Wolverine 2, Wolverine and the X-Men 42, Origin II 3

Wolverine 2
Cornell (w) and Stegman and Morales (a) and Curiel (c)

As you may have guessed from the intentionally deceptive and big ending of last issue, Wolverine, it seems, has not actually gone full evil. Yes he killed that guy but he killed him only because he was protecting his new teammates and doesn't like that, because of his lost healing factor and reluctance to straight murder people, he's dragging the team down somewhat. His teammates and their boss Offer continue to offer few hints about whether they're good, bad, or in-between but given the fact Wolverine's apparently not gone crazy it's probably a safe bet that they're closer to good than bad. Still, the question remains, how did he get here? Well it started with a meeting with Spider-Man. In the midst of Goblin Nation, Wolverine decided that Goblin must have some sort of deal with Sabretooth to divvy up the city and so he tracks down Spidey hoping that he's heard something. Spider-Man berates him but eventually the two have a chance to talk (after each has saved the other) and Spider-Man asks what he plans to do to Sabretooth while Wolverine asks if the new tone of Spider-Man seems to be working for him. Spidey tells Wolverine that he shouldn't go for Sabretooth and says that his new way may be more brutal but it's also more effective and the issue ends with Spider-Man telling Wolverine that it's easy to change and still be the same person without falling into self-hate and self-doubt before throwing him off the building and saying "don't fall."

There's a kind of unwritten rule at Marvel that says when a book is flailing or just on the bubble of doing well, throw Spider-Man or Wolverine on the cover and into the issue, even if it's just for the smallest of guest spots. It's simple logic to follow: Spider-Man and Wolverine sell books and they're characters people know and can make them feel comfortable jumping into a book they don't know as well. So what, then, does it mean when Spider-Man makes an appearance on the cover of a Wolverine book? Unwarranted and unwanted speculation aside, it makes some sense to put these two together. Wolverine and Spidey have a long history together as poster-boys for the Marvel Universe and typically they're at odds with one another for the other's methods. Here the roles are reversed somewhat, a chance Cornell wasn't going to pass up and, once that speculation is put aside, one that would have been silly to pass up. Now Wolverine doesn't want to kill, afraid he'll fall into bad patterns, and Spider-Man isn't afraid to kill, preferring to end threats longterm. As a result, though it's still hard not to feel as if the superstar cameo isn't a little bit forced even with all of the logic at my disposal, the Spider-Man/Wolverine parts are the strongest in the issue and it's clear Cornell enjoyed writing Spider-Man as much as Stegman enjoyed drawing him again (hard not to put Spider-Man in an issue when you have Stegman as the new artist too). The parts with Wolverine's new team still remain a mystery, but not like, in the way a mystery is a good thing, in the way that I still have yet to care that they're not explaining anything. Ah well, third time's the charm.

Wolverine and the X-Men 42
Aaron (w) and N. Bradshaw, Larraz, R. Perez, Crystal, S. Sanders, Alves, Townsend, and Bachalo (a) and Milla and Loughridge (c)

It's graduation day at the Jean Grey School and everyone's excited for the future except Quentin Quire, who is forced to look inward and ask what's happened to him. He came to the X-Men as a troublemaker and a nuisance (truthfully, those words are too small for how he came to the X-Men with Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely) and now he's set to graduate from the school after becoming class president and one of the most popular students and not even burning down the school once. On top of that, family and friends come from all over to support the new graduates and he doesn't have anyone. Until Captain America shows up. That's right, Cap cares about Quentin to some extent, just like Wolverine cares about Quentin to some extent. SPEAKING OF WOLVERINE, all of the graduation festivities are intercut with a scene from the future, when all of these graduates have gone on to their new lives well down the road, with many joining the X-Men, some elsewhere among the heroverse. Wolverine is now shutting down the Jean Grey School as apparently there is no more interest in it. X-Man Idie has come to keep Wolverine company but has to leave partway through to help the X-Men leaving Wolverine alone until who else but Quentin Quire, the new Phoenix (as we saw in BATTLE OF THE ATOM), arrives. The two talk with Wolverine revealing that he's going to have to go elsewhere before Quentin dumps off a bunch of new students from the Negative Zone School, to Wolverine's annoyance and delight. Back in the present, it's a new day at the Jean Grey School and Wolverine went a whole day without having to pop his claws.

It's not an awful ending to the book here, as this is another one of those series that's going to end and restart quickly with Jason Latour and Mahmud Asrar at the helm. It is, perhaps, a fitting ending as it focuses so heavily on Wolverine and Quentin Quire and their relationship, as the book did throughout its run. There were always other students at the school (I've seen lots of people complaining about the lack of YOUNG X-MEN, like Blindfold, Dust, Rockslide, and Anole, throughout this series and I can't say I blame them, if only because they're clearly a big part of the school but they're almost never referenced; even here, as they graduate, Anole's name gets called along with Pixie's and I don't think we've ever heard them speak in this series set at the Jean Grey School) but the focus was always on this newer batch of students, with Quentin tossed in from the old days, and particularly on Quentin. That makes some sense as Wolverine as a headmaster is something everyone wanted to see and who needs headmastering more than Quentin Quire. So the ending is a fitting one here but still one that focuses itself very narrowly on Quentin and Wolverine. Of course, some of the other storylines wrapped even before this, like Broo regaining his mind and Idie regaining her soul for Broo, and so forth, but it does feel weird, after a 30-page conclusion issue, to really only come away with things to say about two characters.

Origin II 3
Gillen (w) and Adam Kubert (a) and F. Martin (c)

Logan is locked away in a cage, shackled to a machine that will shock him until he does what his new owners want him to do, at a circus, exploited for his beastly look and the claws that pop out of his hands. Of course, Clara has a soft spot for him and wants him to talk to her and the others, sure that they'll let him go if he'll only prove himself to be a man and not an animal. Clara has some experience with this as the current girlfriend of Sabretooth and gets a little too close to Logan for Sabretooth's liking. Sabretooth takes an immediate dislike to Logan but still vows to help Clara after Sinister, having already failed to legally purchase Logan from Hugo the circus owner, takes him for testing and experimentation right out from under the circus. Sabretooth tracks Logan to Sinister's lab and they watch from outside while Sinister experiments and shows Logan that he's created his legion of men by taking people who want to die anyway and granting them that death with a concoction that essentially kills them but moreover makes them not feel pain of being human, making them, as he puts it, übermensch. When he leaves, Sabretooth and Clara break into the lab and go to Logan. He first tells them to run but, with Clara's allowance, instead asks for help and the three of them escape together.

I talked last time about how ORIGIN II comes at, perhaps, a bad time simply by its own concept. To reiterate (or you could just click that link, whatever, I'm not the boss of you), ORIGIN II is coming at a time where we know so much about Wolverine's past and he knows a lot more about his past and so a new story about his origin maybe doesn't hold as much weight with us. I still think that is a flaw in the design but it's a flaw that's made very manageable by Kieron Gillen and Adam Kubert, who are both doing great work on the series, making it a series worth reading despite the thought that maybe it's not really breaking ground we needed broken. Of course, it is the first time that Wolverine meets Sabretooth and deals with Sinister so there's still plenty here to deal with and to learn. Kubert's art is really matching the tone of Gillen's writing and, for as much as I like the way he's drawing Wolverine and the landscapes and what not, I think his Sabretooth is really shining. Instead of the giant, lumbering figure that we see so often as Wolverine's rival, Sabretooth is lean and tall, still the antithesis to Wolverine but a polar opposite to Wolverine's short and bulky. The most recent we've seen Sabretooth in comics (though there's been an influx of him lately) was in Cornell's WOLVERINE and he appeared there as almost a Kingpin like figure, larger than life and, weirdly, wearing a suit. I kinda hated that design as it seemed to really take away from the Sabretooth mythos. Sure it's showing him in a different light, maybe even in the light in which Wolverine is trying to be seen, but it's still a huge change to the character after all that. This one looks different than most of the Sabretooths we've seen but still retains a more animal and feral look, something that can turn from human to animal in a flash. Some really good stuff out of this book that, by all rights, shouldn't be that good.