X Deaths of Wolverine #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #4
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Federico Vicentini
Colourist: Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Omega Wolverine going through a Krakoan gate.
PAGES 2-4. Flashback: the fall of Krakoa in Omega Wolverine’s timeline.
Although the caption calls this the “near future”, the grey hairs on Forge suggest that we’re a good few years into the future. Wolverine is also shown with some grey hairs, though not as many. Despite the suggestion in X Lives that Wolverine is basically immortal, that’s not really true; we’ve seen in Old Man Logan that his natural lifespan is still something under 200 years.
Basically, Forge is implanting an organic-tech time travel device in Wolverine so that when he finally figures out what caused this timeline, he can go back in time and avert it. This is the back story of Omega Wolverine; we see him next in the flashback in the previous issue, where he was still hanging around in the far future trying to find the key information, and Moira seemingly killed him.
Krakoa is being destroyed by a bunch of fairly conventional-looking Sentinels, though Nimrod can be seen up in the top right. This is basically the destruction of mutants by artificial intelligence that Moira had always been warning about, and that Xavier and Magneto were keen to avert throughout the Hickman run. Evidently Moira wasn’t lying about that.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. I have issues with the description of Laura, Gabby and Daken as Wolverine’s “closest allies” – they’re his closest relatives, but it’s not like he works with them all that often.
PAGES 6-8. Flashback: the origin of Omega Wolverine.
This continues directly from the flashback in the previous issue. Moira whines that she gave the mutants Krakoa, and that they responded by stripping her powers and exiling her. That’s Inferno #4, though really it was specifically an act of Emma, Mystique, Destiny and Cypher, not mutantkind as a whole. As we’ve said before, all of this is made a bit obscure by the failure to spell out in Inferno what exactly Moira’s secret plan was that led to her being driven out, but the implication was that Krakoa was meant to be a utopia to sideline mutants while preventing any more from being born in the outside world.
As mentioned last issue, the whole “Preserve” set-up echoes a timeline in Powers of X where Moira and Logan survived to the end of the human race, but this is a different timeline.
PAGE 9. Data page. This is all calling back to Powers of X and the potential ascent of humanity into post-humanity. More fundamentally, Moira’s death apparently resets the timeline; but if she were to live forever as part of the Phalanx collective consciousness, that could presumably be averted.
Digression: Quite how Moira’s timeline resets work, if indeed that is how they work, remains a little obscure. I think the simplest approach is to view it as just straightforward time travel where she goes back and alters the course of history. Or, if you prefer, it’s like Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the whole timeline exists from start to end, even though the event that leads to the destruction of everything happens to take place in the middle. What wouldn’t work is any suggestion that the future doesn’t exist beyond Moira’s death, since that would contradict all manner of time travel stories. Of course, precisely because time travel exists in the Marvel Universe, the whole timeline exists at once, even if its actual content is subject to change.
PAGES 10-15. Omega Wolverine, Scout, Daken and Wolverine (Laura) confront Arnab Chakladar.
Moira has already left, so they’re too late.
Why does Chakladar, a regular tech mogul, have a Cable-style gun lying around his lab?
According to Omega Wolverine, all of his children died in various ways in his timeline. Daken’s death might be a callback to Wolverine’s death in Days of Futures Past. Scout is apparently depowered by Nimrod, which I don’t think we’ve seen Nimrod having the power to do yet. Maybe he picks up the designs for Forge’s Neutraliser somewhere, but that suggests a possible future development. Wolverine / Laura (and Omega Wolverine is clear to assert her as the real Wolverine here) is tortured by the “Homo Novissima” – the far-future posthumans from Powers of X, who presumably also dominate the world in his far future.
PAGE 16. Data page.
Singing stone recordings. The singing stones are stone-based recording devices from X-Force. Bugs, basically.
Banshee. Moira asks Banshee to help her get back onto the Island. Banshee was, of course, her lover for many years in the Claremont run and beyond. Evidently he says no, given the next scene.
PAGE 17. Moira returns to the island, tricking Krakoa using Banshee’s skin.
Um. So apparently you can get through the gates by holding bits of a mutant corpse? Anyway, I really don’t like this; aside from being generally grotesque, it feels like it’s going out of its way to trash the Moira/Sean relationship, which may not exactly fit with the current direction of Moira’s character, but didn’t need to be actively destroyed. I suspect the intention was to convey Moira’s sense of desperation, but if so, it doesn’t read that way.
PAGE 18. Destiny in the Hatchery.
Destiny is waiting for Mystique to be resurrected after she was killed in the previous issue. As a member of the Quiet Council, Mystique will be fast tracked.
The panel of Logan and Xavier in the background is the cliffhanger of X Lives of Wolverine #4.
PAGES 19-24. Omega Wolverine stops Moira and succumbs to the Phalanx.
Moira’s initial plan is to get her powers back by using the Neutraliser twice, but that doesn’t work. Apparently Moira’s preferred option is still to reset time by suicide; this is effectively what she did in the Powers of X far future timeline, albeit that she let Wolverine actually kill her.
Professor X is bleeding from the shoulder because he was stabbed by a possessed present-day Wolverine in X Lives of Wolverine #4.
Moira shoots Forge with the Neutralizer. This is, in principle, reversible – Storm got her powers back in the end, and presumably Forge could be resurrected like many other depowered mutants who have gone through Crucible.
There’s some really, really clunky storytelling where Moira somehow gets into a suit of plant-tech armour that happens to be lying around. The art really struggles with that.
Moira uses the Neutralizer on Omega Wolverine, thus removing his healing factor and causing him to succumb entirely to the Phalanx.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: TIME’S UP.
I still can’t get Banshee Skinsuit out of my head. It would have been so easy to just technobabble a way for Moira to get back to Krakoa that didn’t ruin her as a character, crap all over one of more interesting relationships in X-Men history, and make every enemy of the X-Men look idiotic for missing a super-obvious flaw in their security. Free entry to Krakoa *plus* we get to skin some mutants?!? No, that’s too obvious to work. SMH
Wasn’t the point of Lila being attracted to Sam based around his being innocent and naive though? Lila was an intergalactic rock star who could get just about any man she wanted. She’s probably been with a lot of jerks in her life. Then, there’s this starstruck younger guy from Appalachia who is sincere and cute and sweet. Not like other guys she’s been with…he’s never snorted coke, never been in a limo, never flew in a jet. Maybe he’ll be a nice guy. You can see how the attraction may develop.
Plus, you can imagine that Lila was sleeping around on Sam during the relationship too. Eventually, she grows tired of Sam and the two decide it’s never going to work. Sam is heart broken, but Lila is worldly and older and realizes that Sam was cute and sweet, but isn’t an ideal partner for her.
I don’t find anything wrong with the story being told.
Something else that needs to be remembered is that, for as revolutionary as Claremont sometimes was with his X-Men stories, he also knew he was writing for adolescent male readers.
Yeah, the “rock star wants nice guy” thing with Lila and Sam works better from the perspective of Sam being an audience surrogate. Like Omar, I agree it doesn’t make a ton of sense from Lila’s perspective.
I’m trying to come up with a list of healthier super-hero comic book couples of the Silver and Bronze Ages. So far: Elongated Man & Sue Dibney, Mr. Miracle & Big Barda, most Hawkmen and Hawkwomen, Spider-Man & Mary Jane on a good day, Wally West & Linda Park, Animal Man & Ellen (despite the weirdness in their lives). I get that super-hero comics need to have soap opera drama, action, and cliffhangers. Still, there weren’t a ton of romantic relationships between equals in the books. I think things have shifted for the better, especially with regards to LGBTQ+ relationships. Even some formerly bad relationships, like Rogue & Gambit or Captain Brittain & Meggan, have been adjusted to be healthier. Bad relationships are going to happen, I just don’t want gross ones.
I brought up the Sam/Lila thing as a comparison to the Rahne/Elixir thing, which I think got brought up in reference to the Hank/Jan thing, which I think was about the Scarlet Witch thing, which I think was about how there are some stories that stick to characters no matter how often writers try to get their narratives to move on.
The Sam/Lila thing is fine in isolation, both characters were over the age of consent (in most places), and it really was just a fairly harmless teenage fantasy. Joan Jett falls in love with you and takes you to science fiction land. But in the context of all the other creepy relationships, it’s still a big old red flag.
@Omar- I think it’s less Claremont expected women to be sexually available and more Claremont had questionable ideas of consent. Look at Lee Forrester and Cyclops, for example- Scott and Lee get stuck on an island and Scott loses his glasses and has to be blindfolded. Lee makes sexual advances toward Scott and Scott politely refuses them. And then Lee runs off and leaves Scott by his lonesome with no way to see and Scott says this is his fault! If the genders were reversed, everyone would be complaining but Lee got a pass.
“Sam was risking his life on a regular basis at the time.”
That’s something that’s been overlooked in this discussion. It’s frankly stretching credulity that Peter and Kitty didn’t act on their relationship given that they were teenagers who regularly, pretty much constantly, had people trying to kill them.
But I’ll say again, there’s a lot of this discussion that just WANTS the large majority of these relationship stories to be wrong in some sense. I mean, Psylocke was THINKING about Doug from a position of greater social power? Jesus. No wonder X-Man outlawed all this in his own reality.
Again, the conversation started as an examination of what actions get given narrative weight and what gets ignored or written lightly. The new Excalibur doesn’t have Betsy “thinking” about Doug anymore, because it’s one of those unfortunate characterizations that the writer is trying to move her character past. Sam and Lila are written as amicable exes, Rahne’s relationship with Elixir gets remembered but Dani’s being his legal guardian apparently wasn’t… The nature of comics writing means that if you don’t like what a previous writer did, you can change it — but that change only sticks as much as readers allow it to.
@Michael In fairness, Scott immediately blaming himself for something going wrong regardless of whether he has any control over it is 1000% a Scott thing to do.
This conversation has wandered a fair bit, but pursuant to Mike Loughlin’s point, Banshee/Moira are arguably the most adult, balanced romance of the Claremont era. There’s a meet cute, flirting, emotional support in tough times, and sure, she gets mind controlled later, but it’s a Chris Claremont comic, comes with the territory. There’s no fundamental imbalance in the relationship.
That’s why I’m undecided whether the wearing-Banshee’s-skin-as-a-suit is going to permanently damage Moira as a bridge too far and dog her like Hank hitting Jan or Wanda going crazy, or if it’s so utterly stupid that it’ll be forgotten like Rahne/Elixir, or mostly just be a punchline from here on out.
How much page time was ever given to Moira and Sean’s relationship by Claremont? I want to say that it sounds sad that it is considered the healthiest relationship from the Claremont days.
Perhaps the fact that they are trying to set Moira up as a genocidal monster with an unbalanced hatred of mutants could be problematic for Moira’s future, whether she continues to wear a Banshee-skin suit or not.
As someone else pointed out, Moira has served mainly as a plot device for most of the Krakoa era. So, most likely, she’ll be killed off and forgotten about for years, considering she was dead for years before Hickman dug her up. Most likely after reading Ken MacLeod’s Sky Road and remembering that there was a Scottish mutant-adjacent character named Moira he could use in his own story.
It’ll be okay. I figure years from now, Sean and Moira will be able to look back on this incident with a chuckle and make jokes about how the two of them were always “suited” for one another.
Spectacular work, Moo.
“The Sam/Lila thing is fine in isolation, both characters were over the age of consent (in most places)”
I think Sam was younger than 18 at that point…
“Lee makes sexual advances toward Scott and Scott politely refuses them”
Actually it was more she kissed him and then Scott was all “Jean! It’s too soon for a relationship even though I like you!” and then Lee was “Chill out! I’m cold hungry and trapped on a deserted island! All I wanted was some fooling around and companionship and human warmth!” and then she runs and Scott mopes for a page and then Lee comes back once he is done moping and they reconcile.
The age of consent in most U.S. states is still 16/17 with some states stipulating that the older person cannot be in a position of authority over the younger person or a certain number of years older than them. Authority might push the age of consent up to 18/19. That wouldn’t apply to Sam/Lila, though. Also, what state law does apply to them if they’re hopping around the galaxy? New York, I guess?
If I were Psylocke, I might fantasize a little bit about the young man who rescued me from the interdimensional monster. I can see how imminent peril would create situations where characters might not care about age so much. There’s a real push-pull between “mutants are so different/separate from everyone else” and “we just want to be like regular people” in the X-books at the time. So the age of consent conundrum seems to fit right in.
In the absence of imminent peril, the age difference between partners starts to seem like an unforced error/author fantasy. Did Heather have to be so young when she met Mac Hudson and decided they were in love? No. Her defining characteristics at the time were: held a job as secretary, knew Michael Twoyoungmen, came from a large family. And was fairly strong willed, I guess. That’s one where I definitely feel a little sad/creeped out. I like those characters, and I think they would have worked without the old-fashioned age difference stuff.
And then there’s Claremont’s famous original plan for Gambit, never realized because he left the books: for him to seduce and corrupt Kitty Pryde.
Yeah but wasn’t Gambit also supposed to a projection/creation of a mutant child who never grew up?
Also, as per this, it was Rogue he would have been after, not Kitty…
https://www.cbr.com/gambit-cyclops-mister-sinister-chris-claremont-clone/
Allan M.: “Banshee/Moira are arguably the most adult, balanced romance of the Claremont era.”
Yes, and I think the Cyclops/Lee Forrester relationship COULD have been a good one. Oh well. Lee Forrester and Magneto was a weird couple, but at least they were both adults.
Moo: I laughed, and luckily no one was around or else I’d have to explain the Banshee skin-suit.
Anybody out there want to start a death metal band? I think Banshee Skin Suit could share a bill with Cannibal Corpse and Carcass.
Dave said: But I’ll say again, there’s a lot of this discussion that just WANTS the large majority of these relationship stories to be wrong in some sense. I mean, Psylocke was THINKING about Doug from a position of greater social power? Jesus. No wonder X-Man outlawed all this in his own reality.
Thom H. said: If I were Psylocke, I might fantasize a little bit about the young man who rescued me from the interdimensional monster.
I’m looking at this less as “these relationships are bad” or “these moments make the characters bad” and more that there are some writing choices here, and they seem to reflect some stuff in the culture. There are reasons this scene wouldn’t be written this way today.
So, here, for instance, my take isn’t “Psylocke is a sexual predator.” It’s more wondering what Claremont is doing by including this in the story. Typically, we’d read this as a setup for some kind of a running subplot or a character dynamic to be explored. So what’s Claremont exploring or considering here, and why? What narrative, thematic role is it playing?
I think “applicability” is always the key question. There aren’t many popular examples of age-gap romances between people who have just survived a life-or-death situation. But there are plenty of well-known examples of teachers who feel romantic about their underage students, and we don’t always reads that as harmless or romantic.
More generally, I think a lot of what I am saying is even less about individual writers — except as limited examples — than about that bigger shift in how readers perceive things, and what comes across as countercultural or mainstream sentiments and thinking about this stuff.
I find it interesting, for example, that an adult character being gay was too controversial at the time to be said aloud, so that Claremont had to resort to archaisms like “leman” to make text the lesbian subtext between Mystique and Destiny.
But some of the other relationships and portrayals of sexuality weren’t controversial then, but might be a lot less likely to be accepted by fans — or even editors — today.
As Nu-D and others have noted, we’ve seen both a greater awareness of issues around consent and a narrowing of concepts of consent and power in romantic and sexual relationships in parts of both fan and media culture today.
As to the idea of narrative weight, that, too, comes down to fan judgements, and those are shaped by cultural context.
I think Chris V. had a good point earlier when he noted that things that play to readers’ escapism tend to pass by unremarked by both readers and later writers and editors.
Getting away from all the sexuality and sexual consent stuff, I think this is one of the many, many reasons why, say, Mark Waid reviving the plot point about Peter Parker faking some photos in the early Silver Age got some pushback. In the original contexts, these moments were about put-upon, teenaged Peter, the freelance part-time photog, getting one over on the extra-hackish, exploitative, and dishonest Ditko version of J. Jonah Jameson.
As such, it was hard for a lot of later readers to see this as some deep failure of journalistic integrity or pattern of misjudgement in Peter that deserved the consequences Waid brought in as opposed to a bit of cathartic business at the end of an early story.
More generally, writers trying to make some kind of plot point or thematic point out of Peter taking photos of himself as Spider-Man using an automatic camera never works out all that well. Again, it’s seen less as a serious representation of real journalism and more as a grandfathered-in plot gimmick to allow for the whole “Peter’s photos used against him/rivalries with other photographers” stuff that’s just…fun for readers to read about.
Michael said: I think it’s less Claremont expected women to be sexually available and more Claremont had questionable ideas of consent. Look at Lee Forrester and Cyclops, for example- Scott and Lee get stuck on an island and Scott loses his glasses and has to be blindfolded. Lee makes sexual advances toward Scott and Scott politely refuses them. And then Lee runs off and leaves Scott by his lonesome with no way to see and Scott says this is his fault! If the genders were reversed, everyone would be complaining but Lee got a pass.
I don’t know that I’d separate these two ideas. While I don’t know if Claremont had a coherent, conscious take on all of this, it does seem to me that women’s sexuality in his stories is almost always portrayed in terms of some kind of power dynamic, either external — how they relate to other characters — or internal — as between “drives” and “repression,” and this gets linked more broadly to their overall characterization.
It’s harder to think of Claremont stories in which the male characters’ sexuality or sexual desires are shown as shaping their whole characters in the same way. There’s some of it with Wolverine, especially in his first mini where Yukio seduces him, but most of his male characters were typically defined by their romantic desires, not their sexual desires. When male characters are sexualized in Claremont stories, it’s often in the context of being dominated by women.
I do think Claremont plays a lot with the question, “Is transgressive sexuality with uneven power dynamics liberating or just exploitative?” in different scenarios. That’s inevitably going to take things towards questions of consent, but bright-line models of consent aren’t necessarily where Claremont wants to go.
Based on what I’ve read, Claremont completely forgot how old Betsy was when he brought her over from Captain Britain. He planned to have her join the New Mutants and want to be with Doug. Then, he remembered she was too old for the New Mutants so he dropped the Betsy/Doug idea and moved her to X-Men.
Now, it just reads as a bit older woman fantasizing about a younger guy she found cute and nothing more.
“Claremont completely forgot how old Betsy was when he brought her over from Captain Britain”
Especially since her wrote her during some of her Captain Britain days…
Peter Parker? Hell, Superman, the icon of perfect integrity, has made a career out of reporting on himself under a different name. I suppose he is super at everything, including super-sock-puppetry.
@wwk5d
Huh. In a recent interview, Claremont said it was supposed to be Kitty and Gambit:
https://youtu.be/_14UnCkxWZU?t=5163 (at the 1hr26 mark)
Or maybe he intended for both?
Lee runs off and leaves Scott by his lonesome with no way to see and Scott says this is his fault! If the genders were reversed, everyone would be complaining but Lee got a pass.
I think it’s significant that Scott is a superhero and Lee a civilian. She hasn’t voluntarily taken on the role of his protector, and was thrust into a role of responsibility she didn’t want. And her lapse in meeting that responsibility was brief. She came back quickly.
Scott’s guilt is unfair, but realistic and consistent with his character. I don’t think we’re supposed to read his inner monologue as the author’s voice, telling an objectively true version of events. We’re supposed to read it as the character’s voice, telling how he subjectively experienced it.
Thinking about a gender reversal, what comes up for me is that we’re supposed to read Lee’s advances as reaching out for emotional support. I’m having a hard time seeing a male character written that way. A male character’s sexual advances are usually written as lust or love, not fear or insecurity. Men are portrayed asserting their sexual desires out of a place of strength. Lee is portrayed expressing sexual desire as a way to reach out in weakness for help.
If the scene was written to persuade me that a civilian male made advances for the same reasons Lee did, I think the role reversal would elicit the same response from me. But it’s hard to imagine reading a male in Lee’s position being convincingly written that way.
If anyone can think of an example of a male character making sexual advances as a way to find emotional support at a time of weakness, I’d be curious to read it. Especially if it’s iconic or a well-regarded character moment.
Jean and Logan during X-Tinction Agenda comes to mind, but it’s different. They are both in a place of weakness, but he is weaker than she. Still, it’s Jean that reaches out for succor, and it’s Jean who pulls back. Logan needs the support, but he’s not asking for it and not refusing to offer what he can give.
“In a recent interview, Claremont said it was supposed to be Kitty and Gambit”
I haven’t had a chance to see that Youtube clip, but that is interesting, especially as Kitty was off in Excalibur at that point. Was he going to have her rejoin the X-men, I wonder, or would it have been part of the planned Muir Island/Mutant Wars “crossover”? I know in previous interviews he did mention Excalibur would have been involved.
Nu-D said: If anyone can think of an example of a male character making sexual advances as a way to find emotional support at a time of weakness, I’d be curious to read it. Especially if it’s iconic or a well-regarded character moment.
And there’s the example of the original Claremont/Miller Wolverine miniseries, in which Logan carouses with Yukio in his moment of weakness after Mariko accedes to a marriage arranged by her father. But this may not quite be it either, since it’s all part of a larger scheme to keep Wolverine out of the way.
Another “comes close” example may be Matt Fraction’s take on Iron Man as a sex addict comes close to this, particularly the sequence where he sleeps with Maria Hill for solace when they’re both fugitives from Norman Osborn during Dark Reign. However, this is definitely presented as toxic behavior on Tony’s part.
Because of a lot of cultural default assumptions, though, the closest one typically gets would be writers showing a woman picking up on a male character’s emotional distress and making advances out of sympathy.
Because of a lot of cultural default assumptions, though, the closest one typically gets would be writers showing a woman picking up on a male character’s emotional distress and making advances out of sympathy.
I think this is right, which means it is a double standard, but in a different way. If the genders were reversed between Scott and Lee, we’d be condemning Scott, but it’s because the story would be about a horny dude being in a snit when a female rebuffed his advances. The character would deserve condemnation for that.
If the story was told to make Scott’s advances as seeking help and support…well, it’s hard to know how we’d respond to it. We’d probably read it is not very convincing character work, or we’d read a subtext of manipulation or disingenuousness on the part of Scott. We just wouldn’t find it believable that a man would act the way Lee does in that issue.
Well, that took an interesting tangent… the kitty/rogue conundrum, that came up on another site I was on. And in older articles/interviews Claremont gave, kitty was never mentioned, only rogue (though the parts about ‘Nathan/sinister seemed the same.) A poster who was active on the old comixfan boards when Claremont posted there, said they asked a similar question and got the same answer, it was rogue in the original story idea. However, recently, Claremont has said it was going to be kitty. I’m wondering if he was mixing up different story ideas.
@Nu-D:
“If anyone can think of an example of a male character making sexual advances as a way to find emotional support at a time of weakness, I’d be curious to read it. Especially if it’s iconic or a well-regarded character moment.”
IIRC there is the second Nite-Owl in Watchmen. I may be remembering the situation incorrectly, though, or too tied up to my own personal reading of it.
Anya-It’s been thirty years since Claremont originally left the X-Men. He changes the details of the exact story he is planning to tell. He can’t be expected to remember everything over these past decades or stay consistent.
My guess is that the original idea did involve Rogue. One reason is that Kitty was in Excalibur, so she probably wouldn’t be involved with Gambit. The other is that Claremont must have shared most of his plans for upcoming plots with his editors, and after he left, it seems like the X-office was playing off those plot ideas up until the Age of Apocalypse (at least). Lobdell and Nicieza were liberally taking ideas from Claremont’s plans and reworking them in to their own stories. Since Gambit and Rogue ended up in a relationship after Claremont left, I’d assume that was based on the leftover Claremont idea.
IIRC there is the second Nite-Owl in Watchmen. I may be remembering the situation incorrectly, though, or too tied up to my own personal reading of it.
That sounded familiar so I pulled it off the shelf, but it’s actually quite different.
It’s Laurie who makes advances on Dan, but he’s impotent and can’t consummate. They put on their costumes and go on an adventure which rectories his virility, and they consummate afterward.
It has a lot to say about masculinity. But it doesn’t portray a man seeking emotional comfort through sex, and it doesn’t give a chance to reflect on what an ethical response to rejection would be in that case.
…restores his virility…