It’s a fatal four-way when Wolverine, Lady Deathstrike, Omega Red and Sabretooth collide in action as Lethal Larry Hama likes it in X-Men Legends #9, written by Hama, drawn by Billy Tan, colored by Chris Sotomayor and lettered by Joe Caramagna.
Dan Grote: Die Hard. Lethal Weapon. Point Break. Thunder Gun Express. For decades, dumbass action movies have captured our attention with loud explosions, action sequences where one vehicle crashes into another vehicle and chemically enhanced men wrestle one another till it’s time to hang dong in a gratuitous sex scene.
Add to that proud tradition this comic, which is literally just Larry Hama banging action figures together for 20 pages. And I love it.
Austin Gorton: X-men Legends #9 is exactly what I wanted from this story. Just big, dumb action scenes featuring over-the-top characters dripping with machismo who ultimately accomplish very little besides making us smile.
The Hama Method
Austin: I’ve been making my way through Larry Hama’s original run of late, and this story, whether intentional or not, follows a very classic Hama structure. There’s an intriguing first issue that sets the plot in motion while promising fireworks to come. Then a lackluster second issue that moves the plot along incrementally but features largely wheel-spinning action beats. Finally, it concludes with a bonkers third issue that pays off the promise of the setup (at least in terms of over-the-top, high-octane action) and almost makes the whole thing worth it. Nevertheless, you feel like maybe the story could have been told in two issues instead of three. I don’t know if Hama is just coasting at this point and that’s his default structure, or if he intentionally structured this story in a way meant to recall the era in which it takes place, but the formula is striking.
Dan: When you’ve worked in the business as long as Lethal Larry, you develop a certain formula for success. I have to imagine that’s what kept him on Wolverine for as long as he was, but also what allows him to keep writing G.I. Joe comics at IDW in what I assume is an untouchable vacuum. Sure, it makes the cracks easier to find, and we spent most of our last go-round poking holes in the story, but you can’t argue the results. Larry Hama comics are some damn fun empty calories.
Austin: I am consistently amazed at how good he is at salvaging an aimless “part 2” with a bananas conclusion that gives us everything we want from a Larry Hama Wolverine comic. If part 2 is readers wondering when they’re going to get to the fireworks factory, part 3 is consistently when they get to the fireworks factory.
Dan: Interesting, then, that some of the fireworks in this factory are plane math. This comic dedicates an entire scene to quizzing us about the ability of speeding aircraft to land on hovercraft. Is five Rolls Royce jet engines a good thing? Do they make the plane go gooder? NOT ALL OF US HAVE BEEN WRITING ABOUT MILITARY VEHICLES SINCE 1982, LAR-RY!
Even after all that math, Sabretooth just jumps out of his plane and Omega Red crashes his plane into Jie Jie’s hydrocraft. It’s kinda like the larger story. The girls saved themselves, so all the fighting was pointless. The big muscle men just crashed/jumped out of their planes, so all the math about what you can/can’t do with a Russian MI-17 is pointless. But it sure is fun!
Austin: Mentioning Rolls Royce engines just makes me think back to the time the Silver Age X-Men drove around in Xavier’s Rolls hustling for cash to get to Europe to rescue him from Factor Three.
Anyway, Birdy rattling off a bunch of technical specs about the plane as an explanation for why it can’t do what Sabretooth’s asking it to do seems out of character for her. At least as much as Birdy has a character. Who knows? Maybe she, like Chris Claremont, is an airplane enthusiast! It’s all very in character for Hama. He would often pepper his G.I. Joe stories with little bursts of tech specs like that, so readers would learn what military acronyms stood for or what the top speed of such-and-such jet was.
Dan: I’m still working out the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow. But speaking of characters not sounding like themselves, everyone — everyone! — in this comic has witty one-liners. “Smiert Baba Yaga!” When was Omega Red ever known for zings? He’s a big, wooden, Russian death machine. But whatever. I’m into it.
Austin: Remember when Omega Red had a pet tiger cub?
Similar to how everyone suddenly has the cool dry wit of an action hero, the relationship between Wolverine and Sabretooth in X-Men Legends #9 is, on the surface, curious. They are allies throughout in the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of way. Even when they are working toward a common goal their dialogue is surprisingly restrained. Textually, this is probably a by-product of Birdy giving them both “the glow,” and Hama gives Wolverine some token dialogue at the end about wanting to take down Sabretooth but lacking the energy. Yet their dynamic isn’t too far off what it was in Wolverine’s ongoing series around the time this issue is meant to take place (just before issue #69).
Dan: Again, legally, nice.
Austin: At that point, the pair had come off a series of stories exploring their pasts in the Weapon X program together (including the introductory Omega Red arc over in X-Men Vol. 2). While they weren’t friendly in those stories either, it wasn’t too far off what we’re seeing here. Sabretooth is also, chronologically-speaking, on the verge of surrendering himself to Professor X for treatment of his homicidal urges, beginning that brief period of time in the 90s when Sabretooth was almost an anti-hero. Is the Wolverine/Sabretooth dynamic in this issue just laziness on Hama’s part, or a subtle nod to their relationship in the era he’s trying to recreate? You decide!
Magical Girls Are Magical
Dan: As we mentioned in the previous section, Hino-Chan and Yurei, the two mutant girls the story’s various villains are trying to traffic, save themselves. Hino-Chan, the pyrokinetic, breaks the bonds intended to negate her power, and Yurei, the teleporter who can displace time and space, sends herself and her friend to the future, where none of their pursuers can get to them and they can appear again the next time Hama finds himself writing Wolverine.
The ultimate moral is that teenage girls can fend for themselves. Yurei and Hino-Chan escape much the same way Jubilee does in the previous issue, through pluck and determination and plot-convenient problem-solving skills. Thus, all this fighting and these vintage displays of machismo were for nothing.
Austin: I quite like this. Again, I don’t want to assign Hama’s plot more import than he intended, but this is a really clever subversion of expectations. Yes, we get all the sturm und drang of these big dumb lugs mashing together with claws and tentacles and cool guy machismo. In the end, that truly is all just storm and noise. It was misdirection, unintentionally distracting the villains while the captives basically free themselves. Once they do, they end the big dumb fight pretty quickly and definitively. Considering Hino-Chan and Yurei started the story trying to disconcertingly evade a life of being sex trafficked, this is a much appreciated turn of events.
Dan: Agreed. Love agency for them. And the scene where Yurei ‘ports Omega Red into the Hindu Kush and tells him basically you can explain Russian foreign policy to these people was HY-STERICAL.
That said, they never address who this “other buyer” is for the girls that Jie Jie mentions when things go pear-shaped. Guess it doesn’t matter because they saved themselves, and ultimately there were too many other players on the board already. Who else could Hama introduce? Cyber? No one wants that.
Austin: It’s a weird beat, but the answer is probably that it doesn’t matter and the other buyer is just a MacGuffin. Yet there’s a few other beats like that that could be read as Hama hinting at something more: the conclusion of the Deathstrike and Jie Jie plot reads very much like it’s leading the characters directly into a later story. The twins going into the future seems like the setup to a “…where they became these characters you know today!” sort of reveal. I presume this is all just part of Hama’s style and I have been reading entirely too many comics.
Dan: To be continued in a revival of Wolverine: Black, White & Blood five years from now when we’ve all forgotten!
A Deeper, Richer Tan
Austin: I haven’t been the biggest fan of Billy Tan’s art throughout this story, but something about it here is slightly more attractive. It’s become more minimalist. Not just in terms of skimping on backgrounds but figures in places aren’t as overly rendered. He also seems to be using more medium-range shots, which results in the characters making each panel feel bigger without turning it into a bunch of quick-to-read splash pages. I can still think of at least a half-dozen artists I’d rather see here, but this clicked a little bit more for me. Maybe it’s just wearing me down.
Dan: No, I think you’re right. There’s less here that bothers me in this issue. In fact, Tan does a neat thing with the panel borders in the flashback at the beginning, rounding some of the edges to separate them from the present, as Birdy explains to Creed and Logan how they both ended up on Creed’s plane chasing after Omega Red.
Speaking of our gal Birdy, Tan and Hama team up to take the piss out of giant ‘90s guns in one of my favorite beats from the book. Beset by Hand ninja and clouded by smoke grenades, Jubilee beseeches Birdy to fire her giant gun, to which Birdy replies that “it takes over five minute to cycle up.” Five minutes?! What kind of Civil War-era camera nonsense is this?! Did it take five minutes to cycle up when you were appearing from offscreen to blast people in Marvel vs. Capcom 2?!
Anyway, I still think Tan tends to draw Jubilee’s legs way too long, but credit where it’s due.
X-traneous Thoughts
- I’ll say it again: Put Birdy on Krakoa.
- Hama misspells Omega Red’s middle name. It’s Gregorivich.
- Sabretooth refers to Omega Red as “Tentacle Boy”; it’s delightfully specific yet dismissive as a name, all in just two words.
- Next issue: Fabian Nicieza returns with artist Dan “never drawn an X-Men comic” Jurgens to tell a Mister Sinister story co-starring Amanda Mueller, aka the Black Womb, from Nicieza’s Gambit series. Should be fun.
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 and publisher 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 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 Paul Winston Wisdom.
