Wolverine #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE. This is volume 7 of Wolverine, and that’s just counting the titles that were simply called Wolverine. Volume 1 is the 1982 miniseries, volume 2 is the long-running ongoing title that started in 1988. The others are periodic reboots.
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine with his claws out, standing over some dead people, and with a butterfly on his hand. His X-Men belt buckle is lit up, for some reason. Like X-Force, this book carries the world’s smallest “parental advisory” warning.
PAGES 2-4. Alaska. A badly injured Wolverine wakes up surrounded by the corpses of X-Force. He sets off following a set of footprints.
Most of the issue is flashbacks leading up to this point. The implication is that the Pale Girl, leader of the Flower Cartel, makes Wolverine kill the rest of X-Force. (It really is fortunate that the X-Men came up with this resurrection thing in time for the Krakoa era, because ever since, they’ve become remarkably prone to getting killed…)
Domino doesn’t have her Krakoan skin grafts, so this must take place after current issues of X-Force.
“James, Logan, Patch, Weapon X, Wolverine.” All names associated with Wolverine. James is his real first name; “Patch” was an identity he used in Madripoor.
“Canada, Madripoor, New York, Japan, Krakoa.” Again, places particularly associated with Wolverine. He presumably means New York state (where the X-Men’s mansion was based) rather than New York City.
“Had by bones turned inside out.” Not literally, but presumably a reference to Magneto tearing out his adamantium in X-Men vol 2 #25.
“Nuked, steamrolled, crucified, ripped in half…” I don’t remember Wolverine getting nuked, but I’m sure someone’s done it. The steamroller is from Punisher vol 6 #17. The crucifix is from Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #251. Wolverine was cut in half in the current X-Force run when a gate was shut off while he was going through it – if you want literally ripped in half, there’s also Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk, but that’s not the same Wolverine.
PAGES 5-6. Recap and credits. The first story is “The Flower Cartel” by Benjamin Percy (who also writes Wolverine in X-Force), Adam Kubert and Frank Martin. The small print on the data pages just says “adamantium” and “best there is, bub”.
PAGES 7-8. Wolverine plays hide and seek with the Krakoan kids.
We’ve seen Wolverine playing with the kids on Krakoa before – in House of X #1, for example – and it suggests he’s letting his guard down at least a little bit, even if not as much as some other characters.
Percy also chucks in a reminder of Logan’s longstanding romantic tension with Jean; X-Men has indicated that there’s some sort of menage-a-trois relationship going on with Cyclops at the moment, but neither book has explored that further.
PAGES 9-11. Kate Pryde briefs Wolverine on thefts of drugs from the Krakoan supply chain.
Kate Pryde is currently meant to be dead over in Marauders, though I think we all know she’s clearly going to get better. She’s wearing the same traditional X-Men costume that she was wearing in X-Men/Fantastic Four #1 (as opposed to her pirate outfit from early issues of Marauders). There are some fairly ordinary-looking dock workers behind her, presumably loading drugs onto the Marauder – since they’re on Krakoa, these are apparently mutant residents of Krakoa who actually have jobs and don’t just sit around admiring the plants all day.
Whisky. Kate was smuggling whisky onto the island in Marauders #1 as well. It’s still not entirely clear why Wolverine can’t just go through a gate, buy some, and bring it back – or get someone less conspicuous to do it for him.
The Krakoan farm workers appear to be versions of the Multiple Man.
“Everything gets delivered the old-fashioned way – by ship.” Er… well, kind of. X-Force #4 (which Percy wrote) shows an oil-rig-style distribution site off the US eastern seaboard, to which drugs are apparently transported by gates. But presumably they complete their journey by ship.
PAGES 12-13. Narcotics agent Jeff Bannister investigates the pollen cartel.
We’ll find out more about this guy in a data page right at the end of the issue, though it won’t explain the strange mark on the right side of his head.
PAGE 14. A data page on the Order of X. This mutant-worshipping cult has also appeared in Marauders, which was rather more explicit in pointing out that they suddenly appeared at the time of Xavier’s telepathic address to the world, and may in fact be an indication of widespread psychic damage caused by that incident. This data page notes the timing, but nothing more than that. The Order has now taken to carving X’s into their flesh, and a few real extremists have got ideas about ascending by consuming mutants (not dissimilar to the U-Men from New X-Men).
PAGES 15-16. Sage finds a lead on the missing drugs in Moscow.
Wolverine rounds up X-Force to investigate. Jean is a little more tactile with him than usual, but not drastically so. We’ve seen in Marauders and X-Force that Krakoa and Russia are on bad terms.
PAGES 17-18. Bannister visits his daughter in hospital.
She’s on the waiting list for Krakoan drugs, so Bannister isn’t thrilled about people stealing them. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen it mentioned that the X-Men are struggling (and failing) to keep up with demand even for those countries that are meant to be on friendly terms with them.
PAGE 19. A data page about blood groups, the gist being that Wolverine’s blood has a healing property. This fits more closely with the back-up strip, particularly given the references to vampires – but it could also be relevant to Bannister.
PAGES 20-25. X-Force blunder into a meeting of drug-crazed Order of X zealots.
“It is no mistake that X is a tilted representation of the cross.” Wolverine was crucified on an X-shaped cross in Uncanny #251. But this isn’t original; essentially the same reasoning was used in the Middle Ages to claim that Saint Andrew had been crucified on a tilted cross too. (If he was, it’s remarkable nobody thought to mention it earlier.)
“Because the mutants represent eternal life…” Literally true on Krakoa.
Pollen. The Order of X crazies believe that pollen – the drug made from stolen Krakoan pharmaceuticals – can eventually convert them into some sort of human/mutant hybrid, whatever that would be. This pollen, however, is a synthetic knock off which kills them quickly. The next couple of scenes seem to suggest that this isn’t an intentional poisoning, but just a genuine botch job in trying to make pollen independently of the Flower Cartel.
PAGES 26-28. Wolverine confronts the mobsters responsible for the tainted drugs.
The mobsters explain that they’re trying to escape from the influence of the “Pale Girl”, who has some sort of mind control (or at least mind influencing) powers, and makes people commit acts of self harm. She seems to be a new character. Her group is the titular Flower Cartel.
PAGE 29. In parallel, Wolverine and Bannister make plans.
Bannister proposes setting up a meeting with the Flower Cartel. This is expanded upon in his data page later in the issue, which places the meeting in Alaska (which is where Wolverine and X-Force wind up).
PAGES 30-32. Alaska. Wolverine has a brief vision of the Pale Girl and meets Bannister and his men.
Logan is back to thinking about how dangerous he is, and how people should stay away from him (in contrast to his upbeat mood on Krakoa).
PAGE 33. Credits for the second story: “Catacombs” by Benjamin Percy, Viktor Bogdanovic and Matthew Wilson.
PAGES 34-38. Omega Red arrives on Krakoa, much to Wolverine’s horror.
Krakoa. In this story, Wolverine is much more sceptical about Krakoa, regarding its shifting landscape as untrustworthy. It fits with X-Force but seems a little at odds with his attitude at the start of the main story. Like some other characters, Wolverine seems aware of the strangeness of even A-list villains being accepted as fellow mutants, but also to accept it as part of the way things are on Krakoa.
Omega Red. This is Arkady Russovitch, a Russian mutant who started as a serial killer, then got powered up even further by a Russian super-soldier program. He debuted in X-Men vol 2 #4 in 1991, and was last seen in the “Age of X-Man” event, where he seemed to get blown up in Apocalypse & The X-Tracts #4. But that world wasn’t entirely real, so…
Omega Red is an unequivocal bad guy, but no worse than (say) Sabretooth, who was allowed onto the island. Like Sabretooth, he was also a member of Weapon X-Force, the team from the tail end of the recent Weapon X series; he showed some signs of humanising in that series.
PAGES 39-40. Wolverine investigates the chaos left behind by Omega Red in Paris.
The Paris gate is the Arc de Triomphe, which I’m pretty sure we’ve seen before. This seems needlessly provocative.
The idea that Omega Red reminds Wolverine of his “own worst self” is an angle that’s been done many times with Sabretooth.
PAGES 41-44. Wolverine is reluctantly persuaded to investigate Omega Red’s claims that the bodies were nothing to do with him.
Wolverine really is being inconsistent in objecting so strongly to Omega Red but not to some of the other murderous lunatics who are wandering around the island. On the other hand, Magneto’s argument that it’s an acceptable risk because any victims can always be resurrected is unimpressive – as Wolverine points out, the experience of being murdered would still be traumatic.
PAGES 45-51. Wolverine investigates La Oubliette du Roi, which turns out to be a vampire bar. A Christian warrior, Louise, rescues him.
Oubliette. An oubliette is actually a “bottle dungeon” – a dungeon only accessible through a door in the ceiling. I’m pretty sure the stuff about water being introduced is urban legend.
PAGES 52-54. Omega Red claims he was fighting vampires.
Vampire Nation. This is an established Marvel Universe term for organised vampiredom.
The Carbonadium synthesizer. This was a device that Omega Red needed in order to stabilise his enhanced powers, and which Wolverine did indeed help keep away from him. Omega is basically claiming that this was why he killed so many people; however, as Wolverine says, he was indeed already a serial killer before that point. (See, for example, Generation X #11.)
Saint Julian. Specifically, this is the story of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, who may or may not have ever existed. Naturally, the bit where he kills his parents in a blind rage over adultery comes before his conversion to Christianity, after which he’s supposed to have started building hospitals and houses for the poor. The bit of the story that interests Omega Red is that Julian brief turns from helping the poor after “the enemy” comes into his house in the form of a particularly disruptive poor person, but Jesus is supposed to have set him back on the right path. So he’s a reformed murderer who learns to let bad people into his home, you see.
PAGES 55-62. Wolverine returns to Paris and fights vampires again alongside Louise.
The Nightguard are new, as far as I can tell.
Dracula. Last seen in Deadpool vol 4 #29, when he was supposed to have gone off into retirement with Deadpool’s ex-wife Shiklah. I suspect we’re just going to ignore all that.
PAGE 63. Dracula gives Omega Red the Carbonadium synthesizer but keeps him as a double agent.
PAGE 64. A data page on… pollen? Are we sure these weren’t swapped round? Anyway, this is mainly back story for Bannister, making the point that different forces within the US government are giving him different signals – some want to shut down the trade, others see it as an opportunity to form an alliance.
PAGES 65-67. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: BEYOND THE PALE.
ChrisV: I think I was conflating them a bit. For some reason, I was thinking Slapstick’s powers but Madcap’s personality.
But hey, why not use both? Team them up with Arcade and put the X-Men into a giant video game made real to find out just how many lives they have….
The pollen and blood type pages appear in the right places in my printed version. Must have just been mixed up on digital?
They’re all on the same page, and that page is “Let’s have a non-stop in a rave in a rainforest.”
Chris V: “I don’t believe this is the actual status quo yet. I think this is just the first stage, setting up the actual status quo in a way that would make sense.”
This was my exact thought at the time of House of X #1. I thought something would happen during the course of that event that would set the status quo in motion. But here we are, dozens of issues later and this is still what we’re looking at, isn’t it? This is the definition of a status quo. Nothing seems to be building towards anything other than what we’re seeing, and of course the eventual downfall.
Based on the opinions you’ve shared, I think the biggest difference between us on this is that your reservations about it are counter-balanced by a seemingly bottomless well of faith and goodwill that the stuff that makes no sense will somehow eventually coalesce to make sense. Whereas I abandoned that when the big event itself (12 issues, some extra-sized) didn’t set up this “actual” status quo you’re awaiting with surprising patience. I don’t even know what you could still be expecting at this point.
It’s interesting that while X-Men is embracing all mutants into one group and narrowing its focus right in, Avengers is doing the opposite and fleshing out the Russian superteam rivals, the American superteam rivals, and so-on.
Claremont invented that in X-Men, with the Morlocks and Hellions and all that.
@neutrino
The Verendi bunch didn’t kill Kate but Iceman thinks they did. He calls them murderers as he barges in.
YLu said: (Plus, Marvel characters have just generally gotten more ruthless over the years. Once upon a time, you couldn’t have Wolverine kill Hellfire guards without Jim Shooter coming down to declare they actually survived. Nowadays, the Avengers wishing Thanos’ entire army into dust is treated as a great triumph.)
Krzysiek Ceran said: Also, even characters who explicitly don’t kill often have no qualms about staking vampires, destroying sentient robots or lasering aliens in these stories).
I recall this becoming the case fairly quickly in the early 200s, partly as a result of the post-9/11 mood in the U.S. leading to treating various villains more like actual terrorists and super-battles as warlike, filed with collateral damage and “kill to save bystanders” elements.
And that, of course, was in part because a real-life attack, and the cultural shock it produced, made it very hard not to recontextualize the years-long trend of trying to keep villains from looking toothless by escalating their murderousness and body counts and so forth. Suddenly the heroes looked ineffectual to many readers if they weren’t trying to kill the mass murderers, now that the American popular consciousness had actual grand-scale mss-murder of civilians imprinted as world-historical trauma.
Ultimately *ahem*, we wound up with superheroes-as-soldiery as the norm. Most characters seem to have lost civilian identities, and the Avengers, X-Men, and so forth were increasingly defined in pseudo-militaristic terms. And that, of course, means military rules of engagement.
Superhero movies also contributed to this; the modern superhero movie still owes a lot to the 1989 Batman film and to the 1998 Blade movie. The first of those treated Batman killing as more “realistic” and therefore fit for movie audiences, and the latter was not just vampires — always an exception to “no killing” in comics — but was also stylized as an action movie, where mass enemy casualties are the norm.
Thus the Iron Man movie that launched the MCU, whose influence bled back into the comics, had both terrorists as villains — eminently “killable” by movie and comics rules — and generally normalized the “kill the baddies” style. It’s striking in retrospect that the early, pre-MCU superhero revival films — the first two X-Men movies and the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy — followed the standard trope of having the villains (mostly) die, but not at the hands of the heroes. In the MCU, even a relatively light film like the first Ant-Man movie has the protagonist effectively choose to kill the villain, albeit in a bloodless, soft sci-fi sort of way.
My sense is that comics have carved out exceptions, especially in recent years; the comics versions of the heroes coded as more “traditional” or at least more all-ages — Spider-Man, the solo teen heroes, and Superman — seem to avoid killing for the most part. Even then, the rules seem to go out the window in the big crossover events.But those deaths — really, character death in general — as come to mean less and less, and stick less and less anyway. (Irritatingly, some of the villains who do the worst stuff — the Bullseyes, the Red Skulls, the Norman Osborns, and so forth — no longer tend to get even get the kinds of pseudo-deaths and/or comeuppance moments they did, the better to have them running around to make sales-juicing appearances. Unless they stumble into a Dan Slott or Mark Waid comic.)
Or perhaps I’m forgetting some big counterexamples and talking a lot of guff.
@YLu But he didn’t have any reason to believe that. As Kitty said in another Uncanny X-Men issue, it was a convenient excuse to bash in some skulls. It’s only a step above attacking random baseline humans.(Xavier seems to think all humans are responsible for his assassination.)
@Omar Karindu This would be considered a war crime.
I just don’t know what to make of this open embracement of violence from characters that ought to know better. The more I think of this status quo the more I find it unconvincing, as if this were a What If? or Exiles timeline meant to be corrected.
@Omar Karindu, your analysis is interesting, but I personally feel the need to go back to 1990 or so, when the darkening truly made itself apparent. Concepts such as X-Force would not have flown in the 1980s.
I wonder if there is a connection to the Gulf War and the need to realign American people’s perceptions and expectations towards themselves that came with it. It was really obvious in the comics of the time that most everyone was suddenly trying to out-Punisher the Punisher.
But
Luis-Comic books were slow to catch to up to the rest of mainstream culture then, although you could argue that things like Miller’s DKR and Moore’s Watchmen from the 1980s were part of that same zeitgeist.
The main difference was that they were more nuanced in their critiquing the “violent power fantasies” (especially Alan Moore) over books like X-Force, which tended to treat the violence as just another aspect of “superhero culture”.
It was the Reagan-era in which American pop culture really began to embrace fascistic ideology, like vigilantism.
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Dazzler-I am a fan of Hickman and have enjoyed almost all of his work in the past.
I’m willing to give him time and the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve never been disappointed in any of his long-run projects in the past…Fantastic Four, Avengers, Ultimates, Black Monday Murders (which didn’t really last that long, I guess).
I find the mystery with “Dawn of X” compelling. Others do too.
I can understand not wanting to spend the time or energy on a project like this if you don’t find the mystery compelling.
It’s just a matter of where the mystery and hints are leading. I might find myself feeling very foolish for wasting the amount of money on this.
Although, I don’t buy all of the books.
Omar-I think most of those villains are constantly dying and coming back to life, just like always.
Red Skull was killed in the comics to make way for Nazi Cap, and in the current Coates’ run on Cap, once again, Red Skull is being brought back to life.
I think that the death and resurrection of these “big bads” seem to happen so often now, that it can be hard to remember what happened the last time we saw them.
It’s because comic books have an exceptionally hard time creating any new compelling villains, so they’re stuck still using the same major villains that were created in the 1960s.
So, they keep dying and coming back to life over and over again, sometimes with very little explanation.
Another thing we have seen in recent Marvel Comics, though, is a tendency to treat the heroes as their own worst enemies.
It seems like they spend more of their time fighting amongst themselves, doing horrible things to themselves, than they do dealing with any villains.
As far as Hickman’s X-Men though, it’s one thing to have a character like Wolverine acting blood-thirsty.
However, he hasn’t even been that violent, comparatively. He seems to be more of a voice-of-reason, like when he was dealing with Quire.
It’s a different matter when it’s characters like Iceman or Storm.
This would be like having Spider Man suddenly deciding that snapping a mugger’s leg after they were caught was an appropriate action.
I don’t think fans would say, “Well, Spider Man is just getting darker and more violent. It’s the way comic books are going.” I think they’d be looking for the explanation.
I’d say that it’s meant to show that there is something wrong.
I’m still convinced that these characters are being drugged by Krakoa, and that their out-of-character outburst has to do with drug withdrawal.
They’re all mellow and happy on Krakoa, but have them leave Krakoa too long, and they’re dealing with mood swings.
I’m still convinced that part of Moira’s plan is to pacify mutants.
I think that’s why it seems like it’s important for all mutants to be on the island.
They need to be exposed to whatever Krakoa is creating.
@neutrino
It’s pretty reasonable to assume, on discovering that mutant-hating terrorists have picked up a mutant’s fresh corpse, that they’re responsible for her death in the first place. Especially when those terrorists actually did try to off her the last time you saw her.
The alternate is that the terrorists just happened by coincidence to be the first people to stumble upon the corpse after something completely unrelated ended her. We as readers know this might actually be the case, yes, but it really is the less likely, more convoluted possibility.
@Chris V
Iceman was just at Krakoa, though. At the time that scene takes place, he’d been separated from the island for far less time than the less aggressive Bishop had been.
As Omar Karindu pointed out, Spider-Man’s one of the few characters who’s kept up a more traditional superhero morality. But if… Iron Man snapped the limb of a supervillain who he thinks just killed, I dunno, Pepper Potts, I think most readers would assume the uncharacteristic behavior is meant to be a reaction to her death.
Bishop hasn’t been spending much time on Krakoa at all though, has he?
He might not be an addict yet.
Iceman seemed to be pretty addicted to Krakoa. He was probably the happiest person on the island when all of this started.
I would guess he spent a lot of time on the island before joining the Marauders.
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Iron Man has always been portrayed as more amoral than other superheroes, even back in the Silver Age.
He killed the Crusher.
He sentenced Living Laser to a living hell.
Anything to protect his precious corporation.
Iron Man might kill a homeless man just for the fun of it, at this point.
Iceman has never shown that type of behaviour before.
He is on the same level as Spider Man or Firestar.
He doesn’t even show any qualms about going over and torturing a person by snapping off his finger and then ripping off a guy’s arm.
When Xavier was thought to be dead, Iceman was the one who had hope.
He said that he was sure they’d find a way to bring Xavier back.
He didn’t go in to a rage and say that they should find who killed Xavier and lower their body temperature until they had to have all of their limbs amputated.
Iceman is showing some distinct emotional instability.
I just don’t buy it, and with the other clues I find left by Hickman, it adds up to something.
@Chris V: sorry, but I think that you are misremembering Iron Man’s stories.
The Living Laser story, specifically, was not at all how you describe it.
As a matter of fact, for decades Tony Stark was what would in current terminology be described as a fairly woke millionaire. His enemies tended to be agents of totalitarian ideologies that he defeated with a mix of marvelous technological creations and impressive idealism.
In that respect, the character has regressed to an almost nihilistic level since 1990 or so.
@YLu How could mercenaries with mundane weapons kill her? He didn’t even ask if it was them or someone else. The logical thing would be that they were salvage crew working for the killer.
If you think the X-Men are getting darker and out of character, wait until you read X-Men #7. I hope Krakoa is influencing them.
‘How could mercenaries with mundane weapons kill her?’
They’ve been dealing with rank and file foes with power suppressing weapons since issue #1. And they now know Homines Verendi sells them. It would be absolutely within their abilities to kill her.
Luis-Not really, as per your second post.
He was fighting evil Commies, who wanted to take away his wealth and property.
He fit in perfectly with the Cold War military-industrial complex mentality of the US government during the times.
There were some better stories in the 1970s and 1980s, under Bill Mantlo, David Michiline (during his first run), and Denny O’Neil that made Tony Stark a lot more sympathetic.
Like, when he decided to refuse to sell weapons for the US military any longer.
I agree that his portrayal under Mark Millar as a George W. Bush stand-in was a character assassination.
He stood up to the Reagan administration as much as Captain America did in the 1980s.
There was the O’Neil story-arc, where Stane took over Stark Industries and turned it in to a weapons manufacturer again, for instance.
I agree that it was during the second Michiline run when Tony Stark’s character began to change.
However, I’d argue that those early Stan Lee Iron Man comics showed Stark as more of an amoral character, even though I don’t believe it was actually Lee’s intent.
@Krzysiek Ceran Their anti-mutant weapons were bulky suits of armor. Despite having time to prepare, the crew only had standard automatic weapons.
Quote from Zero Tolerance
“But before you started Operation: Zero Tolerance, I was home taking care of my father… A man who was nearly beaten to death by Creed’s goons because he dared to stand up for his family! That’s the part of this you and every other hate monger never got. Me, Cyclops, Beast, Dr. Reyes, Storm – None of us are X-Men because we want to be… We are X-Men because someone has to stand up to people like you and Magneto and Apocalypse – And anyone else who thinks terrorizing or terminating mutants or humans or anybody is the right thing to do! We’re only here because you’re trying to destroy us. Almost funny.”
Iceman
I’m not arguing for or against Iceman’s actions, I’m arguing about the plausibility of him thinking those goons were responsible for Kate’s death. And just because they don’t have power-cancelling armor on them at the time Iceman sees them doesn’t change the fact that he knows they’re working for an organization that uses and sells power-cancelling armor.
Again, why wouldn’t they have it on if they had the time to prepare that they did?