“Touching Darkness”

Writer: Marjorie Liu
Artist: Sana Takeda
Letterers: Clayton Cowles and Cory Petit
Editor: Jeanine Schaefer

See, I said I’d get to some of these storylines sooner or later…

When I read the final issue of this three-parter, I thought it was a bit of a mess.  Reading the arc again, though, I’m coming round to it.  It has its problems – and they’re mainly in part 3 – but they don’t really undermine the central story Marjorie Liu was telling here.

The basic premise of this series is X-23 heading out into the big wide world in order to discover herself and generally try and evolve herself beyond being just a one-dimensional trained killer.  She has no particular idea how she wants to change or even any real understanding of what being different might be like.  She just wants to change.

Or, possibly, throw in the towel and commit suicide.  The previous arc ended with her being reminded of how many people she killed on behalf of the Facility; this one starts with her vaguely toying with a death wish.  The point of this arc is to get her past that, and use guest star Jubilee to change her perspective and give her a reason to live… or at least a feeling that if she sticks with it she’ll find a reason to live.

And that works.  In fact, using Jubilee for the role turns out to be an excellent idea on a number of levels.

For one thing, as you may have gathered, X-23 is a bit of a mopey character, and so if this book’s going to be readable to anyone other than teenage poets with excessive eyeliner, she needs some more cheerful characters alongside her.  Gambit serves that role in the regular cast, but Jubilee helps too.

More to the point, while X-23 is technically part of Wolverine’s family, it’s Jubilee who was a full-blown sidekick and gets treated as a proper friend.  As Gambit helpfully points out, there’s an obvious contrast between the way Wolverine treats the two, which makes Jubilee simultaneously something for X-23 to aspire to, and a reminder of the sort of relationships she’s unable to form for herself (save for Gambit, who this book credits with the patience of saint as he continues working away at her).  As far as Wolverine’s concerned, he doesn’t treat X-23 as normal because she isn’t normal… but there’s a vicious circle there.

And there’s also just a neat bit of irony in having X-23 learn about reasons to live from a character who’s recently undead.

Liu also has another angle, which is that both girls had to leave Utopia in order to get perspective and develop as people.  Unfortunately the details of this get bogged down in what seems to be a garbled misreading of Kathryn Immonen’s Wolverine & Jubilee miniseries, and so that bit falls a bit flat.  But it’s hardly a fatal problem.

All this plays nicely into the book’s central story and gives us some sense that X-23’s actually making progress, however slowly.  Which is a reason to stick around.  The book is best when it’s dealing with the lead’s character development, even if it sometimes lurches into heavy-handedness (such as calling a storyline “Touching Darkness”, or giving Gambit dialogue like “You hurt me more when you tried you hurt yourself.”)

The guest stars here give artist Sana Takeda a chance to show a bit of range, since Jubilee’s about as far removed from X-23 as you can get.  This story needs an artist who can get across the contrast between the two simply in terms of their body language, and Takeda pulls that off nicely.  More generally, there’s a rather nice delicacy to her art which shifts gears easily to accommodate the sporadic bouts of bloodshed.  You can argue that her X-23 is a bit one-note, but then that’s kind of the way she’s written, and at least it’s a note that the art gets right.

So the bit that doesn’t altogether work: that would be the plot.  Or rather, the villains, since even Marjorie Liu isn’t pretending that they’re at the centre of this arc.  Their plot doesn’t even appear until halfway through part two, when the storyline about X-23’s “trigger scent” rears its head, and we get an oddball story about unnamed baddies marketing a version of the scent that turns anyone into a crazed killer.  Now, that’s actually quite a fun idea – there’s a lovely visual of a little baby ineffectually clawing at people – though I’m not sure the story has really sold me on the idea that it’s a particularly useful weapon.  And the head villain is evidently going to be a recurring character, so there’s that.

But having introduced this element in order to provide the arc with some conflict, the story doesn’t really seem to know what to do with it.  Once the characters have infiltrated the baddies’ HQ so that they can find the thingie that will lead them on to the next arc, the story starts flailing around looking for a way to build to a climax without actually resolving anything.  And so, much of part three involves the vastly expensive trigger scent being pumped onto a subway platform for no discernible reason other than to engineer a climax.

That bit doesn’t work, and since it’s the main focus of the final issue, it rather drags down the arc.  But read it as a whole and the strength of the earlier parts does come through.  A better story than it first seems.