Pick of the Week
What did the
iFanboy
community think?
Pulls
Art by Renato Guedes & Jose Wilson Magalhaes
Colors by Matthew Wilson
Letters by Cory Petit
Cover by Jae Lee & June Chung
Size: 32 pages
Price: 3.99
Sometimes you have to hold the entire story in your hands to appreciate what you’ve got. In other words, sometimes you need to wait for the twist ending or the big reveal to fully appreciate the story.
I hadn’t loved the current story arc in Wolverine as much as I did the previous arcs. The Wolverine in Hell story that kicked this volume off was a ton of twisted fun and the Possessed Wolverine vs. The X-Men arc that followed was fantastic on every level. But this one? In which a group of disparate people calling themselves The Red Right Hand have been throwing a new generic enemy at Wolverine every issue only to watch them fall to those six increasingly bloody adamantium claws? It’s felt a bit like a video game.
And then we had the big reveal at the end of this issue and the full implication of what we have been reading for the past five months became clear and suddenly this whole storyline became one big gut punch.
(I realize that I am being vague here, and that’s on purpose. The big reveal is really powerful because we find out about it at the same time that Wolverine does and thus his pain and ours are similarly felt. I’m going to get into the specifics in a moment so if you don’t want to be spoiled, you should probably stop after the next four paragraphs.)
Wolverine is a fascinating character. I don’t find him all that interesting for his badassery (though it’s fun) but rather for the tragedy inherent in him. If Wolverine: Origins is to be believed — and I’m not convinced it should — he has been alive since 1882 and 129 years is a lot of time to rack up painful memories. To me, a character who pushes forward in the face of over a century’s worth of pain (no wonder he spends so much time trying to get drunk) is a character that I’m really going to find compelling and, when done right, fun to read.
If you’re Wolverine and you spend a good portion of your 129 years being a miserable, drunken, brawling bastard killing machine you’re probably going to make more than a few enemies. That’s The Red Right Hand. They are a group of people whose lives were ruined — usually due to the death of a loved one — by Wolverine. Sometimes he killed someone on purpose, sometimes they were collateral damage, but it doesn’t matter to The Red Right Hand. They all want their revenge on Wolverine.
First The Red Right Hand tried getting revenge by sending Wolverine’s soul to Hell and having his demon possessed body fight his fellow X-Men. That didn’t work out quite the way they planned and instead of destroying Wolverine they ended up enraging him to the point where he tracked down their secret compound to seek a little bit of revenge of his own.
In this storyline Wolverine has been fighting his way through The Red Right Hand’s compound against The Mongrels, a group of generic bad guys. In each issue, while Wolverine has dispatched, usually in a grisly manner, the latest poor sap in his way, we’ve met a different member of The Red Right Hand and learned just why they hate Wolverine so much. At first it was fun and interesting but after three or four issues I started to feel a little antsy. I wanted the story to move forward. If I’m being honest, I really was just looking forward to the next story arc because this one wasn’t doing it for me. So it was with great relief that I opened up Wolverine #14 knowing that this was the final part of the “Wolverine’s Revenge!” arc.
In this issue, as Wolverine stands outside the door of The Red Right Hand’s control room after having bested the final Mongrel in the previous issue, we meet one last member of The Red Right Hand. He’s a young boy whose single mother was a nurse with S.H.I.E.L.D. and who was killed when Wolverine woke up in a S.H.I.E.L.D. infirmary and accidentally gutted her during one of his berserker rage night terrors. Wolverine enters the control room to find all the members of The Red Right Hand dead of a Jonestown-esque mass suicide, thus robbing Wolverine the chance to find his revenge at the tip of his claws. But that’s not all from The Red Right Hand. They’ve saved their best for last. As Wolverine stands among the bodies a video appears on the screen showing the members of The Red Right Hand. In it, their leader, known only as The Old Man, explains to Wolverine who they are and why they sought to destroy him. The Old Man tells Wolverine that if he is watching this video then that means he has killed all The Mongrels and that they are all dead at their own hand and that now The Red Right Hand has had their final revenge. The Old Man directs Wolverine to look at a file on the table in front him that contains proof of The Red Right Hand’s revenge.
The Mongrels were all Wolverine’s illegitimate children.
Suddenly everything changed for Wolverine and for the reader. Suddenly the seeming repetitive near tedium of the past five issues (as well as the name of the generic bad guys) takes on a whole new heartbreaking meaning. Suddenly Wolverine falls to his knees and we are left mouth agape.
There is a reason why we constantly call Jason Aaron one of the best writers in comic books today. What I thought was a rare miss for Aaron turned out to be him playing me like a fiddle. A dark, disturbing fiddle.
Ever since The Sixth Sense, the twist ending that changes everything about the entire story you just witnessed has become cliché. But there’s a reason why they keep getting used: because when they work, when they really and truly work, they hit you like a hard punch to the gut. When I read the reveal about Wolverine’s children my mouth fell open, I said “holy shit,” and then I very quickly did a mental review of the events of the past five issues and then said “holy shit” again.
That’s how you bring the hammer down on the reader at the end of a story arc.
Now? You couldn’t pay me not to read the next issue. Well, you could, but it would require a lot of zeroes.
Conor Kilpatrick
Holy shit, Jason Aaron.
conor@ifanboy.com
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Love it,i loved wolverine,origins,to so I tend to think it matters great pick.
At first I was gonna give a snarky comment like:
“Jason Aaron again?” Or “If you love him so much, why don’t you marry him?” That kind of thing.
Then I got to that line about the Mongruls being Logan’s illegitmate children and I’m like…..Shit! I don’t even read this comic and that is fucking bad ass! So +1 for Aaron right there for shutting me up.
Wow. Sounds like I missed out on a doozy of a story. Even though I know the ending, I’m thinking I’ll pick up the trade in like 6 months when I’ve forgotten it all. The ending sounds fantastic and I totally get why it’s the pick as it sounds like a great, great moment.
Park Chan-Woolverine.
YES!
Finally! 😛
Thrilled this is potw. I was hoping for a decent pay-off from this arc, but it looks like it will be great. I skimmed through the review (trying to avoid spoilers), but I saw no mention of the art. The conclusion is more contigent on the story than the art, but Guedes has grown on me with his work in this series and I’m curious what others think…
I was feeling the same way about how this arc was feeling like a cheesy videogame, but the pay-off was more than worth it. So glad this got the pick! Aaron is easily one of my favorite writers at the moment.
I wrote the recap that’s in this issue, but I also did the ballooning (laying out a guideline for the letterer), so I read this script awhile ago, during my summer internship. After I was done, I actually had to sit back and take a few deep breaths because I was so viscerally horrified, and then I immediately went to tell the editors how effective it was. It’s a truly brilliant issue, and Jason Aaron deserves all the credit you’ve given him here. The final moment with the young boy at the end, too, is a secondary gut punch — in an issue that almost didn’t need anything other than Logan’s devastation — and it’s a credit to Aaron’s talent that he pulls off both.
Very cool!
Yeah the part with the kid was intense.
ya i feel the kid part hit me even harder to be honest, the fact that out of most of those people he killed that were close to them were bad except that his mom was an innocent so she wouldnt be in hell lol how horrible
I saw the twist coming almost as soon as I started reading this issue, or maybe at the end of the last one, so the effect of that was a bit lost on me, but the kid alone in hell got me.
i took the kid being alone in hell as a consequence of waiting to see his logans face.
Solid pick I think. Am I the only one that thinks that the kid in this final issue’s mom might be the nurse that Wolverine killed at the beginning of Enemy of the State? I can’t remember if she was black or not, but that scene immediately brought that to mind.
It is. If you go back to that page in Enemy of the State, Guedes was redrawing Romita’s scene exactly. That was the intention. 🙂
Okay, just making sure I got that right. I was second guessing myself.
I’m not a Wolverine fan at all, but I saw this was the pick so I picked it up, and, wow. Even though I missed the setup, this was still great, and I can only imagine what it would mean after reading the rest of this story.
so now Wolverine knows how Fat Cobra of the immortal weapons feels. It sounds like a similar story. Also written by Aaron I believe.
Funny you’d mention that, since isn’t Fat Cobra making an appearance in Wolverine in a few issues? I want to say that was in the Marvel Preview article from earlier in the week.
Great pick. I absolutely love what Aaron has been doing on this title.
wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, holy shit jason a, wow conor im wow i need to get the first 13 because im glad you spoiled it wow thank you
Aaron is at Fan Expo here in Toronto this weekend, I hope I get the chance to speak to him and probably get him to sign this issue for me. I want to tell him just how twisted this was to read.
And the nurse Wolvie kills in the flashback, the boy’s mother, that is actually out of Mark Millar’s Enemy of the State run years ago, when Wolvie was being controlled by the Hand. The panel is clearly a reference to the JRJR panel in the original. Just a cool homage since I really loved that story.
I flipped through this at the store and…..man you weren’t kidding. This was amazing! Another +1 for Aaron. It kinda makes Logan that much more of a bastard doesn’t it? Why is he a hero? lol
My POTW though was FF #8. Epting returning was more then enough for me to make it pick.
FINALLY we get Epting back. I think he’s onboard until issue #12.
@Conor
Your review gives me cause for enthusiasm again. The last several issues have basically been the exact same thing. I’ve got this book set to read next. Now I’m genuinely excited.
OMFG! I don’t even read the book and everything just fell out from me and I was in shock for a while…
I still won’t get the other issues, for now, but that was a massive shock to the system.
Get the chase one with Mystique!!!
Really happy with this issue. My patience payed off. Not my favorite of the week (so far) but a strong issue and I can certainly see why you would choose it.
Wow can’t wait to read this.
I really enjoyed Guedes art in this arc. consistent and he was able to really nail home emotion (ex panels of the week).
I really enjoyed this arc because it felt like Aaron was building towards something that was going to knock us out. I was thinking that it would just be the mass suicide that would do it, but it happened so early i was shocked when you finally realized what had happened.
this was my potw for the slow burn pay off and great art.
BTW i started picking up this book when it was last potw some months ago when Ron made it. Thank guys.
“Oldboy with Wolverine” is one of those ideas that seems so simple, it’s actually shocking to me that it hasn’t been done until now, like the multi-colored Lantern Corps.
Gotta be honest. I didn’t even like Wolverine that much and had no idea who Jason Aaron was til Ifanboy.com. Wolverine Weapon X is crazy good and I am so glad ya’ll turned me on to a writer that I can follow through multiple series’ Loving Ifanboy!
http://www.comical-musings.blogspot.com
Really this arc was so long it bashed me into not caring about the twist ending. I’m just glad it’s over.
This leads me to believe that we should really start looking at the bigger picture and not too much on the individual chapters. Ever since the rise of the Trades, comic books have been taking the long form storytelling approach. So for people who haven’t been enjoying Fear Itself, I say wait for the bigger picture.
http://popcultureblogspot.com/
Am I the only one who thinks Wolverine is solely responsible for single parent homes in the Marvel Universe? Any word on whether he was the kid who killed himself’s father?
The joke is that Jason Aaron also wrote the Fat Cobra Immortal Weapons story where exactly the same thing happens. As a result I saw this coming several issues off, albeit with a sense of ‘Surely he’s not going back to the well, is he…?’ The Fat Cobra story was much better thanks to it’s brevity, whereas this was at most one good issue out of 6.
Really? I’ll have to go back and reread that, but I don’t recall Fat Cobra murdering his children.
Finally got around to reading this after avoiding spoilers for 2 weeks. I had a feeling that it would be somthing involving Wolverine’s old age but never that he just mowed through his own kids. It wasn’t a cheat and was a twist that mattered. Well done.