It’s here, it’s here! A Wolverine event that will hopefully neatly tie up the storylines that Benjamin Percy has been weaving throughout X-Force (2019) and Wolverine (2019) these past few years. But if you haven’t been reading along, don’t worry — it’s not so complex that you can’t just pick up this issue and jump in.
X Lives of Wolverine #1
Benjamin Percy (writer), Joshua Cassara (artist), Frank Martin (colors), VC’s Cory Petit (lettering and production), Tom Muller (Design), Adam Kubert & Frank Martin (cover)
January 19, 2022
Percy has done a neat job of creating a first issue that works without any background knowledge of the titles leading up to this event, and that’s impressive considering how many things have led up to Wolverine and Omega Red squaring up across time and space! It’s not a perfect introduction for a new reader, however, because while the action and plot are easy to decipher, it’s the mystery of it all that’s the real hook — what exactly has Mikhail Rasputin been doing this whole time? What is Omega Red’s motivation? But this issue raises new questions, and I don’t think it would be the worst way to get caught up with a few various plots.
Wolverine opens the issue by opining about time, so you know it’s going to be a temporal kind of storyline. We see Omega Red discover he’s been manipulated by Beast, up to and including memory tampering, so he heads back to the motherland and into Mikhail Rasputin’s waiting arms. A lot of exposition regarding geopolitics is given to us via some sparse but effective data pages, including a note from Beast that is a perfect character summation of his current fascist era despite him not appearing in this issue.
Wolverine is summoned by Professor X. With Jean Grey’s help, he’s Days-of-Future-Past’d right to the moment of Charles Xavier’s birth. Omega Red is there, in spirit, taking over the bodies of people around the estate and imbuing them with his life sucking tentacles. While Omega Red seems to have a plan, Wolverine is more in the dark as to what the hell is happening and why. But he knows what his mission is, at least: save Charles Xavier.
Joshua Cassara has a lot of fun with facial expressions in this one, Wolverine’s and those of the Xavier family especially, and the action is equally dynamic. Wolverine is always in motion during a fight, and there’s real frantic energy around the brawling, pieces of wood flooring flying everywhere, or glass shattering.
Frank Martin uses a browner, slightly washed out palette for when the story is in the past, including yellowed gutters. Krakoa gets lush greens that turn electric as Wolverine travels through time. Russia, by contrast, ends up with a paler, sicklier green-gray as Omega Red storms in, which complements Mikhail’s powers in an effective one-page spread. I’m also a sucker for bone-claws Wolverine, and Martin and Cassara create a gooey three-dimensionality to the blood running down them.
Percy’s take on Wolverine has always been a little stiff for me, and the character’s internal monologue in this issue hasn’t dissuaded me from that opinion. But he got a couple chuckles out of me here which I feel is an improvement on previous attempts at humor in X-Force. Having Cassara back on art also adds loose kinetic energy to the issue, and the pacing is tight. It helps that most of the dialogue is general battle banter, with less time spent inside Wolverine’s head than you usually get in his solo title. That forward momentum is what carries The X Lives of Wolverine #1, and left me extremely curious as to how everything will play out and exactly what the end goal of all these threads could be — from the vampires to the enormous amount of Colossus foreshadowing found in Inferno. Finally, the dominos fall!
