Laura: X-23 Appreciation 2018

[Ambaryerno]

Liu forced that to happen though, by HAVING her have the follow out with the New X-Men over X-Force. Her follow out with Julian was ESPECIALLY forced in the Babysitter's arc- because Liu wanted her to be more connected to characters with more connection with Logan and remove the friendships Laura developed on her own.

There was absolutely no reason to have Carol pop up in ANW- yet she showed up in the Fing Fang Foom story arc, at Sarah Kinney's funeral, and in the OWL storyline. She has ZERO connection with Laura- Tom Taylor would have been better off including Black Widow. Yet she's constantly used, and what's her only real connection to Laura- being friends with Logan.

How many storylines were semi based off of Logan though? You had the Brood Saga (a storyline where Logan was the focus because of his healing factor) Enemy of the State, and a play off of Old Man Logan. The only story that was really Laura's was the Four Sisters. Even 'Orphans of X' was based off the 'Red Right Hand'.

Taylor denies RRH having anything to do with OoX; he didn't read it before starting and it was just a coincidence the story lines happened to be similar. And honestly, given all the people Laura killed as an assassin it's not exactly a stretch that she'd have a group that wanted revenge against her, too.

[TheCape]

Laura also has a bunch of illegitimate children running around in the Marvel Universe who were looking for her in revenge, man that must have sucked

[WebLurker]

I think her origen is now
Damage Logan DNA from blood sample
Sarah begins expermation to create clone
X chromosome modification or replacement with one from hers
X23 sample created
Cloning used to generate embryo from sample
Rice force Sarah to carry Laura
Laura gains some trats from Sarah du to being carried and drugs to ensure developmental and mutation occurs(they did state she would get some trats crim Sarah du ro being carried)
Baby Laura is born being both Clone and having logan Sarah DNA present at any point from 98/2 to 50/50 ratio

I think that sounds about right (and, IMHO, doesn't invalidate anything established before the Adamintium Agenda mini).

In regards to the bolded, I'm not quite sure about that; unless my memory fails me, I don't recall there being any mention of meds being used to ensure Laura was born with an X-gene. As far as her gaining anything from Sarah Kinney being the surrogate, as I recall from real life science, Kinney, as her birth mother, would be the one giving Laura her epigenetic tags. Her mtDNA would also be different, since that would've come from the woman who donated the egg used to clone (whether Kinney used one of her own eggs or got someone else's remains unknown so far). I don't know if any of those traits would be apparent on the surface, though. So, I guess that her resemblance to her mom is tied only into the retcon that Kinney used her own DNA to fill in the genome gaps.

[WebLurker]

I was talking mainly about Marvel having her be Wolverine recently; I personally felt like it lead to eradicating Laura as her own person because more and more writers wrote her personality to fit Logan's personality more.

Laura used to have her own relationships (Julian, Kiden, Cessily, Sooraya, etc...),...

Like she now has with Gabby and Jonathan and had with teen Angel and the other All-New X-Men?

...her own villains (Kimura...

Laura never really had a large rogue's gallery in the first place. The main villains from the first two minis were killed off in their first stories (except Kimura, who had a round total of four stories). She spent a lot of time in team series, where she fought the team's enemies. A lot of the original XX-23 solo and All-New Wolverine villains were one-shots (many of whom were created exclusively for those stories). When you get down to it, Laura's main struggles have been in her own head, not external threats.

...and was pretty separate from Logan.

X-Force was the only regular series where they were both regulars; they had two-ish scenes together in New X-Men: Childhood's End, Wolverine only appeared in one story of the original X-23 solo (not counting her saying good-bye to him at the end, which makes sense in context), was only in the beginning and final act of Marjorie Liu's X-23 one-shot (which was mostly about Laura and her NYX co-stars), only two flashback sequences in All-New Wolverine, and a co-star in the Generations: Wolverine one-shot (which was the entire point of that story in the first place). Sounds pretty separate overall.

Even in X-Force; Logan wasn't as close to her as he was Rahne or the other girls he's mentored.

That's exactly what Gambit calls him out on in the X-23 solo and we get to see Laura's perspective on that fact in Marjorie Liu's X-23 one-shot, All-New Wolverine, and the Generations: Wolverine one-shot.

(Somewhat conversely, we also see in X-Force that Logan considers Laura his personal responsibility, not Cyclops or the X-Men's, and his handling of the situation when she goes MIA in "Not Forgotten" fits extremely well with the later developments of him adopting her. So, while I think he certainly had an easier time interacting with the other kids he mentored, I don't think Laura was quite the afterthought that she considered herself to be even before the All-New Wolverine retcons.)

Over time, I feel like more and more Marvel has been forcing her to 'be more like Logan'; by eliminating her friendships and tying her more to Logan's (Carol Danvers, Gambit, Jubilee)...

She's not close with Danvers (they teamed up once?), Gambit and Jubilee were pre-All-New Wolverine and have not appeared much (Gambit did come back once in All-New Wolverine, which made sense and he was one of many other X-23-specific characters involved). Also, her most important modern supporting characters (Gabby, Jonathan, and teen Angel) are not supporting characters of Wolverine and in some cases were invented specifically for the X-23 mythos.

...changing her personality and voice...

Mileage may vary on that. Also, the character has aged and grown over time, so some change is to be expected and a lot of it arguably stems from the long-standing central premise of the X-23 mythos; that Laura is someone who was intended to be a weapon but was on a journey to deprogram herself and reclaim her humanity. If you start on a journey, you need to make it to your destination (or make progress eventually). (There's also the fact that different authors have handled the character and some did better than others.)

...completely sugar coating her relationship with Logan and eliminating any strain they used to have...

Except that they didn't. Tom Taylor's All-New Wolverine #7 -- the story where Laura decides to adopt Gabby, basically -- is built on the idea that Wolverine taking a very hands-off approach in regards to his relationship with her was hard on her and that she was still hurting over it years later. Heck, it's outright implied that Logan made a mistake (albeit with the best of intentions) and that Laura herself almost made the same one with Gabby. Generations: Wolverine has Laura scolding him for his failings in fatherhood. She's taking about herself as much as Akiko when she says: "I think you'd prefer to fight undead ninja's then spend time with your daughter." Logan freely agrees, even so far as to assume that he ruined her life in some fashion after working out that they're related.

Mileage may vary, as always, but I think the idea that this father/daughter relationship was imperfect but still good (if that makes any sense) that had been previously established still holds true. It's also worth noting that with Logan dead, it's mostly from the perspective of Laura's after the fact, in contexts where she would be more likely to remember the good and not so much the bad.

...and making her Wolverine.

Which proved to be short term and didn't hijack her character. She was still her own person in those stories; there are quite a few points (sometimes outright lampshaded) that she's doing it like herself, not like Logan.

Now they're eliminating her origin; so instead of her being a clone, she's more closer to Logan's child.

First of all, her being Logan's daughter has been an established fact and a piece of the mythos since 2010. That's nothing new (and is something that Craig Kyle himself has embraced, partially after realizing that a lot of readers were seeing the characters as such). Secondly, we've already known that she wasn't a "pure" clone ever since the original mini, so we're really getting into semantics by saying that this retcon invalidates that. She was made in a cloning project, which certainly qualifies her for cloned human status, esp. in sci-fi science (in reality, even identical twins and artificially cloned organisms have vast differences in their DNA codes). Even if her genome was altered further than we though, she is still artificially created and that's the really the gist of the whole "she's a clone" thing (heck, the movie made her a test tube baby and nothing that substantial changed). You can argue that there's semantical differences, but for all practical purposes there is none and it gets the point across right away. In any event, even if you don't buy all that, the X-23 series confirms that Laura is a clone, so that is still canonical.

Laura HAD a unique internal struggle, that was somewhat different from Logan. Instead of fighting her 'animalistic side', Laura's struggle was 'am I even a person in the first place'.

Not exactly. That was played with a bit in X-Force (she's heard echoing the sentiment that clones aren't "real" and Elixir talks her out of a suicide run by saying that her being a clone has no bearing on the fact that she's fully human) and the first X-23 series and "Circle of Four" story in Venom (the demon in the first story arc claims that her clone heritage means that she has no soul, something that bothers her until she gets proof of her's existing in "Circle of Four" -- she must've forgotten or not heard clearly in New X-Men. Beyond that, not much is done with it. Heck, in the original X-23 series, one of the series that used the "do I have a soul?" trope, had a scene with Laura specifically reflecting on the fact that she understood that she was more than just an experiment, to the point of not being able to understand why her creators couldn't see her as a fellow human being.

I think that her primary struggle actually was, to quote The Iron Giant, "I am not a gun." That's the main question that kept coming up, could she move past her programming to be a self-actualized person or would she always be X-23. We saw it in Innocence Lost, Target X, New X-Men, X-Force (a bit), the originalX-23 series. Craig Kyle has said as much, given his one sentence description of the character was that she was a katana that wants to be human, not that she's unsure if she's real or fake.

So, her struggle is her own, not Logan's, but it stems primarily from her upbringing, and is still a factor, as the current X-23 series shows; it's building off of All-New Wolverine and while I think they're following suite in showing Laura at her most balanced point in life, she still feels removed from the rest of the human race.

Her being Wolverine and now this retcon; makes me feel like more and more that the old Kyle and Yost Laura is being erased.

Oddly enough, Tom Taylor has gone on record that he kept looking back at the Innocence Lost story when writing All-New Wolverine as a sort of guide to the mythos.

At the end of the day, if you don't agree with any of this, fair enough, but does it make sense why some of us don't think there's a problem here or that the retcon actually changes anything?

[theoneandonly]

she also has her own sidekick in the vein of Jubilee in Gabby.

[Dthirds3]

Some thing interesting

https://twitter.com/MrCraigKyle/stat...811727872?s=19

[Nazrel]

Yeah, that's the other thing: There were TWENTY-TWO failed attempts at the female (and this is confirmed by Kyle; there were many MORE failed male clones before that) before the 23rd returned viable. So she did SOMETHING different in try 23 than she did in each of the previous 22.

All of Sarah's talk was when she was making the proposal to Sutter and Rice. How naive do you have to be to think she stuck to that script over TWENTY THREE attempts to create a viable fetus? Every trial she was going to do something different in an attempt to make it work, so all you have to do is say that subbing in her own intact DNA to stabilize the damaged sample was the "X Factor." Whether it was plugging in bits and pieces, or pairing one of Logan's repaired X chromosomes with one of her own.

I'm sure I'm repeating myself here, but the objective wasn't to create a viable embryo, the objective was to create a viable embryo of a genetic duplicate.

The whole point of duplicating the X chromosome was to to bypass the damage while still basically being a genetic duplicate, they were trying to recreate the genetic code not just plug gaps; if you're just going to replace a substantive part of the genetic code, it defeats the purpose of duplicating the X chromosome in the first place.

X-23 2.jpg
X-23 3.jpg

[Jumpyshark]

Some thing interesting

https://twitter.com/MrCraigKyle/stat...811727872?s=19

Thanks for sharing! I've always seen Laura being potentially gay or bi, as I think with her past she just might not have figured it out yet. It will be interesting to see if Gabby's journey influences her, but that's not necessarily the only way of course. I'd certainly trust Mariko Tamaki to handle it well, should they explore it, but I'm happy with Laura not dating for a while either. There are lots of New X-Men friends for her to hang out with, after all!

[Beaubier]

Some thing interesting

https://twitter.com/MrCraigKyle/stat...811727872?s=19

Interesting. He’s specifically talking about X-Men Evolution Laura there, so I wonder if it would apply to his vision for comic Laura as well.

I’d certainly approve of Laura being revealed as bi in the comics. #1 I don’t feel like there’s enough high profile bisexual heroes in Marvel, and #2 it wouldn’t cause the same ruckus that the Iceman reveal did, considering Laura’s past relationships. I’m still exhausted by people’s whining over Iceman.

[Ambaryerno]

Interesting. He’s specifically talking about X-Men Evolution Laura there, so I wonder if it would apply to his vision for comic Laura as well.

I’d certainly approve of Laura being revealed as bi in the comics. #1 I don’t feel like there’s enough high profile bisexual heroes in Marvel, and #2 it wouldn’t cause the same ruckus that the Iceman reveal did, considering Laura’s past relationships. I’m still exhausted by people’s whining over Iceman.

The weird thing about this is that Kyle ALSO said that if he had a choice of any character to have her in a relationship with, it would be Hellion. I responded back about that to see if we can get clarification.

[RoamingGnome8]

Laura also has a bunch of illegitimate children running around in the Marvel Universe who were looking for her in revenge, man that must have sucked

No but it is the same kind of idea: group of people whose families and friends were killed, getting revenge through the people close to them.

With Logan, it was his illegitimate children because there was a sense of guilt there for Logan.

With Laura, it was Sarah because there was a sense of guilt there for her killing her mother figure.

Like she now has with Gabby and Jonathan and had with teen Angel and the other All-New X-Men?

Gabby is very much a play off of Logan's relationships with Kitty, Jubilee, ect...

Light innocent sidekick that brings hope and humanity.

Putting her on a team with the All New X-Men never really made sense to me because:
Adult Cyclops was the one who put her IN X-Force in the first place, knowing her sense of autonomy was questionable.
She didn't trust adult Warren AT ALL in X-Force.
She had zero connection to Jean, other than really through Logan.

And once again, Bendis treated her completely as 'a fill in Logan'.


As for what change does this bring:

1) I think Retcon's are usually a bad sign for a character.
Logan's been retconned so many times that it's diminished his character as a whole.
Jean/Phoenix we still never know which retcon writers are using, and has led to the Phoenix force being overused and losing its sense of wonder.
Superboy lost a lot of his personality from the retcon.
There's very little reason to change an origin story in my opinion- basically don't fix something that was never broken in the first place.

2) It's going against the creator wishes in this situation and that seems kind of disrespectful. Comic books are a lot like improv, in my opinion. If someone says 'this object is blue' or 'it's really cold'- you have to run with it. Kyle has said- Laura was cloned from duplicating Logan's X-chromosomes, she's not related to Sarah Kinney in any way. That's what is canon.

3) It makes Sarah Kinney even more awful that she'd basically let them do this to roughly her own genetic child. I'm not saying her actions weren't already horrible (justifying abuse with 'this is science') but adding the element of them sharing DNA, eliminates her thought process that she could be 'impartial' and that she wasn't doing exactly what her father did to her.

4) It worked fine for XCU, because the XCU and MCU have to simplify things for general audience members and that's fine. But I don't necessarily want comics resembling the movies.
It's like recently the Runaways breaking up Karolina and Julie, so it could resemble the show of Karolina and Nico being a couple. It was just awful treatment of Julie Powers so Marvel Comics could have 'synergy'. It just feels cheap.

5) I was fine with it as a fan theory, but did it really need to be canon? Laura already saw Sarah as a mother figure, why do we need to make her Laura's actual mother?
It just felt like an unnecessary overly saccrine plot point to remove any uncomfortableness Laura might have over being a clone, which is what's I honestly felt like Taylor did in his writing; remove all emotional and physical conflicts for Laura.

6) As for the science, my attitude is, is I'm reading story's about people bit by radioactive spiders or has metal claws coming out of their hands. I should be able to suspend disbelief that Laura has green eyes, even if that doesn't make actual sense.

[MyriVerse]

Two things bother me about this reveal.

1. The X-People should know their genomes so completely that there should be no surprises like this after the first year or so of their "existence." The window for this sort of revelation is long since past for Laura. Seriously, the people in this group should have posters of their complete DNA to hang on their walls with highlighted portions explaining each.
2. Tony Stark or his tech should never be an authority on this subject.

But I have always wanted Sarah's connection to be stronger.

[Ambaryerno]

Two things bother me about this reveal.

1. The X-People should know their genomes so completely that there should be no surprises like this after the first year or so of their "existence." The window for this sort of revelation is long since past for Laura.
2. Tony Stark or his tech should never be an authority on this subject.

But I have always wanted Sarah's connection to be stronger.

You’re not going to find many people who disagree that putting her in ANXM was a waste. She should have been in Adjectiveless, Amazing, or any other JGS-based book. It NARRATIVELY made more sense (last scene of Arena was Logan putting her on a medical chopper. So how she wound up in Miami has never been explained) and it would have been a great opportunity to actually develop her relationship with Logan.

[Beaubier]

The weird thing about this is that Kyle ALSO said that if he had a choice of any character to have her in a relationship with, it would be Hellion. I responded back about that to see if we can get clarification.

In that case I would assume that he intended for XME Laura to be gay but not comic Laura. They are, after all, 2 different characters/universes. Though comic Laura could still be bisexual even then.

But I’d be interested in his response if he replies.

[Ambaryerno]

In that case I would assume that he intended for XME Laura to be gay but not comic Laura. They are, after all, 2 different characters/universes. Though comic Laura could still be bisexual even then.

But I’d be interested in his response if he replies.

It wouldn't be unprecedented for two versions of a character to have different orientations. IE Governor-General Howlett vs. OG Logan. Someone else asked for clarification as well, so hopefully that shows enough interest for an answer on that point.

IMO, I think they should leave the comics iteration as-is, rather than introduce yet ANOTHER divisive retcon (the HfW reveal is already fracturing the base enough :-P ); Laura being straight, with Gabby picking up on some of the unused XME traits like her orientation.