Wolverine #15 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #15
“Deceiver”
by Benjamin Percy, Adam Kubert & Frank Martin
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine fights Sevyr Blackmore. The exposed metal is presumably meant to reflect Sevyr’s acid attack, but it looks more cyborg-like. At any rate, nothing like that happens in the issue, so let’s call it symbolic.
PAGES 2-6. Flashback: Sevyr raises Solem.
Logan points out on page 8 that Sevyr is not a reliable narrator, but it seems likely that we’re meant to take all of this at face value. The gist is that Sevyr wiped out Solem’s village when he was a child, but was impressed enough by Solem to take him prisoner, and (after his skills became apparent) make him a pirate. Solem grows to become a rogue and trickster figure, and eventually avenges himself by cutting off Sevyr’s nose and stealing his ship. All this is new information.
Sevyr and Solem both seem to take it for granted that a severed body part can’t be fixed. Didn’t Arakko have any healers among their array of massively powerful mutants? Did they just not have much respect for non-combat powers? Or maybe, as a pirate, Sevyr simply didn’t have access to them.
This flashback also portrays Amenth as more of a functioning society – albeit a brutal one – than we’ve seen in the past. Clearly the place wasn’t literally non-stop combat with invading demons.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGE 8. Logan and Sevyr talk.
“The thing that got him [Solem] thrown in the pit for a hundred years was this: he dirtied up the wrong marriage.” When Solem first appeared in issue #6, he was being held in a prison pit in the Tower of Broken Will, where he had been for “one hundred years and a season”. His crime was killing Bracken, the husband of War. The precise circumstances of that haven’t been revealed. In issue #6, War plainly hated Solem, and claimed that he “robbed me of my love and my child of his father.” Solem claimed that Bracken had “demanded to fight me. For his so-called honour.” The implication seems to be that, at the very least, Bracken believed that Solem had been sleeping with War. Sevyr strongly implies something similar here, but it’s not obvious that he’d have any first hand knowledge.
“Then Solem was freed… [and] heralded as a … champion of Arakko.” In issue #6, when he was selected (by Saturnyne) to fight for Arakko in the “X of Swords” tournament.
PAGES 9-10. Flashback: Sevyr catches up to Solem in Madripoor.
“One month ago.” The timeline is getting a bit confused here. In Planet-Size X-Men #1, we were told that Arakko had only been on Earth for two weeks before relocating to Mars. That’s a bit of a squeeze but it just about works (though it also contradicts the timeline in Guardians of the Galaxy, which is a whole other problem). This flashback apparently takes place in the run-up to “Hellfire Gala”, and the present day sequences must be several weeks past “Hellfire Gala”. That means that either Wolverine really took his time before starting to investigate the fate of the Marauder last issue, or he took forever to get around to actually hunting down the pirates in the second part of that issue.
PAGES 11-15. Logan and Sevyr decide to fight.
Well, they’re not subtle characters.
Sevyr’s summary of events aboard the Marauder basically matches what we saw last issue.
“Magnetic flooring.” Solem has adamantium skin (he claims it’s flexible because of some sort of tiny chainmail pattern), so Sevyr’s plan is to trap him in place with an electromagnet. Actually quite sensible, and it works with Wolverine too. Quite how Solem could be born with a man-made alloy for skin… well, yes, but you could raise the same objection to Colossus’ power to turn into steel.
“The Muramasa Blade.” In Wolverine #6 and X-Force #13, Wolverine and Solem went to hell in search of the Muramasa Blade that both of them had been instructed to retrieve for the X of Swords tournament. They wound up retrieving two swords, both made by the legendary Muramasa, and both supposedly containing a part of his soul. Hence, Sevyr is suggesting that destroying the sword will destroy Muramasa’s soul, or at least part of it.
(These are different swords from the Muramasa Blade that was a fixture of Daniel Way’s Wolverine: Origins back in the 2000s.)
PAGES 16-18. Flashback: more of Solem and Sevyr’s fight.
The key point here is that Solem uses his Muramasa Blade to bring down a chandelier so that he can escape Sevyr.
PAGE 19. Sevyr demands that Wolverine bring him Solem.
“I watched you in Saturnyne’s arena.” Presumably as one of the onlookers in the gallery in issue #7, when Solem made Wolverine fight War. In page 18 panel 4 of that issue, there is indeed a really big guy among the onlookers who just might be Sevyr.
PAGE 20. Data page. Lots of examples of Solem doing roguish things in both Arakko and Earth. Some of these are ridiculous and you have to wonder where he’s finding the time, but heck, he’s clearly a trickster god figure. He has his ways.
PAGES 21-22. Wolverine finds that Solem has stolen his Muramasa Blade.
Really, sneaking into Wolverine’s bedroom isn’t that challenging for Solem. He’s a mutant. He can use the gates. Bozos like Petra and Sway can get up to the Summer House. Still, this is obviously personal.
PAGE 23. Data page. Wolverine spells out the plot.
PAGE 24. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: FIND THE MOLE.
This was fine. I don’t tend to have strong feelings about this Wolverine run (except the vampire stuff, which bores me to tears). Perfectly reasonable standalone stories, but nothing that makes me feel invested.
The Adam Kubert art is great stuff, though.
God, it all sounds like reading the background notes for somebody else’s D&D game.
Actually, Si’s comment made me think that Solem would make a good MarvelConan villain. And that probably makes sense; temperament-wise and ability-wise, Conan is close to the middle point between Solem and Wolverine anyway.
I always thought that Peter turned into “organic steel” as basically an analogy to avoid the (turns into a man made material) problem.
Colossus’s power is hard to believe in from a natural science standpoint, indeed. But not because steel is man-made; steel is essentially iron with a very small component of carbon and could conceivably be synthesized by real organisms. Far stranger things have happened.
What is hard to believe is that he can switch back and forth between the two forms. And apparently can do so in just a few seconds (if not faster still) with some sort of actual change of his own body composition (meaning that it is not a flow of iron back and forth from under the skin or something similar).
We know that the iron somehow disappears; that was a plot point when he fought Proteus back in 1980. He himself has repeatedly shown that his body density and apparently weight change as well – for instance, his second fight against Magneto had him switch back to human form so that colliding with Nightcrawler would not be fatal to Kurt.
That is not biologically possible. Or even physically possible. How is Piotr losing and regaining several kilos of iron at a moment’s notice all the time?
Wolverine’s regeneration offers similar difficulties. It has long left the real of anything that could be biologically conceivable. The flash forward of Grant Morrison’s final few issues actually had him claiming to once having survived for six months by eating bits of himself. That is not biology, that is magic.
Just as Cyclops’s eyes where once described in some handbook as ‘portals to a dimension of pure force’, we must assume Colossus gains his extra steel from a steel dimension while Wolverine is a conduit to the dimension of pure meat.
It’s basic physics, really.
Luis: Don’t forget that when Colossus transforms he also no longer needs oxygen.
Oh, you guys better watch yourselves.
Sure, the vast majority of mutants powers bear absolutely no resemblance to anything that would occur as part of natural evolution, and most of them would have to be marked down as magic.
You’ll give some comic creator an idea that he has to explain away discrepancies between comic book science and biology.
We’ll end up with some convoluted major event where Marvel reveals that mutants are not the “next stage in human evolution”, but rather part of some millennia old conspiracy involving mutants being created by Mephisto.
It’s a dark path we really don’t want to have to go down.
The physics of comic book universes are simply very different than in our reality. That’s all we need to realize.
“Just repeat to yourself, ….”
There’s a bit in Spurrier’s X-Men Legacy where a human scientist named Nina Ambrose ridicules the idea that the X-gene unlocks latent human potential for firing lasers from your eyes or summoning demons from Limbo, says none of it makes any sense and only proves that mutants are an artificial species created by Celestials or the Phoenix Force. I wonder sometimes if the X-books would still be on their racial exceptionalism binge (which predates Hickman) if Spurrier was the X-writer-in-chief, and what form his X-vision would take.
Spurrier is very anti-nationalism.
I’m sure his vision would look nothing the same as Hickman’s Krakoa. I can guarantee that much.
Not one superpower makes a lick of sense, and trying to explain them usually ends in madness and death.
And bad stories.
Is Nightcrawler a better character because he is really traveling to some sort of Cthulhu dimension, flying through it, and instantly returning?
He is not.
All superpeople spend more energy than they can actually obtain by “natural” ways.
Hence “Godpower/Von Doom Particles”.
Case solved.
(It’s pseudo-science, guys. If they give background for powers, and make it work in a story, just accept that as it is, and enjoy.)
The Canadian government abducted and brainwashed the living conduit to the meet dimension.
That’s no big deal. Sticking knives in him made him dangerous.
Solem’s skin must have a connection to the adamantium dimension, the existence of which could have been a big deal if not for the fact that the X-Men can now create however much they need for Wolverine resurrections anyway.
I did a goofy comic in my high school math notebook where the main antagonist had had his nose cut off by the main character, and went around with a little patch over where it had been, vowing revenge. So Sevyr immediately seemed to have the same M.O. But he’s drawn with the scarab patch over his missing nose even before he meets Solem. Maybe an art error.
@Kryzsiek – a dimension of pure meat sounds like heaven for Odin Quincannon.
I’m enjoying this series a lot more than I expected, and Adam Kubert’s art is phenomenal.