The next chapter in the Krakoa Era begins in X-Lives of Wolverine #1 by Benjamin Percy, Joshua Cassara, Frank Martin, and Cory Petit!  

Welcome to Comics XF’s X Lives and X Deaths of Wolverine coverage! Given the story is being released weekly over the next ten weeks, we’re doing things a little differently than usual, with a team of critics rotating through each issue over the course of the series. In what is presumably a nod to the precarious state of publishing amidst the ongoing pandemic, the ten issues of X Lives/Deaths on the “Next Issue” page don’t have specific publishing dates, but rather, are simply numbered Weeks 1-10.

Cassie: Mutant, noble warrior, victim, brawler, lover, ninja, detective – Wolverine is anything you want him to be. Wolverine is ageless and somehow timeless. A character that functions both as a symbol of brute violence and a community loyalist, writers, readers, and characters within the Marvel Universe ask a lot of Wolverine. He must fight with honor, but murder when others refuse; he must care for young people, but have a fraught relationship with his own children; he must be fallible enough to break things, but heroic enough to fix everything.

Now, in X Lives of Wolverine #1, he has to save mutantkind by saving its other symbol: Professor X. Austin, readers, welcome to a new chapter in Wolverine’s bloody soap opera.

Austin: Thank Cassie! Wolverine is definitely a character who is forced by various factors to be many things to many people, including the headliner of the opening act of the X-line’s post-”Inferno” storyline. The bright side of that reality is that there’s usually something in the character for everyone to enjoy, and several of those facets are on display in this first issue. Some are certainly more successful than others, but that’s what we’re here to break down! Shall we get to it? 

Two Men and A Baby

Cassie: You know things are gonna get weird when Logan is philosophising. About watches. And time. And his long-lived life. 

Wolverine, the guy who has seen it all and done it all, has been summoned to go save a life as it is being born. He’s the perfect guy for the job, especially when it becomes clear that Omega Red is lurking around the site of the birth, complicating matters with his usual violence. 

The mission is a critical one: that baby grows up to be Xavier, one of the fathers of modern mutantkind, (Percy has Logan take a moment to name Xavier as his father figure to raise the stakes neatly), and the gravity of it all is not lost on Logan.

Later, we realise this mission is the first of many. Almost immediately, Logan is off somewhere new to save Xavier all over again. The hunt, the desire for a lone wolf with a heart that beats for a family trying to put broken pieces back together again: it all begins here.

The best moment of the issue is the double-page given to Cassara as Jean and Xavier reach into Logan’s mind to travel the course of history and time and we see renderings of Logan’s greatest hits: his Weapon X origins, his iconic battles, his loves, and losses. Cassara, like Percy, likes to find poetry in the brute. His carefully rendered details and a touch of embellishments here and there echo Percy’s occasional literary flourishes. The best one in this issue? Logan describes old souls like himself as people who ‘chewed up clocks and swallowed down worlds’.

It’s a workmanlike plot. It’s certainly a very ‘we’ve been here before’ plot. So, Austin, how does it feel? And as a bonus question (I don’t know why I’m hosting this piece), do you have any thoughts on Omega Red? 

Austin: I agree, that double-page splash of Wolverine’s history was a highlight, and arguably the thing that felt the most special about this issue. ‘Workmanlike’ is also a good word to describe the plot. Sending a character hurtling through various histories is certainly a time-honored sci-fi plot device – maybe this next leap is the one that’ll bring him home” etc.- but even specific to the X-Men, it’s a pretty rote routine. This is basically a riff on Rachel Summers sending the consciousness of Kate Pryde back in time to Kitty’s Pryde’s body in the original “Days of Future Past.” Or even the cinematic Wolverine doing the same thing to his past self in the film adaptation. Which is fine. Stories reuse plot devices all the time, but it doesn’t exactly make the story feel original, to its detriment. 

As for Omega Red? The jury is still out. Percy using him as a pawn in the Krakoan/Russian power struggle over in X-Force and Wolverine has been mildly interesting. While I’m sure the specific mechanics of how and why he’s being sent through time to apparently kill Baby Xavier will be revealed over the course of the series, I’m not sure how he fits thematically as the villain of what this story is meant to be. Hopefully, that’ll be revealed over time as well. 

Also, it is unclear why, if Present Wolverine is stuck with whatever claws his Past Self has, Omega Red can seemingly manifest his wrist tendrils in whatever body he is inhabiting. Still, I recognize this is not the most pressing concern at hand. 

“The Clock Is Ticking”

Cassie: This comic opens with Wolverine talking about the nature of time. When you live a non-linear life as he does, and as mutants can, time becomes unstuck from meaning with all their time travel and psychic projection and other various plot devices. 

Naturally, that means the story is told in flashbacks and sudden cuts. We can’t trust the story to move through time chronologically. We see Logan in his mission and we see him being briefed in the Krakoan present. For a moment, it feels like we’re not supposed to know the identity of the baby he’s saving. Towards the end of the comic, a splash page of Logan cradling baby Charles lands triumphantly and is styled like a plot twist.

Austin: Him being sent back to save Cassandra would have been a genuine plot twist and a welcome surprise.  

Cassie: But big reveals don’t work in time travel stories if the narrative has already clued us into who that baby is and will become. This reliance on establishing dialogue and context clues that betray the surprise is either a fundamental mistrust of the audience or a betrayal of the narrative’s inverted structure. 

How did this work for you, Austin?

Austin: Not great, Cassie. As you said, the opening pages felt like the result of a timid editor’s note, added over concerns readers wouldn’t “get” what is the obvious plot point that Wolverine is being sent through time to save Professor X. All the cuts and narrative jumps felt superfluous. It’s unclear what is gained by cutting away from the various “Omega Red possesses the help, Wolverine fights him off, but he’s drawing ever closer to the baby!” sequences. The issue had already all but revealed Omega Red’s target, and without knowing anything about the why of it, it’s hard to feel the tension the repetition is meant to increase. The only time all the jumps and cuts worked for me was the second time hop when Team X-era Wolverine is seemingly about to be eviscerated by Sabretooth. We discover on the next page that Sabretooth was pushing Wolverine, distracted by the time jump, out of harm’s way. It was cute. I smiled.

On the art side of things, while it is unsurprisingly nice overall, it feels padded at times, too. Sure, the double-page splash of Wolverine’s history is fun, but did we need a whole page to show Wolverine burst through a wall? It wasn’t surprising or especially dynamic, it was just loud and splashy. Worse, it adds to the feeling that this is just a regular Wolverine story pressed into service as an event and stretched out to fill some extra pages for a larger #1 issue.

Which, ultimately, speaks to the biggest problem with this issue. 

Great X-Pectations

Austin: Ultimately, this reads a lot like just another issue of Wolverine or X-Force: it’s got Wolverine conducting a mission and fighting Omega Red, while Russian machinations, uh, machinate in the background. Given the creative team, this is both understandable and unsurprising. Yet, much of the marketing surrounding the series suggested something more, that by serving as a bridge between “Inferno” and “Destiny of X,” it would function more like House of X/Powers of X than “just” another Wolverine story. So is it unfair to expect more from what is just the first issue of ten (between the two series)? Or does the marketing surrounding it make it unfair that this issue doesn’t do more to live up to its hype as “the next HoXPoX” (when even House of X #1 made a splash even while doing plenty of setup for the rest of the series)?

Cassie: I love Wolverine, but I found this issue’s attempt to make this Wolverine story stretch into being an X-Men story, with its vague references to Logan’s having found a family and his habit of taking a moment before a mission to think about his love for Jean, fell short. An issue doesn’t have to be an epic or even give away all its secrets, but if this is a bridge to a new era, I’m not sure what the issue has to say about that era. That it will feed on old myths and figures and re-interrogate them? That Logan’s gonna Logan? That Charles must loom large above all else?

It’s probably too early to tell, but I’m not ignited by curiosity. 

Austin: Agreed. I was especially surprised at the way the issue re-centered Xavier as this pivotal figure, to be targeted and protected, respectively, by the two time-traveling characters. Repeatedly throughout the Krakoa Era, Xavier has been, if not exactly tarnished, complicated by the actions he’s taken (or not taken) as well as by the rise of Moira MacTaggert as a secret mutant figure of import. On the surface, the role of Xavier in this story feels like a backslide, a return of the character to a position of messianic importance he’s long since abandoned. 

Of course, we’ve got nine more issues of this story on their way, and that’s plenty of room to deepen and enrich what is being presented here. But like you, this issue on its own doesn’t exactly leave me burning for more; honestly, right now, it’s just that lingering pre-release hype doing the heavy lifting on that score. 

X-Traneous Thoughts

• Neat technical touch when Omega Red leaves one of the “host” bodies and the color in the speech bubble changes mid-dialogue from white text on black background (to indicate possession) to black text on white background (to indicate normal).
• Beast has done a lot of shitty, unconscionable things in the Krakoa Era, but him telling telling the Five, “your job is to cook what we order. You have received our order. Now cook” in the first data page sets a new bar for sheer dickery.
• All this Russia/Krakoa tension stuff ported over from X-Force is going to seem terribly prescient when we’re at war with Russia in the real world in a couple weeks.
• The spectre of Cassandra Nova is lurking. We know that she held on in idea and spirit without physical form from this moment of stillbirth; will she haunt the series?
• This issue seemed extra bloody, even by Wolverine/X-Force standards. Maybe it’s all the birth sequences. It certainly fits the quasi-horror vibe Percy has been bringing to Wolverine.

Cassie Tongue

Cassie is an arts and culture writer living on Gadigal land in Australia. For 10 years she’s been working as a professional theatre critic, and is delighted to finally be writing about her other love: comics, baby.

Austin Gorton

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