Shocking Weapon X reveals (SPOILERS)

[Huntsman Spider]

Green Goblin was the result of Osborn working by himself though unless that was retconned too.

Partly, yes. According to Mark Millar's Marvel Knights Spider-Man #1-12, Osborn was part of a consortium of crooked corporate-types and politicians who were concerned that the rise of superpowered do-gooders would be a threat to their wealth and status, either by actively fighting against and exposing their corruption and criminality or just putting their abilities to use genuinely improving human society. To keep said superpowered do-gooders "occupied," that consortium created many of the early supervillains that first menaced the Marvel Universe --- though they weren't expecting Norman Osborn to turn himself into a supervillain.

That said, I do like the idea posited by some here that nearly every attempt at human augmentation or enhancement in the Marvel Universe, successful or otherwise, was ultimately the product of Weapon Plus working out how to create the perfect (or at least most effective) mutant-killing human bioweapon through repeated trial and error. I could also see the likes of Power Broker and Norman Osborn (and his successors/fellow Goblins) easily explainable as having broken away from Weapon Plus's overarching plan to strike out on their own, thinking they were better off using the human augmentation/enhancement tech to turn a profit for themselves rather than "wasting" it on a quixotic effort to rid the world of mutants. As long as I'm at it, though, it could be explained or retconned that the spider that bit Peter Parker all those years ago was a product of Weapon Plus experimentation as well, given that they did use animal test subjects at one point. Oh, and the chemical spills that blinded young Matt Murdock while amplifying his other senses and put Jessica Jones in a coma from which she woke up with superpowers? We never knew exactly what those chemicals were or what was in them, so it could easily be explained or retconned that Weapon Plus or a spinoff was tinkering with experimental chemical formulas to augment human senses and/or physical capabilities and Matt and Jessica were the unwitting beneficiaries of those experiments due to their accidents.

I could even mention the Spider-Women, as per the poster that suggested Jessica Drew's origin being tied to Weapon Plus via the High Evolutionary and his tinkering with animal DNA --- and raise Julia Carpenter, who was explicitly meant to be a spider-powered super-soldier or super-agent answerable to the U.S. government via the Commission on Superhuman Activities. Who's to say that wasn't a Weapon Plus branch or splinter organization, too, especially given the existence of Deathweb, who were subjected to the same experiments as Julia, but broke bad? Frankly, the possibilities are endless at this point; the entire Marvel Universe, heroes and villains alike, could ultimately trace its origins back to Weapon Plus in some form or other, and imagine how that would impact the X-Men, knowing that almost all the non-mutant superheroes (and supervillains) were deliberately created or intended as a counterweight to their very existence.

[Maestroneto]

Green Goblin was the result of Osborn working by himself though unless that was retconned too.

There's some Oscorp stuff in one of the stations Cap and Logan investigate.

[Snoop Dogg]

Goblins can be a Weapon Plus thing but it cannot become a universe-shrinking, all-encompassing conspiracy.

[Huntsman Spider]

Goblins can be a Weapon Plus thing but it cannot become a universe-shrinking, all-encompassing conspiracy.

I can see your point there. There is a pretty strong temptation to say that "it's all connected," as the MCU promised once upon a time . . . but should it be?

[norj]

Just realized that Spider Queen and Madame Web (Julia Carpenter) are most likely products of Weapon Plus. Spider Queen was one of several latent mutants that were exposed to high levels of radiation in the hopes that it would jump-start their powers and create the next Captain America, she was the only survivor and was driven mad by her powers so they locked her up for years before she escaped. Madame Web was a friend of Val Cooper who was injected with a spider super serum.

[Master of Sound]

Just realized that Spider Queen and Madame Web (Julia Carpenter) are most likely products of Weapon Plus. Spider Queen was one of several latent mutants that were exposed to high levels of radiation in the hopes that it would jump-start their powers and create the next Captain America, she was the only survivor and was driven mad by her powers so they locked her up for years before she escaped. Madame Web was a friend of Val Cooper who was injected with a spider super serum.

Julia is no longer Arachne or Spider-Woman? Sad, I liked her way more than Jessica.

[Huntsman Spider]

Just realized that Spider Queen and Madame Web (Julia Carpenter) are most likely products of Weapon Plus. Spider Queen was one of several latent mutants that were exposed to high levels of radiation in the hopes that it would jump-start their powers and create the next Captain America, she was the only survivor and was driven mad by her powers so they locked her up for years before she escaped. Madame Web was a friend of Val Cooper who was injected with a spider super serum.

More Spider-connections to Weapon Plus! And yeah, Julia Carpenter was unwittingly inducted into a kind of super-soldier project run by the Commission on Superhuman Activities to make superheroes that would be answerable to the U.S. government, so that could easily be tied back to Weapon Plus, along with Adriana Soria's origin.

Julia is no longer Arachne or Spider-Woman? Sad, I liked her way more than Jessica.

Blame the culling of the Spiders that was Grim Hunt back in 2010. In a nutshell, Marvel felt there were too many Spider-People running around, and since Jessica Drew was back as the Spider-Woman thanks to New Avengers, she wasn't going to end up on the chopping block. Alas, Mattie Franklin and Cassandra Webb did, and Kaine died as well, only to be immediately revived by the Other in the epilogue, while Anya Corazon became Spider-Girl (taking up Julia's Arachne costume from Omega Flight) and Julia inherited Cassandra's powers and became the new Madame Web. Nowadays, thanks to Spider-Verse, Julia doesn't have Madame Web's powers anymore, and the all-too-brief Prowler series that tied into The Clone Conspiracy a couple of years back established that she somehow lost her original spider-powers as well.

And yeah, I also liked Julia more, though that was probably because I grew up with her in the 90s, both through the Iron Man animated series of the time and by having the issue of the original Secret Wars in which she made her first full appearance. I even had (or read) some of her West Coast Avengers/Force Works appearances from the 90s as well. I like Jessica well enough, but Julia was my Spider-Woman.

[Sin Nick]

Honestly, none of this sounds interesting to me. Weapon X is like synonymous with Wolverine, making all these other characters "Weapons" under the program does nothin for them IMO. It all reminds when all these random characters suddenly started developing "healing factors"(Marrow, Angel, Sauron, etc.).

[norj]

The project that created the Children of the Vault is remarkably familiar to the one that created Fantomex. other possible Weapon Plus creations include Deathlock and Machine Man.

[vitruvian]

There were a lot of mysteries on who all the previous weapons were of the Weapon X program. Some are revealed, but some new mysteries were added as well.

As today, in the cap America/ Wolverine one-shot we saw that the animals of Brute Force are now Weapon II. Brute Force is not well known, but that is a team of 5 or 6 different animals with cyborg parts, a lion, bear, eagle, kangaroo and one or two others. Which is quite a reveal.

But that are not the only revelations!!

Weapon IV is Sulfur, aka Man-Thing

Weapon V is Venom and somehow Nick Fury was involved in this as well

Weapon VI is Power-Man, aka Luke Cage

Weapon IX is Psyche. This is very likely to be Weapon IX is Typhoid Mary - the M. Hunt on Blackboard is Mary's psychiatrist from Marvel Comics Presents #150-#151), and the theater masks represents Typhoid Mary's split personalities. Previously it was assumed Weapon IX was Deadpool.

The total overview is now:
Weapon O – Black Captain America (Isaiah Bradley)
Weapon I – Captain America (Steve Rogers)
Weapon II – Brute Force
Weapon III – Skinless-Man
Weapon IV - Man-Thing
Weapon V - Venom
Weapon VI - Power-Man (Luke Cage)
Weapon VII - Nuke.
Weapon VIII several criminals
Weapon IX - Typoid Mary (previous thought to Deadpool)
Weapon X - Wolverine
Weapon XII - Huntsman
Weapon XIII - Fantomex
Weapon XIV - Stepford Cuckoos
Weapon XV - Ultimaton
Weapon XVI - Allgod

How did they start work on Venom before Spider-Man brought the symbiote back from Secret Wars... which was long after Luke Cage was empowered?

EDIT: I see that the writer on Venom has retconned earlier contacts with symbiotes. That still leaves the question of how Fantomex became himself again to die on this investigative mission - last we saw his body was just a shell for Xavier's mind called X, right?

[Jackraow21]

The project that created the Children of the Vault is remarkably familiar to the one that created Fantomex. other possible Weapon Plus creations include Deathlock and Machine Man.

Great call outs here! Connecting the Children of the Vault to The World, as their ship was maybe an early version of it, is brilliant. Same with Deathlok and Machine Man.

[norj]

One last Weapon Plus connection William Burnside aka 1950's Captain America aka The Grand Director. This guy was a complete nut, a deranged Cap fan, Burnside found a copy of the formula for the Super Solider serum and turned it over to the FBI in exchange for becoming the next Captain America, he then had his name changed to Steve Rogers and underwent plastic surgery to look like him, in his job as a high school teacher he notices that one of his students Jack Munroe resembles Bucky and injects him to serum so that he could be his sidekick. The two of them start fighting communist spies but because Burnside never used Vita rays to stablize the serum they become more and more, paranoid, violent and xenophobic until the US government decides they are too crazy and places them in a cryogenic sleep. When the Original Cap comes back an unknown government official who doesn't like the social state of America awakens and sics them on Rogers. Long story short Burnside has been depowered and is no living in a nursing home, but the name of the person who freed him was never revealed, but I think the Director of Weapon Plus may be responsible.

[Huntsman Spider]

One last Weapon Plus connection William Burnside aka 1950's Captain America aka The Grand Director. This guy was a complete nut, a deranged Cap fan, Burnside found a copy of the formula for the Super Solider serum and turned it over to the FBI in exchange for becoming the next Captain America, he then had his name changed to Steve Rogers and underwent plastic surgery to look like him, in his job as a high school teacher he notices that one of his students Jack Munroe resembles Bucky and injects him to serum so that he could be his sidekick. The two of them start fighting communist spies but because Burnside never used Vita rays to stablize the serum they become more and more, paranoid, violent and xenophobic until the US government decides they are too crazy and places them in a cryogenic sleep. When the Original Cap comes back an unknown government official who doesn't like the social state of America awakens and sics them on Rogers. Long story short Burnside has been depowered and is no living in a nursing home, but the name of the person who freed him was never revealed, but I think the Director of Weapon Plus may be responsible.

Hmm, yeah, that could be interesting. And let's not forget about the legacy and lineage of the Black Captain America, Isaiah Bradley. For those who don't know, to make a long story short, with Erskine dead and the formula for the Super-Soldier Serum presumably lost, Project Rebirth secretly experimented on a total of 300 African-American soldiers to recreate the serum, though only five of those soldiers survived --- Isaiah Bradley being one of them. He went on an unauthorized mission to save his comrades who had basically been abandoned by the U.S. Army during World War II, and while he succeeded, he was court-martialed and imprisoned for insubordination.

Not that the U.S. military stopped there, harvesting Isaiah's DNA to engineer a son named Josiah by his mother, who was able to hide him so that he couldn't be exploited by them, though he would later end up becoming a hero of sorts in Christopher Priest's short-lived The Crew series (also where he first appeared), teaming up with an incognito War Machine, Kevin "Kasper" Cole/White Tiger, and a mysterious mercenary named Junta to battle rising gang violence in his neighborhood. Then we had Elijah Bradley of the Young Avengers, who initially claimed to have gotten a transfusion from his grandfather Isaiah, only to later be revealed as using Mutant Growth Hormone to fake having Super-Soldier-level abilities . . . and then gain them for real after getting off MGH and getting an actual transfusion from Isaiah to save his life after he was wounded in battle at the end of the first Young Avengers series. Considering that Weapon Plus was known for experimenting on racial minorities and prisoners in its earlier phases, it wouldn't surprise me if Project Rebirth's attempt to recreate the Super-Soldier Serum using African-American soldiers was linked back to that.

[Hush]

The project that created the Children of the Vault is remarkably familiar to the one that created Fantomex. other possible Weapon Plus creations include Deathlock and Machine Man.

One last Weapon Plus connection William Burnside aka 1950's Captain America aka The Grand Director. This guy was a complete nut, a deranged Cap fan, Burnside found a copy of the formula for the Super Solider serum and turned it over to the FBI in exchange for becoming the next Captain America, he then had his name changed to Steve Rogers and underwent plastic surgery to look like him, in his job as a high school teacher he notices that one of his students Jack Munroe resembles Bucky and injects him to serum so that he could be his sidekick. The two of them start fighting communist spies but because Burnside never used Vita rays to stablize the serum they become more and more, paranoid, violent and xenophobic until the US government decides they are too crazy and places them in a cryogenic sleep. When the Original Cap comes back an unknown government official who doesn't like the social state of America awakens and sics them on Rogers. Long story short Burnside has been depowered and is no living in a nursing home, but the name of the person who freed him was never revealed, but I think the Director of Weapon Plus may be responsible.

Deathlok would make sense for sure especially after seeing the Roxxon logo, and good thinking about the children of the Vault and Machine Man! The Captain America of the 50s could make sense too especially after learning that Nuke was Weapon VII.

Thinking about it Sentry (Golden Serum) and American Kaiju (Project Troubleshooter) should also be part of the Weapon Plus program, since they were both created while trying to replicate the Super-Soldier Serum. I guess Weapon H should also be part of the program.

The S.I.C.K.L.E logo is strange though, maybe Omega Red and the Stranniy Corrective Labor Camp are also linked to the Weapon Plus program somehow.

Also after seeing the Stane International logo, maybe the Project: Delta was also part of the program.