Michael will note, an animal abuser in the Firestar miniseries. This was in her earlier appearances in the 1980s, but only a small number of readers today seem to have trouble with her as a protagonist these days. By the 1990s, she was being played as a caring teacher of mutant youth!
And on the flip side, some post-2006 stuff, like the reworking of Loki into a much more sympathetic character after literally decades as a complete scumbag, has absolutely stuck for readers. (Granted, that had the advantage of several highly talented writers working quite hard at it, and a couple of actual deaths and rebirths.)
But overall, yes, a combination of event fatigue and an overreliance on both shocking character turns and rest-button plot mechanics have made most things characters do seem pretty “ignorable.” The next writer will just go back to basics or run with a new status quo, after all.
Part of the issue is that writers are increasingly interested in big, wild, exaggerated concepts that don’t have much grounded emotional reality to them.
So we get Spider-Man, the hero who could be you, making deals with devils to erase his marriage, being body-jacked for a year or so of stories by one of his archfoes, and being replaced in the public eye by his clone to forward a conspiracy by an evil corporation run by extradimensional monsters.
The X-Men, for their part, now live on a sentient island with all their villains and sundry supporting characters, have colonized Mars with extradimensional warrior mutants, and cannot die except under very unusual circumstances.
And then there’s any character Jason Aaron or Donny Cates have written in the last ten years.
That constant level of hyperbolic premise shifts and quasi-ironic plotting creates a general lessening of the emotional stakes, and it also tends to create fantastical plot-device reversals to leave things relatively workable for the next writer. So yes, the sense that thing smatter or that these characters are relatable rapidly hits a point of diminishing returns.
Somehow Al Ewing bucks the trend, and some characters like the Kamala Khan iteration of Ms. Marvel or Squirrel Girl get to be left alone long enough to develop a quirky, relatable supporting cast and a sense of personality. But those titles work largely to the extent that they are sealed off from too much event-centric plotting; the crossovers can sometimes come and affect them, but usually in specific, tailored ways that play to the emotional core of the character or title.
So maybe being the kind of character that sells well in digests but not so much at the local comics shop is the best way to be a functional character at Marvel these days, as opposed to an infinitely reworkable IP.
It’s weird how sometimes a character remains popular despite hurting established cast members though. Emma Frost is still very popular despite everything she put Firestar through as a child. And Poison Ivy essentially raped Count Vertigo, who is often written as an anti-hero or an anti-villain. Yet both of them got redemption arcs. Part of it might just be that a lot of readers like Emma better than Firestar and Ivy better than Vertigo. Part of it is the fact that they’re arguably both victims of abuse so the readers want them to rise above the cycle of abuse. And part of it is definitely due to the fact that they’re both attractive, scantily clad women.
It became a running sub-plot in the Avengers comic book. Pym and Janet got divorced. Roger Stern took over and addressed the running plot.
It wasn’t as if he struck him in that Jim Shooter issue and it was never mentioned again, but no reader ever forgot about it.
It sticks in people minds because it was dealt with in subsequent comics of the time. There were consequences.
The Bishop thing doesn’t stick in people’s’ minds because it happened, then it’s over, so let’s just move on.
“It became a running sub-plot in the Avengers comic book. Pym and Janet got divorced. Roger Stern took over and addressed the running plot.”
Yeah, but you said “dealt with in *concurrent* comics.” Maybe you meant “in subsequent Avengers stories” but I took it as you meaning that characters in other books were gossiping about it.
I’m not even sure what happened with that prior post. There are so many typos.
It’s about Hank striking Jan…not Hank striking “him”.
That’s true that Emma’s characterization during the 1980s was ignored and Emma became accepted during the 1990s as a teacher, when she didn’t have to do much anything to redeem herself. I guess maybe it was done gradually and also happened in the ‘90s when readers were more willing to accept writer’s characterization.
It’s not as if Wanda couldn’t be a viable character again. She was moving on after the Robinson Scarlet Witch series, which was a well-done reconstruction of the character. It seems that later writers never know what to do with her, so just return to her most famous stories…the Byrne West Coast Avengers arc and “No More Mutants”.
And Poison Ivy essentially raped Count Vertigo, who is often written as an anti-hero or an anti-villain. Yet both of them got redemption arcs.
Poison Ivy also underwent a soft reboot in the early 1990s, changing her from the unrepentant sociopath she’d been since her debut int he 1960s through the Ostrander Suicide Squad into the marginally more sympathetic murderous pseudo-ecologist of Batman the Animated Series.
Even then, I think it wasn’t really until the No Man’s Land crossover at the very end of the 1990s played up the idea that Ivy could actually care about at least some other people if she saw them as too young or innocent to threaten her beloved plants.
Not coincidentally, that was when Harley Quinn was brought into the mainline comics continuity. That gave comics Ivy the romance angle with fan-favorite character Harley (speaking of murdering lunatics who get to be played as lovable innocents gone astray). Count Vertigo barely appearing anywhere definitely helped with that, of course, but it’s not as if pre-Suicide Squad Ivy hadn’t been a sociopathic murderer.
With Emma Frost, the turning point was pretty clearly the deaths of the original Hellions, followed by writers playing up her deep, deep trauma over that and making it her new defining trait. Emma has also had her implied backstory retconned to Hell and back.
She was initially established as a corrupt elite running a posh private academy, something that would strongly imply that she was much older than the Morrison retcons that made her a much younger, troubled character swept into Sebastian Shaw’s orbit.
Even in Generation X and New X-Men, she was more like someone Susan Lucci would play on a soap opera than the <iCW-esque “troubled ‘mean girl’ who’s grown into her secret heart of gold” character she became somewhere near the end of Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men.
Like Poison Ivy, I’d say Emma was not merely retconned, but rebooted into an entirely different character archetype across several changes of writer and title. In each case, new backstory and motivation were then refitted to the new role for the character, piece by piece and writer by writer. Both characters’ retroactive reconfigurations were more piecemeal than it might seem in retrospect, with each subsequent creative team change developing additional sympathetic qualities and further rewriting their motivations and backstories.
Reconciling the current versions of Emma and Ivy to their original characterizations across their first decades of publication history is the narratological version of the Ship of Theseus problem.
One could argue that the reverse was done to Norman Osborn, who has been made into a worse and worse person, and more and more pathological, even pre-Goblin Formula, by every writer since John Romita, Sr. and Stan Lee’s relatively sympathetic depiction of a man whose love for his son was blunted by his ambition, and who became pretty decent when those ambitions were suppressed.
Ironically, those changes have made Norman a modernized version of what Steve Ditko was probably going for with Norman, a ruthless malignant narcissist whose wealth and connections allowed him to gull the public and live a life of privilege.
“And part of it is definitely due to the fact that they’re both attractive, scantily clad women.”
Yeah, female characters may get fridged more, but they also seem to get away with more shit. That Wolfsbane/Elixir romance? If it had been Cannonball/Wallflower instead, Sam would probably be labeled a predator to this day.
“And part of it is definitely due to the fact that they’re both attractive, scantily clad women.”
Yeah, female characters may get fridged more, but they also seem to get away with more shit. That Wolfsbane/Elixir romance? If it had been Cannonball/Wallflower instead, Sam would probably be labeled a predator to this day.
Male characters can get away with it if they seem awesome and confident enough to enough of the fandom. Being vaguely antiheroic with a troubled backstory helps there. I think that’s what probably ends up working out for Namor over and over again, despite all the objectively awful things he’s done from literally his first appearance in 1939. Ditto for Magneto, a character so transformed into a Byronic antihero that any story that plays him as the raving megalomaniac he started out as will be swiftly kicked into retcon Hell.
And then there’s the unusual case of Doctor Doom. Yes, he’s a villain, but he’s almost always played as the villain fans should kind of like. When was the last time anyone was genuinely upset at what he did to Valeria? Or, going way, way back, to Darkoth or Sharon Ventura?
Doom has even bounced back from killing a child — Cassie Lang — as the villain fans kind of root. Writers as varied and talented as Mark Waid, Steve Engelhart, Ed Brubaker, and Matt Fraction Doom have worked hard to”show” fans that Doom is a disgustingly hateful, hypocritical, and self-deluding sociopath. Waid and Engelhart even had Doom willfully do horrible things to children and it didn’t make the fans turn against the character!
But the idea that Doom is basically a superhero spoiled into villainy by sheer egotism sticks pretty hard to fandom, and the “Doom is awesome” thing inevitably comes back into style no matter how many other characters he kills, mutates, or tortures.
It’s still gendered — none of these characters are ever going to be played as unambiguously heroic any time soon — but there’s a male power fantasy that works for them in much the same way that there’s a male sexual fantasy that works for Poison Ivy, Emma Frost, and similar characters.
In the case of Doom, the original presentation by Lee and Kirby, followed up by Byrne, of Doom as noble and operating with his own code of ethics (while still being a villain) is so iconic that even an attempt at being shocking for its own sake (like Waid) fails to change readers view.
Fans seem to latch on to a certain characterization of a character (the original in the case of Doom, the Claremont revision for Magneto, the one-defining moment for Pym or Wanda) and then refuse to move on.
Once again, with Wolfsbane, I don’t think most readers remember it. It’s such a minor story. It hasn’t become an important part of the canon for Wolfsbane.
Piotr was sleeping with underage Kitty, but no one defines Piotr as a predator. In fact, that’s a beloved aspect to both characters with most fans to this day.
“Piotr was sleeping with underage Kitty.”
Mm… don’t believe so. There was an exchange of dialogue in some issue or another that implied that they wanted to have sex. Kitty: “God, I wish I was older.” Peter: “So do I.” and I think that’s what prompted Shooter to call a flag on the play and insist that they be broken up.
Pretty sure her first time was with Wisdom. I seem to recall reading somewhere that Ellis wanted to make it explicit that it would be her first time but was denied, but only because editorial didn’t want to make it explicit and not because it was, you know… too late.
And Whedon wrote Peter and Kitty’s first love scene as though it was their first time (with each other, I mean). Next morning there’s a scene with Wolverine eyeing them up suspiciously and saying, “About time.” which could be read as either “About time you two woke up.” or “About time you two hooked up.”
Anyway, it’s an interesting coincidence that both Whedon and Ellis have been accused of predatory behaviour since then. Guess pervs have a thing for writing about Kitty having sex.
Oh, yeah, I was thinking about that scene during the “Brood Saga”. I remembered it as Claremont hinting that they actually did have sex.
Still, it was a 14-year old in a hot and heavy relationship with a 19-year old guy, and fans wish that the two of them were still together.
Similarly, Mark Millar deciding that Electro was blowing up cars containing children via an incidental line of dialogue during a fight scene in Marvel Knights Spider-Man didn’t make readers start seeing Electro as some kind of loathsome monster forever after.
To be fair, I think there might be an special exception where if Mark Millar wrote the story, everyone puts it down to Mark Millar being crass and awful, and the character is automatically forgiven. 🙂
Electro is kind of a special case- he also killed or helped kill a lot of people in Erik Larsen’s Sinister Six story (and was implied to have almost killed the Sandman’s friends the Casadas) but a few months later he gets written as sympathetic in a JM Dematteis story. He seems to go from complete monster to sympathetic loser depending on who’s writing him.