Hellverine #4 annotations
HELLVERINE vol 2 #4
“The Drowning Man”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso
HELLVERINE
Even as Hellverine, he doesn’t want to fight either the Mother or her children. But he has another option: from reading the Book of Lamentation, he’s learned some “hell magic” which “conjures horror” and “makes others see me as their worst nightmare”. It even works against the Mother’s enchanted children, who were perfectly willing to attack a burning skeletal Wolverine. That might suggest that it’s also cutting through their enchantment, although it clearly doesn’t free them entirely, since the art still shows them all with yellow eyes.
When Hellverine uses this power, a burning symbol appears on his chest. From the dialogue, I think the idea is that he has to carve the symbol into his chest using his claws in order to activate the spell, but the art struggles to get that idea across. Seems a very specific sort of spell, but I suppose maybe any old knife would do.
I hadn’t noticed this before, but Hellverine’s hands – which are only partially gloved – still have flesh on them even in demonic form. It’s weird.
Akihiro interprets the face in Mother’s belly (which has its own arms and is obviously meant to be a “baby” of sorts) to represent himself as “Daken”. That’s not a name he uses these days, but he seems to interpret this aspect of Mother as representing the part of himself that wanted to “infect others with his pain”, i.e. his original villain persona. Destroying the Mother seems to provide Akihiro with some sort of closure, as well as making him feel like he’s atoning for his sins. So apparently that’s the format.
Afterwards, Akihiro cooperates in burning Logan and Itsu’s old house. Presumably because they saw him defeat the Mother, and perhaps thanks to the testimony of the freed children, the locals are happy to agree that mutants were not to blame for what happened to their town.
His next port of call is Genosha, which is important to him because it’s the place where Wolverine killed him in Uncanny X-Force #34. Wolverine drowned Akihiro in water from a fire hydrant, and so this time the demon is water-themed and kills people by drowning.
And if you’re thinking: hold on, Genosha still had functioning fire hydrants despite the eradication of its entire population? Well, yes. But that’s what happened in the original story. And if you have an issue with the fire hydrant, then boy are you going to have problems with the rest of this story. We’ll come to that.
VILLAINS
The Mother. It’s never made clear whether this is actually Itsu or merely some projection of Akihiro’s own hang-ups about her. Akihiro himself describes her as “my mother, Itsu, or some warped reflection of her”, but also calls her “a demonic manifestation of my pain”. And presumably he’s just guessing anyway.
As implied last issue, her child followers have leaves on them. Akihiro interprets Mother has having “built a new family” to replace her loss of him. Then again, she can’t be that concerned about the well being of the kids, since she sends them to figth Hellverine.
Once the kids are scared off, Hellverine can defeat the Mother in normal combat. Decapitating her frees the children from her control.
The unnamed water demon appears as an Akihiro made of water. There’s not much going on with him beyond that – like the Mother, he’s not really a character as such.
Mephisto. He shows up right at the end to tell Akihiro to “stop fighting me… or I’ll return you to the grave”. Mephisto uses the name “Daken”, presumably wanting him to backslide to his villain days.
GEOGRAPHY
Genosha. Oh boy.
So. As everyone knows, Genosha was reduced to ruins in New X-Men #115. It was comprehensively a wasteland whenever we saw it during the Krakoan era, the final time being Marauders vol 2 #11.
In X-Factor #7, we were told that Ethan Fortune had bought the place, and had built a city called “Gigosha” in the ruins of Genosha’s capital Hammer Bay. Gigosha was run by an AI and populated by “millions” of immigrants who had signed away their freedom as part of the terms of service. This was obviously a reference to the sort of crypto-libertarian projects that get bandied about from time to time in the real world.
Aside from the apparent speed of Gigosha’s construction, there was no real continuity problem with any of this. In fact, X-Factor #7 states outright that until Gigosha came along, “Genosha was an uninhabitable ruin, almost no population or resources to speak of.”
But that was X-Factor #7, way back in the dim and distant past of February 19th! According to this issue, an entire human city was already on the site of Gigosha, with reluctant inhabitants being displaced to the outskirts when Gigosha came along. This is the location that Akihiro visits here. And it’s not even a shanty town – it’s a completely normal (if somewhat crime-ridden) city complete with functioning docks, bars, apparent waste collection services, a surprisingly well stocked greengrocer, a bookshop, running water, printed newspapers, a book shop and numerous apartments with normal-looking furniture and bathrooms. There’s an anti-mutant militia called the Pro-Mans but it’s hard to see how this city could be functioning in the way we see without some form of actual administration.
It looks like a run down part of New York, basically. It makes no sense at all.
FOOTNOTES
Page 3 panel 3: Dr Strange gave Akihiro the Book of Lamentation last issue.
Page 9 panel 2: Sabretooth killed Akihiro at the North Pole in Wolverine #41 (2024); Romulus killed Itsu at Jasmine Falls in a flashback in Wolverine #40 (2006).
Page 9 panel 5: Wolverine drowned Daken in Genosha in Uncanny X-Force #34 (2012).
The problems with Genosha go back to Morrison destroying it. In the original Genosha story, Genosha was said to have a human population of ten million. But when Cassandra Nova’s Sentinels destroyed Genosha., there was no mention of significant human deaths, even though 16 million mutants were said to be dead. (Kitty’s father was said to have died and Philip Moreau was implied to be dead, but that’s all.)
Later on, in X-Force 37, Genosha is said to have an electrical grid. Percy wrote that issue- apparently he intended for some humans to have made their way back to Genosha even then.
Later on, in X-Men 35, 15 million Genoshan mutants are resurrected. Even if only a fifth of them decided to stay on Earth. that’s 3 million Genoshan mutants.
Percy apparently started working on this issue before learning of X-Factor 7. When he learned about Gigosha. his solution was to say that Gigosha only controls a small part of the island. (Which was probably a good idea, since the readers hated Gigosha. That way, we can avoid Gigosha whenever we go to Genosha )
Percy’s idea appeatently is that the surviving humans had already started to repopulate the island before X-Force 37, and their ranks were bolstered by the resurrected mutants. We saw something similar with Slorenia, the country destroyed by Ultron in Avengers- it was repopulated by Slorenians living abroad. (It also apparently teleported form Eastern Europe to the Middle East but whatever.)
What happened to those zombie Genoshans that Scarlet Witch made during one of her various redemption arcs?
@Si- Strange cast a spell that would cause the zombies to crumble to dust after thirty days.
Somewhere in the middle of all that are Cullen Bunn’s contributions – the slow rebuilding of Genosha by displaced mutants in his Magneto series, and the sinking of the island (again, some more) in his Uncanny run. Oh well.
So a shiny new city is built upon the devastated bones of a country destroyed by a genocidal event. And the previous inhabitants/ surviving members of the target ethnic group were essentially forced to seek a new homeland, pushed out by the new colonizers.
Something about this is leaving a really bad taste in my metaphorical mouth.
Also, even putting all of that aside, I hate that Genosha was replaced by Gigosha just to fuel another Mark Russell story.
This is the problem with destroying places in a “somewhat like the real world” comic book universe. Somehow, you need to restore the status quo eventually. D.C. was destroyed in the Avengers, Paris and Las Vegas in Fear Itself, and either they’re reconstructed magically, or else handwaved back to a semblance of normal… You can destroy a fictional place like Slorenia or Genosha, sure, but if D.C. is blown up, it’ll be restored sooner rather than later.
@Michael: I can’t recall if it was ever specifically stated (or contradicted), but I always assumed that most human Genoshans emigrated (or were forcibly evicted) during the Magneto Rex period.
I keep meaning to ask this… no one actually calls him Hellverine, like, in dialogue, do they? Surely that’s a bridge too far?
It makes sense a significant number of human Genoshans emigrated. Plenty of white South Africans did after apartheid ended, and they didn’t have the additional motivation of angry people with superpowers.