As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

WOLVERINE vol 7 #40
“Last Mutant Standing, part 4”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Ibrahim Moustafa
Colour artist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine and Spider-Man in action against Stark Sentinels.

PAGE 2. Tribute to Alison Gill.

PAGES 3-7. Wolverine enlists Spider-Man to help him enter the Orchis space station.

Oscorp. Peter is leaving the Oscorp building, where he currently works in Amazing Spider-Man. (Norman Osborn is good right now, if you haven’t been following it.) Spider-Man is wearing the Oscorp hi-tech version of his costume here, hence the little glowing bits.

“You’ve alive?” Peter knows perfectly well that some mutants are still on Earth – aside from anything else, he’s appeared over in Uncanny Spider-Man – but presumably this is the first time anyone’s mentioned to him that Logan wasn’t among the mutants who went through the gates in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023.

The Orchis jet was stolen by Logan in Wakanda last issue, as the footnote says. If its rightful owner Jun Wei is “expected back at her post in less than an hour”, Wolverine apparently came straight to New York in the hope of getting Spider-Man to help. Seems a bit ambitious, but who knows, maybe he wasn’t specifically looking for Spider-Man. Maybe he just figured that the best way to round up some allies at short notice was to head to Marvel Manhattan, swing a cat, and see who he hit.

Now, granted, if Wolverine thought he needed a scientist hero to help him get past Orchis’ security systems, he could always have asked the Black Panther, who was literally right there last issue. Perhaps he didn’t come up with the idea until after he was well out of Wakanda, though.

The Beast is obviously not in Wolverine’s good books right now, after Beast enslaved him in issues #26-29. The Beast’s criminal behaviour is public knowledge, at least in general terms, but Spider-Man may be dismissing it as likely propaganda.

The X-Sentinels. The pilot robot in panel 7 page 2 is one of the Orchis X-Sentinels built around the adamantium skeleton of a dead Wolverine. They were set up in X-Men #22, where Orchis were repurposing the skeletons left behind by the assorted Wolverines who died in suicide attacks on Orchis’ space station during Inferno.

PAGE 8. Recap and credits.

PAGES 9-13. Wolverine and Spider-Man’s ship gets damaged.

Logan reminds us in narration that he’s spent most of the Krakoan era being sceptical or conflicted about the place. In fact, he left the country in issue #35, immediately before the Gala. So the arc here is that he completely loses faith in Krakoa only for Orchis to reframe it for him as something that’s worth fighting for after all.

PAGE 14. Data page: an email from Wolverine to Jeff Bannister. He spells out his reservations about Krakoa – fundamentally, he is not a separatist – and reminds us that he made a conscious effort to stay connected to the human world, specifically via his friendship with Jeff throughout this series. His suggestion is that this is the reason why he’s been going out of his way to team with non-mutant heroes, rather than hang out with the remaining mutants.

“Hulk, Cap, T’Challa…” The previous three chapters of this team-up arc.

PAGES 15-18. Wolverine and Spider-Man escape back to Earth, but the X-Sentinel follows.

Straightforward. The longer term significance of this abortive mission is presumably the fact that Spider-Man manages to download some data from Orchis’ systems, as mentioned on page 24.

PAGE 19. Data page: Jeff Bannister’s reply to the earlier e-mail. Somehow, he correctly guesses that Wolverine is planning a suicidal attack on Orchis, and tries to talk him out of it – not that it seems to have any impact.

Bannister correctly points out that most mutants are in fact still around, if you count the population of Arakko.

Sage and Domino visited Moscow in X-Force #44, which is presumably when Jeff’s sources saw them.

PAGES 19-24. Spider-Man and Wolverine fight the Sentinels.

During which, Wolverine concludes that Bannister is right, and he does in fact need the other mutants to provide direction and meaning in his life – and hence, it’s time to get around to making contact with the mutants again.

The final two panels show Sage and Black Tom Cassidy, in the mobile X-Force base which they were using during the Hellfire Gala (and thus still have). They were actually reunited with the rest of X-Force in X-Force #46, but this scene leaves it ambiguous whether we’re before or after that issue in the timeline.

PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads SABRETOOTH WAR.