It’s a Wolverine Showdown in X Deaths of Wolverine #3

X Deaths of Wolverine #3, from Benjamin Percy, Federico Vicentini, Dijjo Lima, and Cory Petit.

Liz Large: We’re halfway through the X Lives/X Deaths story, and I am looking forward to talking about how this is ramping up. What about you?

Cassie Tongue: You can really tell we’ve hit the halfway mark: the plot is unfurling, revealing more of its complexities – and starting to really tackle the fraught possible histories for mutantkind. Also, someone gets a new arm, and there’s a family reunion: a lot is happening here!

Wolverines

Liz: I was delighted by the opener to this issue. We get to see Laura and Gabby having an extremely sisterly interaction, and I love it. Gabby’s a kid, and seeing her ask Laura a thousand questions ranging from deep (how many people has Laura killed) to relatable (I also have questions about the Children of the Vault) was really great. Most importantly, Gabby wants to know: would having a butt claw be just like having a stinger? I love her. 

Cassie: Would it be like having a stinger or is a claw really too much of a slicer to form an apt comparison? Wouldn’t you just stab people all the time? No one would ever let you cut in front of them in a queue for fear of butt-stabbing. I’m thinking about this too much. 

There’s a great energy and tone to this new generation of Wolverines, and seeing them operate as both a family and a pack is extremely heart-warming. In an event focused on multiple Wolverines, time travel, and the wounds of the past, it makes sense that Gabby and Laura and also Daken, who appears later, would have a significant role to play. They’ve been on Wolverine’s mind as well; in X Lives, he’s dealing with an attack on Itsu that he can’t bear to resolve unless he knows Daken will still be born. Now they have to step up to take down Omega Wolverine, and has anyone been more excited for a team-up, ever, than Gabby?

Liz: She’s so pumped! Gabby really went through a lot in the recently-resolved New Mutants arc, and it makes sense that she wants to spend more time with her family after going through the extremely common tweenage stage of fighting with your friends, dying, and being resurrected. Does Xavier “invite” her on the mission to take down robo-Logan? Not exactly, but she has the confidence to invite herself somewhere she knows she will be useful. She even refers to herself and Laura as “Wolverines,” and I’m not sure if it’s an attempt at a new code name or just a fun bit she’s doing. I support it either way. The family connection is the focus here, and it seems like that’s going to make the difference.

New Devils

Cassie: So, Omega Wolverine’s whole deal is made explicit: he’s an assassin from the future, trying to stop present-Moira from creating a Phalanx-winning future. Everyone’s tracking Moira in this series, and she’s started using it to her advantage, leaking intel to the CIA and leading them directly to Omega Wolverine, essentially distracting them with a fight she hopes will take out both enemies. 

It’s a smart move, and I love that this series really digs into the character traits that must have kept Moira X going through the lives we now know she’s lived: her gritted-teeth determination, her tenacity, her resourcefulness. In some ways, the characterisation here addresses gaps that were necessarily made by the big change to her character function and role in House of X/Powers of X.

Liz: Agreed! I like how smart Moira’s being here— she’s confident in her abilities, but every move she makes just shows us how right she is to feel that way. The way she manipulates Arnab Chakladar into doing exactly what she wants is so smooth. Her combination of skill and technical knowledge, combined with the allure of a future in which what they do has already succeeded, makes it easy for her to get him on board. Considering that she starts off by ruining his million-dollar event and kidnapping him, it’s impressive! 

I found it interesting that Arnab compares her to Ada Lovelace. Ada was essentially the first computer programmer, taking technological developments in a new direction, though she was certain that computers could never create or think on their own. Moira’s goal is something beyond what Ada imagined. Her plan of combining the human and the robot to achieve what neither could do on their own shows promise, especially considering how nice her fancy new arm looks. What do you think of this new partnership?

Cassie: I assume any and all partnerships that any mutant makes with someone who isn’t a mutant (by which I mean, specifically, humans and AI lifeforms) is going to end badly. One of the most breathtaking things about this new era for mutantkind is that it feels consistently, and horribly precarious: shake hands with the wrong person and it all goes away. 

And Moira herself is a complication to that future as much as she first helped to create it; as she is quoted on the endpage: ‘Forever is where I live. I tried to take you all with me. You chose not to come.’ 

She also can’t stop framing the situation in terms so dramatic they’re literally biblical: she calls herself a Judas, and inverts Magneto’s already-classic House of X #1 declaration, ‘you have new Gods now’ by telling Arnab that mutants aren’t gods at all: instead, they’re devils.  She’s more ready than ever to destroy it all, and with every handshake (and new hand) it feels like she might just manage it. 

Liz: I LOVE the glorious pettiness of this. Moira has spent lifetimes trying to save mutants and failing. But the moment things start to go badly for her this time, through problems arguably of her own creation, she absolutely loses it. The women you tried to manipulate are mad at you? The two doofuses you tried to work with don’t treat you with enough respect? Time to actively work to kill them and all their friends! 

This isn’t sarcasm. I really enjoy this full switch from the wise person making the hard decisions out of duty to an early-Magneto-style scenery chewer. The mutants are DEVILS! I cackled when reading this, I love her commitment to this new tactic. 

Future Grief

Cassie: Of course, there’s another little twist: Omega Wolverine, for all his Phalanx circuitry markings and total embrace of violence with little thought to community, is the Logan we know and love. Just, from the future. It’s Daken that smells it on him (why did he join his sisters’ missions? To work out some old issues on a facsimile of his dad, obviously!) and it immediately changes his approach: he softens, resists, switches immediately to conflict resolution based on words, not violent actions. Truly, the clean-slate fresh-state recovery options that were part of the Krakoan dream have worked wonders on him; he’s blossomed, settled, grown into himself. It’d be heartwarming if it wasn’t immediately followed by Omega Wolverine taking a leaf from Moira’s book of dramatics: “None of you make it,” he says to his beloved family. “I know how each of you dies.”

Liz: We’ve become so used to having resurrection as an option— especially after it was determined that Gabby is allowed to be resurrected— that the idea that Logan has seen the permanent deaths of his children in the future is so chilling. Pre-Krakoa, death was a revolving door, and now it’s just some inconvenient memory loss. But the idea of a post-Krakoan death that’s permanent, and a world so messed up that it killed three members of the hardest to kill family? It’s unsettling! 

The art does a really great job of conveying Logan’s pain here. Even behind the injuries and circuitry, you can just see the sadness pouring off of him. When he collapses, there’s a real sense of dread for what’s in store, for him and the others. 

Cassie: Yes! It hits you right in the chest. And what a great opportunity to take a moment for Vicentini’s art; he keeps his characters in profile, avoids placing them in the centre of the frame – they rarely make eye contact with the reader. It makes sense: everyone has an agenda, everyone is caught off-guard; the world is moving around them, towards some unstoppable outcome that we know is going to land hard. The art captures that unease. The sense that no one is prepared for what’s coming. 

No one, perhaps, except Moira X.

Liz: Ah, Moira, who we see in the distant future on the final pages of the issue. Who, in what may be her most dramatic moment so far, turns out to be the one who infected Logan with the virus as part of her centuries-long plan to kill the last mutant. The drive and determination to drag this out for hundreds of years, to continue it in the face of the world ending the next day! Iconic. She’s chewing the scenery, she’s setting up an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to kill somebody, she’s explaining her entire plan to the hero. I love it. 

X-Traneous Thoughts 

• Krakoan reads WAR STORIES
• Arnab insists on royal jelly honey for his tea, which is the diet of a queen bee (it’s served to him by a ‘worker bee’ of his own). You know it’s the royal jelly that separates queen bees from the worker? The larvae bathed in royal jelly while in development become the queen at the top of the hierarchy. It’s amazing what can happen when you augment some cells…

Liz Large

Liz Large is a copywriter with a lot of opinions on mutants.

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.