Following Lady Deathstrike and the mysterious Jie Jie to Shanghai, where Hino-Chan and Jubilee have been taken, Logan will have to keep Yurei safe while dealing with the Hand. But who invited Omega Red to the battle? Don’t expect any answers, as this is only Part 2 of 3 in X-Men Legends #8, written by Larry Hama, drawn by Billy Tan, colored by Chris Sotomayor and lettered by Joe Caramagna.
Dan: Austin, you tweet a lot about the old Marvel Universe trading cards. Let me ask you: When you were a young lad reading comics, when you stumbled across a character you recognized from the cards, did you find yourself reenacting the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme?
Austin: Oh, 100%. Those cards were my entry into comics, and there was always a sublime pleasure to coming across a character in a comic that I knew from a trading card. I was like Buddy the Elf: I know him, I know him!
Dan: Same, and I feel like X-Men Legends #8 is shooting for a similar energy. It wants us to get excited and point at the cool characters who show up, but the problem is their appearance in Wolverine stories has become so cliche by this point it’s hard to muster that same feeling.
When Are We, Exactly? Part Two
Austin: Last issue, we speculated some as to when exactly this story is meant to take place; this issue thankfully provides a note on the title page declaring it occurs “prior to Wolverine #69.”
Dan: I am legally required to interrupt you here to say, “Nice.”
Austin: Wolverine #69 kicks off a three-part story set in the Savage Land that teases the return of Magneto prior to the big “Fatal Attractions” crossover. Which is all well and good, aside from the fact that the Savage Land story takes place after X-Men (vol. 2) #17-19, also known as the story where the X-Men fight Omega Red (and the Soul Skinner, a villain who never appears again) and the story where Colossus and Illyana’s parents are killed. So Jubilee’s general unawareness of Omega Red here, and Wolverine’s belief that he needs to explain Omega Red’s deal to her, is awkward from a continuity perspective. Especially given they just got done fighting him.
That’s not to say anything about Omega Red’s introductory story, which occurs even earlier than X-Men (vol. 2) #17-19, during which Jubilee and Wolverine also both fought him. Of course, continuity issues are not the worst problem a story can have, but it sticks out more in a story intended to mimic the style of previous stories and dance between the raindrops of established continuity.
Dan: In all fairness, I believe all this unnecessary-to-us-and-possibly-to-Jubilee exposition falls under the Jim Shooter rule of “every comic is someone’s first.” Larry came up in the era of characters needing to restate their whole deal every once in a while, so this is likely a product of that.
As for the Soul Skinner plot, I have to imagine Lethal Larry has a hard enough time remembering his own continuity, let alone Fabian Nicieza’s or anyone else’s.
Austin: Fair enough, yet for all that, Hama does have Omega Red mention Tyuratem, a secret Russian space center at the centerpiece of an earlier Hama story (Wolverine #66-68). The story features Wolverine fighting Epsilon Red, a cosmonaut with tentacles similar to Omega Red’s. It’s a relatively deep continuity cut; we’re not exactly calling back seminal Wolverine tales here. But it’s part of why things like the presentation of Jubilee having never fought Omega Red before (especially since Hama sets up the X-Men’s trip to Russia for the Omega Red/Soul Skinner story in Wolverine #68) or having her meet Yukio for the “first time” last issue stick out.
Omega Red’s involvement in X-Men Legends #8 is presented like it’s meant to be a surprise: he isn’t referenced directly by name and doesn’t appear until three-quarters of the way into the issue. When he does appear, he is depicted exploding out of a shipping container in a half splash page, like it’s a big, shocking reveal. All of which is largely undercut by, you know, the enormous picture of Omega Red on the cover.
Dan: What can we say, the kid sells papers, baby! Actually, spoiling Omega Red allows you to keep the comic’s other surprise — BIRDY! (and Sabretooth, I guess), who we can discuss a little bit more in this next bit.
All the Ladies
Dan: A Wolverine story though this may be, Hama gives the women and girls in this story (and one character’s butt) plenty of time to shine.
Austin: My favorite bit in X-Men Legends #8 is the sequence of Jubilee breaking out of the shipping container, the way it juxtaposes the villains’ overconfident assertion that she’s simply a dumb little girl who is in over her head against Jubilee quietly escaping on her own. When Wolverine arrives to “rescue” her, she immediately joins the fight on her own. Hama wrote a strong Jubilee back in the day, using her as a true sidekick who could compare and contrast thematically with Wolverine. Hama’s Jubilee gave Wolverine someone to talk to and allowed her to hold her own as a competent partner. It’s appreciated seeing that dynamic continue.
Dan: This might be Billy Tan’s best art sequence of the arc. As the camera zooms in and through the shipping container she’s trapped in and Joe Caramagna’s “PAF” SFX — colored by Chris Sotomayor to match Jubes’ outfit — quietly do their work.
Austin: Speaking of things that are the opposite of quiet, there’s the pretty egregious shot of Lady Deathstrike’s butt. It comes when she’s leaping towards Wolverine, positioned near the top of the page and angled down toward him. The end result is that her metal-pants-clad butt is dead center on the page.
Dan: It’s gratuitous but “appropriate” for the time this is set in. Also, I feel like Sotomayor really took his time getting the light to reflect just so off her posterior.
Austin: It is a well-rendered butt! And certainly representative of the time. I was just taken aback when I turned the page and it was all “hello, butt!”
Dan: Nevertheless, we get a good fight scene between Wolverine and Deathstrike. They’re about evenly matched.
Austin: The panel in which the two sort of slash at each other in a flurry of claws, lines, and cuts is especially fun. It’s a technique that hasn’t been used a lot, despite Wolverine’s propensity for fighting similarly clawed antagonists.
Dan: It’s very X-Men: Children of the Atom, which I appreciate.
Austin: Yurei teleporting goons to a series of different perilous locations (the tiger enclosure of a zoo, a field filled with landmines), then looking to the reader and saying that she did indeed memorize locations like that for just that purpose seems like a shot across the bow of, well, people like us.
Dan: Suck it, pedants! That said, Yurei is remarkably competent for an imperiled child. This gets back to what we said about the previous issue about child trafficking being an uncomfortable hook on which to hang this story.
Austin: I do appreciate the way X-Men Legends #8 pivots the plot away from some of the starker realities of child trafficking. Both the depiction of Yurei as a competent actor, however suddenly and inexplicably, and the reveal that the kidnapped kids are wanted for more traditionally super-villainous reasons help make it more comic book-y and less “horrifically real”. It’s still not great, but it’s better.
Another relatively deep continuity cut comes from the appearance of Birdy, Sabretooth’s telepathic “Gal Friday.” Birdy uses her telepathy to curb Sabretooth’s murderous rages. First appearing in Omega Red’s introductory story in X-Men (vol. 2), Birdy was a featured player in Hama’s Sabretooth miniseries. The series was drawn by Mark Texeira, and her appearance here appears to be a direct homage to a similar panel in Sabretooth #1, in which Birdy is positioned in the same way whilst holding a ludicrously large gun.
Dan: As much as I rolled my eyes when Creed showed up on that last page, I was pleasantly surprised to see Birdy. She feels like one of those characters fans would get inexplicably attached to and demand their return. And hey, it’s the Krakoan era, baby, anything’s possible. Victor LaValle and Leonard Kirk have a Sabretooth series coming up after Inferno; there’s probably a good arc about Birdy finding her own identity on Krakoa and not wanting to give Creed “the glow” anymore.
Why Is This a Three-Parter?
Dan: My biggest question walking away from this issue is WHY IS THIS A THREE-PARTER? If all this ultimately is, is a bouillabaisse of Cool Wolverine Stuff, I feel like this doesn’t need to be more than two parts. No other arc in this series has been more than two issues to date, and this one is every bit as disposable as the others (with the possible exception of the first arc, which puts the whole Adam-X-as-Summers-brother plot to bed).
This is like when a ’90s action movie runs over an hour and a half. Jean-Claude did the splits, slept with the love interest, and punched the bad guy’s heart through the back of his shirt. What more do we need to do here?
Austin: This was a common problem with a lot of Hama’s previous Wolverine stories: He tended to structure them as three-part stories when there was, at best, two and a half issues of material to cover. Rather than prune, he padded. The end result was action-heavy middle chapters that moved the plot ahead incrementally, and felt a bit like filler. This was likely due to Hama’s stated “one issue at a time” approach in which he wouldn’t do a lot of long-term plotting in advance. Whether that is the case here or not, the “fluffy middle chapter” vibe of this issue is perhaps what contributes the most to making it feel like a story Hama could have written for the series back in 1993.
Dan: The funny thing is, if this were 1993 and I were picking this up, 13-year-old me would totally be like, “Oh, wow, Lady Deathstrike AND Omega Red AND Sabretooth! I’m getting hair in weird places just THINKING about all these hyper violent characters!” But as the target market for this comic — an older dude who USED TO feel that way — it just sorta feels stuffed and slight at the same time.
X-miscellany
- Wolverine refers to himself as “the ol’ Canucklehead” — take a drink.
- Maybe there wouldn’t be so many shipping issues if works of fiction stopped staging fights in shipping yards. Looking at you, X-Men Legends and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Seriously, what is that? Is it all the colorful rectangles?
- “You with the net — knock her out with your spear.” What is this order? If Jie Jie wants the dude’s spear, why didn’t she say, “You with the spear”? What does the net have to do with anything?
- Would Omega Red call someone an egghead? Even in Russian?
- “Is a frog’s butt watertight?” earns the “Does a mall babe eat chili fries?” Jubilation Lee Award for best line.
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts WMQ&A: The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
