TT: Hang on just a minute Pierce. I’m in the middle of an absolutely brutal auction and I think I’m going to win! There we are. Now I’m the owner of a complete set of Disney Infinity figures from the third series in the game! These should fetch me some money on the black market!
PL: Tony, I told you already. I don’t want to be privy to your activities on the dark web. I’m not sure that the law protects two people who write about The Shortest Canadian There Is from testifying against each other in court. But it does look like you and Ol’ Canucklehead have something in common. I think it’s time to dive into Benjamin Percy, Adam Kubert, Frank Martin and Cory Petit’s Wolverine #9. Shall we?
Patch And A Who’s Who
TT: Wolverine has been a public figure in the Marvel Universe for years now. He saved New York from Xorneto. He was an Avenger at a time that I would say comes closest to the Avengers being in-universe celebrities ever. He was the headmaster of a school for mutants. And sure, he often was wearing a mask, but let’s be real… There’s no way at this point in the Marvel Universe that Patch is an effective disguise anymore.
And I love that Percy knows it too.
PL: I love the audacity of the Patch “disguise.” You have to imagine that Logan is the sort who thinks that if he’s wearing his X-Force costume rather than his regular brown and gold or blue and gold, that no one considers him to be the same person. But I have held the theory that even Wolverine just likes to get dressed up once in a while. I think there are some corners of the world that Patch might throw people off for a few minutes but the Legacy House doesn’t look to be one of them.
TT: I totally got the feeling in that first scene that they knew EXACTLY who Logan was, but they didn’t want to out him until it was nice and dramatic. I mean, that metal detector was clearly beeping the whole time they wanded him, and the only other person who would do that is Tony Stark. But after he gets through security, somehow, he enters a ballroom that’s allllllll sorts of Marvel underworld types, but kind of a different crowd than we’re used to in these sorts of scenes. I mean, no AIM, no Hydra, no Red Skull, no Strucker, no Silver Sable…
Pierce, who did you see here?
PL: I clocked Kingpin, that mutant-worshipping cult from the first issue of Wolverine, the kid Hellfire club and a red-headed man with a gun arm who I wish was Red Norvell but as you pointed out off-air is most likely Bushwacker.
However, last we saw Bushwacker, he was taken out in the pages of Immortal Hulk. Anyone that caught your eye, Tony?
TT: There were four that stood out to me outside what you pointed out. The first two were kind of variations of each other. On Logan’s right is a pair of faceless soldiers in armor that made me think of both classic AIM and classic Hydra, yet really didn’t seem to be either. Then on his left was a pair of men in what looked to be green civil war uniforms, but what stuck out to me was one of them was wearing an X-logo. Curious who those folks are.
Blink and you’ll miss him was Xeno from X-Force. Cool cameo, and paired with last we saw him in X-Force I’m very interested to see what comes out of this appearance.
Then there’s the woman in the wheelchair. There’s clearly more going on with her than just a fifty-something woman rolling around an auction, since she had glasses that had a heads-up display. So I wonder who that is…
But before we can think much on it, the auction starts!
Highest Bidder
PL: It’s almost surprising that we don’t get a black market auction of various Marvel Universe items every year or so. All that stuff has to go somewhere and S.H.I.E.L.D is evil every year or three so it’s not like they are keeping tabs on all of it.
There’s some fun stuff up this time around: a Goblin Glider, a prison painting by Jigsaw, Spider-Man’s gravestone, Cap’s cowl from WWII, the gloves of Magnetic Man, the cyanide tooth of Black Widow, the mind-wiped Maverick himself and most interestingly, the severed hand of Wolverine. What’s your theory on how they got a hold of that one?
TT: Is that Old Man Logan’s severed hand? He lost his hand during one of Ed Brisson’s arcs, right? I mean it could be Prime Earth Wolverine’s hand from a story we haven’t seen before too.
But the buzz that Maverick himself had, that got real interesting for me. He wasn’t just a superpowered assassin. He wasn’t just someone with a lot of history. This was a key to Krakoa.
That was a trip. Or it will be for someone who wants to visit Krakoa.
PL: At first glance, there are a couple of different places that hand could be from presuming it is actually Logan’s in the first place. But since it’s his right hand, that narrows things down. It can’t be from AoA Wolverine or from Wolverine in Marvel Universe versus Wolverine. But it could be from the future Wolverine from Jason Aaron’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” story that was missing both hands. But like you mentioned, it is likely from Old Man Logan when Scarlet Samurai sliced it off and Kraven subsequently picked it up.
On the Maverick side of things, mindwiped mutants represent a significant security risk for Krakoa and I like how nicely this wings together with the work that Percy has been doing in this era exploring the measures that mutants have to take to protect themselves.
Today Is A Victory…
TT: So let’s take a look at the flashbacks that are peppered throughout the issue. Logan and flashbacks have gone hand in hand forever. I would have to say that I can’t think of any character who’s had as many. These I like because they’re not mission centric but built around Logan and Maverick’s relationship.
And they start with three absolutely gorgeous pages to start the issue. Normally I’m against decompression, but Kubert did here let this vignette breathe. This is just the wrap up to another Team X mission. Logan and Mav show mercy and take out a fascist soldier that Sabretooth was torturing. The dialogue is just Logan saying at some point he and Maverick glitched and decided not to be evil.
However, we get this in three 16 panel grids, and they’re split up mostly with one single large image per page, with several small inset panels to tell the story. And holy crap I love them.
PL: After a few issues of an artist who didn’t seem to be enjoying himself in the least, Adam Kubert is an absolutely welcome sight. But more than that, Kubert’s work feels like a more natural fit for Wolverine’s world and it doesn’t matter if that’s a pseudo-James Bond story like this one or something featuring more straight up superheroics.
But I think what I’m most surprised by is the fact that Maverick actually kind of seems cool? Between Percy referencing Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings and Kubert’s patient approach, the creative team has added some depth to a character that was first introduced as a trading card and was probably most notable for having bland codenames.
How did you feel about the mnemonic device employed by the former members of Team X? “Today is a victory over yourself of yesterday.” Feels to me like the most succinct that anyone has summed up Logan in years.
TT: That was one of the coolest bits of dialogue. It felt profound and poetic in a way that Logan doesn’t get to be often. And it almost felt like… Like maybe a platonic love poem? These are two men bonded in a way that human beings almost never are, and to escape the absolute torture they’re enduring- and I mean that literally, as Logan is clearly in extreme pain as he’s dumped back in his cell in the second flashback- they use this poetic little saying to bring a measure of relief.
Then as Logan is captured, the flashback and present events blend together, as Kubert blends the 16 panel grid with a more standard layout… I mean I feel like this is one of those comics that the writer and artist probably could be credited together as storytellers.
PL: I couldn’t agree more. And the rest of that quote from Mushashi is “Tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.” I think in a lot of ways Percy is spelling out the themes of his work. While The Book of Five Rings is focused on martial arts, its lessons apply to various forms of conflict and for men like Wolverine and Maverick, it makes sense that it’s something that could use as an anchor point.
The final part of the book is the Book of Void. For two men that have had their minds wiped multiple times, it almost provides some comfort: “By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist.”
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Are we Maverick fans now? Yes. Yes we are.
- That bloody handkerchief is absolutely going to come back to bite Logan in the ass.
- We didn’t get into it much but Maverick actually looks really cool here? What gives? This is a character that flew so low under my radar as a kid that he might as well have been dead.
- Did someone… dig up Black Widow’s cyanide tooth? It feels unlikely that someone could have knocked it out. Furthermore, who is verifying that all of these items are real?
- Spider-Man’s gravestone being on display makes me realize exactly the job I’d get in the Marvel Universe. The folks who design, sell and engrave headstones must be making a pretty penny when people just come back to life and die again every few years.
- Krakoan reads: OUT RUN YOUR PAST
Pierce Lightning is a longtime comics journalist and critic, singer for a band called Power Trash, and staving off the crushing heel of capitalism with every fiber of their comic book loving being.
Tony Thornley is a geek dad, blogger, Spider-Man and Superman aficionado, X-Men guru, autism daddy, amateur novelist, and all around awesome guy. He’s also very humble.
