LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #5
“Brother in Arms, part 2”
Writer: Erica Shultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

WOLVERINE

After telling us last issue that she enjoyed fighting robots because she didn’t have to hold back, she seems to be losing patience with them. (“Robots, automatons, whatever! They’re all dead to me.”)

She dissuades the Revolution from killing Schneider on a fairly standard speech that he doesn’t have to be a killer any more – and then kills Schneider herself. This is a fairly standard Logan trope, where he regards himself as the X-Man who’s already corrupted and keeps doing these things in order to let his teammates stay heroic; Laura seems to be extending it to other characters who are also already corrupted. She tells Revolution that she’s “trying to be better, but some people need to be stopped permanently”. There’s no suggestion, however, that Schneider couldn’t be stopped by simply arresting him; she means simply that he deserved to die.

GUEST CAST

The Revolution. Laura thinks of him as an “old man”, and the story generally plays up his greater experience and wisdom compared to her. He tells Laura that he learned to control his own rage simply through taking the time to process what had happened to him. This doesn’t entirely stack up, timeline-wise. Bucky returned as the Winter Soldier in 2008, and didn’t escape his own brainwashing until after that point. Laura was already free of the Facility when she debuted in 2003, five years earlier. So if it’s just a matter of time then she’s already had more time than him. But perhaps Bucky has been more willing to reconcile himself to the process taking time, which works a bit better.

He was in fact hoping to recruit Logan for this mission – the apartment Laura is staying at was one of Logan’s safe houses. There was indeed a caption in issue #3 which described it as such.

VILLAINS

Henrick Schneider. He’s been using radiation in “precise dosages” to slow his aging and, despite being at least 100 years old, he still looks fairly young.

He lives in a normal-looking house outside Buckport, Iowa (which isn’t a real place). He’s been irradiating the groundwater for nearly a year in an attempt to provoke mutations. The end result has been to kill a bunch of people and mutate a local butcher, which has achieved precisely nothing. Ostensibly, Schneider’s goal is to “harness mutants’ powers” in order to amplify his robots and “create unstoppable machines”, but only certain mutations are “applicable”. Quite which ones, and how he was going to use them, never really becomes clear before Laura kills him.

He has cufflinks with the Hydra logo, something he also uses as a design for his robots.

As in the previous issue, he insists on referring to the heroes as X-23 and the Winter Soldier.

O*N*E. Laura was expressing scepticism about them issue #3, for good reason, and was going to investigate them before getting derailed by Revolution’s mission. In this issue, they show up in the epilogue to sort out the aftermath of Schneider’s experiments, after Bucky alerts them to the fact that something to do with mutants was going on. Despite their questionable reasons for making it a priority, they do in fact contain his groundwater contamination and, by all appearances, seem to do a competent job. We do get a panel of a O*N*E scientist taking a sample of the mutagenic groundwater, though…