You know what my favorite aspect about Wolverine is? It’s not his rough
and rugged attitude, his bleak origin or even his cool ties Japanese
culture. The thing that I find utterly interesting about Logan is his
constant tendency to be thrust into the roll of big brother for teenage
girls. I don’t know why exactly I find this so interesting…perhaps
it’s because there’s a weird contrast between the Wolverine/girls scenes
and every other scene with him. There’s no real explanation to why
Wolverine seems to gravitate towards mentoring these young girls, yet
it’s a core part of his character. Wolverine First Class was a
series that explored the dynamic between him and Kitty Pryde, and was
one of the most fun and enjoyable books to ever be put out by Marvel.
Now we have Wolverine & Jubilee #1, the start to a series
that’s looking to focus on Wolverine’s relationship with another former
ward, the 90s-rific Jubilee. This book seems to especially sell itself
to fans of the 90’s X-Men cartoon (which was THE SHIT), where viewers
were introduced to the X-Men through the eyes of the spunky mallrat with
powers of questionable usefulness. Nowadays, she’s a much different
character. After Jubilee lost her powers after House Of M, she
became much more mature and introspective. Despite showing growth as a
character, creators barely used her after she lost her powers.

Luckily,
Victor Gischler breathed new life into the character in his X-Men
series after he…well…turned her into a vampire. It indeed sounds
lame, but even if this drastic change was a bit hokey in the X-Men
book, Kathryn Immonen makes Jubilee’s plight an interesting read. Still
brooding and introspective, but now with a pesky vampire problem to
deal with. In all honesty, this is probably the best depiction of the
character since she was in Generation X all those years ago. Not
only were all of Jubilee’s interactions with the other characters spot
on, but it’s interesting to see how she matured as a character. Big
scenes with her and Wolverine were at a minimum, but it looks like we’re
going to get more scenes of them together in the next issue. A really
neat series so far.