X LIVES OF WOLVERINE #1 - Review (Note: Spoilers!)

[Jackraow21]

Whew! This was an adrenaline rush from start to finish. It kicks off in high gear and really never slows down. Cassara’s art is a treat as always, and I love the way he draws the bone claws and Omega Red’s bone (non-Carbonadium laced) tentacles too. Very organic and bony, with an ominous and creepy quality to them. At any rate, this issue was not what I expected at all, at least in one major way, and that’s a good thing. I enjoy when I can still be surprised when reading a comic. So, without further ado, here goes…

- Open with some (not all) of the pages we saw in the big preview, that being of Logan with the broken watch and Xavier telling him “it’s time”;
- Cut to a mansion somewhere and a woman giving birth, she’s called Mrs. Xavier so we know it’s Charles’ mother and Brian Xavier, his father is there too;
- She’s in labor and he steps outside for some air, where his gardener comes forward in the dark ominously, suddenly hurling garden shears at him;
- He’s tackled to the ground by someone, who ends up being Logan, and you see that the gardener has red eyes and bone tentacles and a glowing omega symbol on his forehead like he’s been possessed by Omega Red, and he and Logan begin to fight;
- Cut to Krakoa, today, in the Hatchery and we see Omega Red come and knock out Egg/Goldballs and drag him away, using his face/retinal scan to enter a restricted area with mainframes all connected by organic looking material/vines and whatnot, and he accesses a computer in front of a huge screen and discovers what they did to him when the resurrected him (that being gave him an implantable Carbonadium Synthesizer which doubles as a surveillance device built by Forge, which happened in X-Force or Wolverine awhile back)… he’s not happy about it clearly;
- There’s a data page re: his resurrection noting the objection to this by The Five, which was dismissed and overruled quite rudely by Beast (“Your job is to cook what we order. You have received our order. Now cook”… this guy really needs to get his comeuppance soon);
- Back to Sharon Xavier who gives birth to a baby, and Brian Xavier gets guns for him and the butler out of the gun cabinet;
- There are screams from upstairs indicating something is wrong, and the midwife is saying “I’m sorry…”;
- Back outside, Logan pops bone claws and is fighting “Omega Gardener” (possessed dude) and at one point slices one of his bone tentacles in half but it appears to regrow (interesting because I never knew what OR’s powers were like before the Russians made him a super soldier and gave him the Carbonadium which apparently laced his tentacles similarly to how Logan’s bone claws got laced with Adamantium);
- Suddenly the gardener reverts back to normal and doesn’t know what’s happening, begging Logan not to hurt him, at which point Logan turns and looks at the upstairs bedroom in an ominous way;
- Cut to Brian Xavier and the butler rushing upstairs to Mrs. Xavier with guns, and the butler is suddenly possessed by OR and shoots at Brian who returns fire and kills him, saying “I’m sorry…”;
- Back in the bedroom, Sharon is saying the deceased infant’s name is Cassandra (remember Charles killed her in the womb, at least physically), but the midwife tells her that another baby is on the way;
- Brian bursts in with his shotgun and promises to protect her and Sharon and the midwife have no clue what’s going on;
- The midwife gets possessed by OR now and starts choking Sharon as she’s giving birth to Charles, and somehow Brian can see in the reflection of the window that it’s not the midwife but rather looks to be Arkady himself choking her (again, in the reflection only);
- He points the gun at her and tells her to release his wife and she grabs his gun with a bone tentacle and knocks him out with it;
- Logan bursts in the room smashing through the door, with his bone claws popped and looking badass;
- Cut back to the other preview pages we saw showing Logan and Xavier going underground to join Jean, and them hooking him up to Cerebro;
- Here’s where we get the big two-page spread as it activates showing glimpses into Logan’s storied past;
- Back to Logan fighting the possessed midwife/Omega Red in the past, and in the background Sharon gives birth to Charles;
- OR tells Logan he’s gone soft because he won’t kill the innocent midwife who is possessed by him, tells him Krakoa has made him soft;
- Logan pins her to a wall with his claws (the two outside ones extended and the middle one retracted as we’ve seen him do), and we have a panel with Sharon Xavier holding the infant Charles in one hand and a shotgun in the other calling them both monsters and telling them to get away from her baby and out of her house;
- Cut to Moscow, Russia today and we have a bunch of tanks pointed at a Krakoan gate and soldiers around it drinking coffee;
- Omega Red comes through the gate and asks if this is how they welcome a comrade and demands to see “him”;
- Suddenly someone says “that’s enough” and everything goes black, and OR is face to face with Mikhail Rasputin who welcomes him home;
- Another data page, this one from Sage’s logbook, detailing “the new Russia” and how Mikhail has essentially created a shadow government there (“two Russias with two leaders, one president of the people and one president of the mutants, like two wombs or nesting dolls in service to the mother country”) and also mentions that he is data-mining the Cerebro sword;
- Cut back to the past with Logan still having the possessed midwife pinned to the wall and Sharon Xavier unloads the gun into him point blank;
- The midwife picks her up with a tentacle around the neck, while Sharon’s still holding the newborn, and Brian tackles her from behind and gouges her eyes causing her to drop Sharon and the baby;
- Baby Charles is on the floor crying and Logan picks him up, slicing his umbilical cord with a bone claw as the baby cries;
- The possessed midwife charges and Logan sidesteps her, and she goes flying out the window and hits the ground below, dead;
- Awesome full page spread of Logan holding newborn Charles, telling him “Shhh. It’s all right, Chuck. I got you.” This is especially eerie considering what Logan says earlier in the issue about seeing Charles as a father figure to him, despite their relative ages (which was in the preview pages);
- Suddenly he fades out and we see him transported into his body back in his old Team X days, likely in the 1960s, where Creed jumps out and tackles him to the ground;
- We realize they’re in a firefight, Maverick is there too, and apparently Victor tackled him to the ground to protect him since he zoned out;
- Logan says “I don’t remember this” and Jean connects with him psychically telling him he’s in Colombia and his target is 25 miles southwest of there… “You have to save Xavier,” she says, “The clock is ticking…”
- The End.

Like I said, this was action-packed. Best Wolverine comic I’ve read in some time. Percy brought his A-game to this first issue, as did Cassara. If they can keep up this level of quality for the whole event it will definitely be a classic Logan story. For sure.

10/10