Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You: Gillen and Kubert's Wolverine Origins II

Kieron Gillen, on what's inside (via CBR): 

This story is set right before World War I. It takes place right around the time the German Schlieffen plan for winning that war was was made up. So we're on the cusp of what will be frankly a horrific century and what will civilization mean, then? An earlier draft of the story featured characters like Sigmund Freud and the Futurist movement. That was my original focus. All that stuff is sort of gone, and now I'm really focusing on the characters and what's important there, but in terms of themes, the idea of civilization and how violent it can be is a big part of this story... 

The X-Ray was originally called that because they had no idea what it was. An "Unknown" or X-Ray was pretty much the short hand for that, and this story is only a few years after that. So it makes sense that if they found a new form of human living in the woods, they'd call him an X-Man. That's all kind of built into the period detail. Ideas like Eugenics were prevalent around this time in this world that was on the brink of war.

Well, This Is What I Get For Not Reading The Solicits While I'm In Greece

Davids Lapham and Aja have a Wolverine book coming out in September and the cover looks like this:YES PLEASE.

Days of Deathlok's Future's Past's Moral Compass

"Tomorrow Dies Today" Part 5 in "Wolverine: Weapon X" #15 from Marvel Comics

(You should know up front, I haven't read Parts 1 through 3 of this story from "Wolverine: Weapon X" #11, 12, and 13.)

I avoided this story for a long time simply because it looked like just another excuse to have a bunch of superheroes do a dogpile on a bunch of killer robots... I wasn't entirely wrong but I wasn't entirely right either.

I only peeked at it because of Spider-Man's appearance on the cover, a sometimes accurate and sometimes entirely inaccurate promise of a guest-appearance in mainstream superhero comics, and was shocked to discover: not only is Spider-Man actually in the damn thing, it's also a comic intelligently using tropes of the superhero genre, sci-fi action time travel movies, and the history of several Marvel Comics characters to tell a probing story about the nature of humanity. I should have known better than to assume junk could come out of the mind and the pencils of the writer of "Scalped" and the penciler of "Amazing Spider-Man" #539, one of the better issues of a Spider-Man series in recent memory.

The character Deathlok, as I remember him from the 90s, was a cyborg who talked to himself. Not exactly brilliant-sounding stuff is it? As a cyborg he had an onboard computer, this computer had an A.I. which took care of all the needs of their shared body's mechanical parts. So there was always a bit of arguing between them. Whether Aaron was the first to utilize this dichotomy for revealing something about our own humanity is pretty immaterial as he has done it very well here. This new version of Deathlok is just one of a massive army of Deathloks, a mere drop in a sea of cyborgs. His mind belonged to a serial killer named Evan and his robot A.I. well... it makes some interesting choices for itself.

THE LONG AND SHORTBOX OF IT?
Jason Aaron and Ron Garney have crafted a good story of heartbreak, human deprivation, and finally redemption.

With a lot of superheroes.

And time travel.

~ @JonGorga

Here's What I Think

You know how yesterday I said that I couldn't believe that Spider-Man would be on two teams of Avengers at once? Well, with today's announcement that Wolverine will ALSO be on the New Avengers, I'm pretty sure that the cover to Avengers #1 is misleading. Take into account that neither Spidey nor Logan appeared in the teasers for Avengers and also that New Avengers #1 doesn't come out until June and, well, we have a recipe for misdirection.

Gorga's Looking Forward to Wednesday 12/9/2oo9

My thoughts on the comics that interest moi this week!

BIG week:

"the Amazing Spider-Man" #614 (definitely)
Still only beginning to catch up with this book...

"Spider-Man and the Secret Wars" #1 of 4 (probably)

The "Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars" was one of my favorite comics to dig through boxes for in comic shops (sometimes all around the world) when I was a kid, so the idea of dropping in at the BEST moment of the series (the opening of issue #4) and depicting it from my favorite character's POV? I don't even care if this turns out to be out-of-continuity I think I will buy all four!

"Web of Spider-Man" #3 (maybe)

So far I didn't buy #1 and then I bought #2, but mainly only because it was a sale weekend at St. Mark's Comics... Spider-Man never seems to actually show up in these, but I get the feeling they really need to be read to follow the story-line "The Gauntlet" currently going through "Amazing".

"New Avengers Annual" #3 (maybe)
I loved the first annual from a few years ago, felt kind of lukewarm about the second one. Depends on whether the Web-Head shows up. We shall see.

"the Invincible Iron Man" #21 (probably)

Well, the first part of "Stark: Disassembled" in last issue was great (as can be seen in Josh's review here), so we'll see how things move along here. Considering the connections this story should have to the upcoming 'events' from Marvel I should read all of it just to best appreciate "Siege" and whatever the hell "The Heroic Age" will be.

"Daytripper" #1 (probably)
A completely original work from the remarkable team of twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bá? Why wouldn't I pick this up?

"Ghostbusters: Past Present Future" (maybe)
The Ghostbusters take on the mythical ghosts of Charles Dickens' classic story "A Christmas Carol"! Deeeeee-lightful!

"God Complex" #1 (maybe)

This looks pretty good to me. Fun, cool, smart.

UPDATE: 12/10/2oo9

So Spidey appears in the "New Avengers Annual". Also? It looks like Bendis is finally going to make sense of the muck he has made out of the character of Hawkeye in this issue. Exciting!

"Web of Spider-Man" by comparison looked okay, but had no Spidey... His name is in the title, right?

"Invincible Iron Man" is really about as excellent as superhero comics get.

"Daytripper" is equally excellent. I can't wait for this series to be complete! It could be truly brilliant.

"God Complex" and the Ghostbusters one-shot? Well, they just seemed a bit too rote, you know? Standard choices being made.

I also took a long and hard look at "Wolverine: Under the Boardwalk" and seriously considered it. Looked very good, but I have TOO MANY COMICS. I passed on it.

"Spider-Man and the Secret Wars" #1? I bought it. I make no apologies.

A Case of Mistaken Energy Signatures

"Ms. Marvel" #43 from Marvel Comics

(I haven't read "Ms. Marvel" #35-42 and I think that should be made clear first.)

Okay. So. At the current moment in Carol Danvers' life, she's just come back from the dead... I think. She died in battle with the person pretending to be her: Moonstone. But she didn't really die (of course) she was transformed into two (or three?) distinct energy signatures: one is in her old body, one is in the body of a Los Angeles screenwriter... hmhmm, and a third I suspect has fallen into the body of her impersonator although this is yet to be stated.

This issue of "Ms. Marvel" opens with former Thunderbolt team-member Moonstone. She has, as part of the "Dark Reign" crossover assumed Ms. Marvel's identity by donning her Eighties outfit and running around with the new 'Avengers', all essentially Norman Osborn's supervillain cronies currently posing as superheroes. She's telling all of this to some guy she abducted right out of his own apartment and flew off with. Then to give herself some 'therapy' she drops the guy right into Manhattan.

Honestly, for an issue opener that's pretty strong.

She claims that she likes being a superhero now, but I have a bad feeling that this desire to be heroic is actually just a shard of the real Ms. Marvel's being trapped inside 'Ms. Moonstone'.

BAH!

The only good moments in this issue are those between Wolverine and Spider-Man and between Lily Hollister and Norman Osborn, four characters NOT in the title of this comic.

1. Spider-Man says: Shouldn't we make sure Ms. Marvel is okay? She just died and came back? Wolverine basically says: Yeah sure. You go do that. I'm going to leave now.
Classic.

2. Lily Hollister (a woman in her twenties) offers to give some pleasurable distraction to Norman Osborn (a man in his forties). Skeezy, skeezy, skeey. Also I believe this marks the first time a Brand New Day Spider-Man character has appeared outside of the Spider-Man books, proving once and for all that it's supposed to be the same fictional universe. They're just doing a craptastic job of making that clear.

The rest of this issue was one very overdone fight and pages and pages of this faux-Carol Danvers screenwriter woman, which would be fine and dandy in an autobiographical comic, but seem pretty silly and boring between pages of action.

Honestly THE LONG AND SHORTBOX OF IT?, all this boils down to the fact that this is confusing and mediocre stuff. In issue #34, it looked like Carol Danvers was going to make a crusade out of taking down Norman Osborn and I was looking forward to reading it whenever Spider-Man dropped in. Spider-Man dropped in and if it weren't for his appearance I would have dropped out.

Considering that Brian Reed is supposed to be one of Marvel's best writers, (or at least this was what I understood) I expected better.