Wolverine #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. And this one, we can take fairly quickly.
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine imagines himself being attacked by villains (under the Pale Girl’s influence).
PAGES 2-4. The Pale Girl makes the Marauders turn over a crop of petals.
Pretty self-explanatory. The clear implication is that the Pale Girl controls people using music, and that Bishop is initially unaffected because he has headphones on. Presumably he’s starting to succumb by the end, when he sees Kitty as a zombie.
PAGES 5-6. Recap and credits. The story is “Your Own Worst Enemy” by Benjamin Percy, Adam Kubert, and Frank Martin.
PAGES 7-9. Flashback – Wolverine kills X-Force, believing them to be villains.
We saw the aftermath of this scene in issue #1. Wolverine’s rogue’s gallery has always been a little bit undermanned, and so the three villains who appear in his hallucinations are Sabretooth (obviously), Lady Deathstrike (equally obviously) and a scientist guy who looks to be Dr Abraham Cornelius from the Weapon X Program.
It’s maybe worth noting that this “tricked into killing his friends by illusions” routine is a turning point in the life of the “Old Man Logan” version of the character – but of course, in that timeline, the people he killed couldn’t be resurrected.
The Skeleton Coast of Namibia is the northern part of the Namibian coastline, and is indeed known for its shipwrecks and whale bones. (In the days before engine-powered boats, the Skeleton Coast was a nightmare for sailors, because you could land on it but you couldn’t get away again, due to the current.)
PAGE 10. Wolverine wakes up back on Krakoa.
We’ve seen Healer before in X-Force, serving this same role.
PAGE 11. A data page recapping what happened to the Marauders; it doesn’t add a great deal. The Pale Girl’s powers seem to involve “transient ischemic attacks” – in other words, a short-term restriction in blood supply.
PAGES 12-14. Jeff Bannister gets an update on the Pale Girl, and his daughter persuades him to call the X-Men.
Again, pretty self-explanatory. I could live without the over the top nastiness of the Pale Girl’s attacks on people. Bannister’s daughter’s dialogue is a bit weird: “I know you hate them, but this is their fault.” We haven’t really seen any evidence that Bannister hates mutants, and he even took Wolverine back to the gates. But he’ll tell us later that his scars came from being caught in the crossfire “of some mutant showdown” when he was younger. His resentment of mutants – and his feeling that they should clear up their own problems – doesn’t seem to prevent him from treating them reasonably on an individual level.
PAGE 15. Wolverine visits the resurrection in progress.
There’s obvious tension here with Cyclops, who’s always been in an implied romantic triangle with Logan and Jean.
“My brain’s never healed like my body…” Various explanations have been given over the years for Wolverine’s memory gaps, ranging from psychic interference and memory implantation (which his healing factor evidently couldn’t overcome) to a suggestion that his healing factor actively removes traumatic memories. It seems to be a combination.
PAGE 16. A data page, headed as a “profit and loss analysis of petal shipments”, but actually focussing on the physical loss of petals. The gist is that the mutants’ iron grip on the supply of Krakoan drugs is keeping theft to a minimum, and that millions continue to die from drugs that will one day be cured by Krakoan drugs once production increases. There’s obviously a tension between this and the overall Krakoan set-up, in which the ability to supply the world-changing drugs is what gives Krakoa its leverage. The story tries to keep the balance by saying that the drugs are available, but with a significant waiting list.
PAGE 17. Bannister and Milly discuss faking the closure of their investigation, to throw the Pale Girl off their track.
Speaks for itself.
PAGES 18-19. Bannister and Wolverine make plans to work together.
The set-up is that Bannister can’t trust his organisation because it has a mole, so he’s going to work with Wolverine instead. Fine – and it does make a pleasant change to have a character who seems to be aware of the irrational aspects of his anti-mutant sentiments, and to try and keep them in check. As for Wolverine, there’s a sense that he’s keeping away from the X-Men until he’s got the Pale Girl dealt with, but he’s happy enough to have Bannister in the firing line.
PAGES 20-23. The Pale Girl gets Wolverine to turn on Bannister.
Did they not make any plans for this? It seems incredibly unwise. At any rate, the suggestion seems to be that the Pale Girl was posing as Milly all along (or at least swapped places with her at some point in the story).
The narration is setting up the old dilemma of whether Wolverine loses himself when he turns violent, or is actually reverting to his true persona.
PAGES 24-25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: BARFLY.
I just did not care about this at all as I was reading it.
Dropped.
“millions continue to die from drugs that will one day be cured by Krakoan drugs”
Should that be “die from diseases”?
It’s a good thing the X-Men conquered death before the Krakoa status quo set in, because ever since then, they’ve all been a lot more prone to dying horribly. They’re getting kind of careless about it, aren’t they. Like “hey, what do I care if I get murdered, I’ll be back in a few days, tops.”
As opposed to the old days when you could stay dead for months or even years…
I hate this setup. Yes, he caught his teammates by surprise, yes, maybe this happened when Domino’s powers were supposedly shorting out (as was mentioned, but not really shown in X-Force)… but it’s still ridiculous that he offed them basically without a fight. And two of them being telekinetics.
Still not as stupid as Old Man Logan’s setup where he somehow slaughtered the whole mansion, but stupid nonetheless.
I’d expect the cliffhanger to be a fake-out of some kind. On the other hand, maybe the fake-out was that the amount of screentime given to Bannister was supposed to convince us he’ll be co-starring in the series to make his death in #2 surprising. Which it was, for me, if that part’s not a fake-out.
I have no idea what they were going for with Bannister’s daughter. Her dialogue seems kind of off, and the art when she says ‘Where’s the help’ is really weird. Usually with HOXPOXDOX the issue is ‘is this a plot point or are they being written out of character’. In this case it’s more of a ‘is this a plot point or are they just bad at depicting children, as comic books so often are’.
Yes, it did seem a bit ridiculous that Wolverine, who has no long range powers, was able to kill 2 characters with TK in the same fight.
I wonder if the Pale Girl will be revealed to be Bannister’s daughter.
At this point I’m just here for the Kubert artwork, mostly.
I still don’t buy into Wolverine stalemating in a fight against SPIDER-MAN
I roll my eyes at writers’ tendency to overpower Wolverine too, but I don’t mind it here. The other characters would presumably go relatively easy on him since he’s their pal. Plus, since it’s all a hallucination, who’s to say what they themselves were seeing or how it even went down. And even with all that, Jean still leaves him in a state that would have been decidedly lethal to anyone who doesn’t have a magical healing factor.
I’m also mainly staying for Adam Kubert art.
The abolishing of death for mutants may have been an interesting plot point back in HoX #5.
But in practice, it has effectively given the entire cast an overpowered “healing factor”, just like Wolverine. Want to see Quentin Quire come back from decapitation? Want to see Jean Grey get skewered, or Domino skinned alive and just effectively walk it off next issue?
The all-too-brief scene with Cyclops and Wolverine watching Jean in the egg really needed to be expanded on. I mean, when you have Logan and Daken playing Snikt Roulette last week, for _laughs_, and then this? It’s hard to know how everyone takes “dying.”
The only tension I feel is about Kate Pryde over in Marauders.
I still feel like there’s an interesting story of Wolverine means in a world full of infinite resurrections and memory alterations.