She is risen!
X-Men #10
VC’s Clayton Cowles (letterer), Gerry Duggan (writer), Marte Gracia (colors), Tom Muller w/ Jay Bowen (design), Javier Pina (artist)
Marvel Comics
April 13, 2022
Even as shipping delays plague the comic book industry, sometimes the stars (and release dates) align, and I spend my Easter Sunday reading X-Men #10 and seeing our lord and savior, Wolverine, rise from the dead. She even pops out of her brightly-colored egg claws first! Happy Easter!
With that belabored opening out of the way, Laura Kinney’s resurrection on the opening page of X-Men #10 is likely, as Proteus puts it, “a mulligan” for erroneously giving her an adamantium skeleton in previous issues. At first, this prologue seems like writer Gerry Duggan and artist Javier Pina throwing a (not adamantium-laced) bone at die-hard fans; the page holds a greater significance as the story unfolds. X-Men #10 is about bodies: living bodies, dead bodies, stolen bodies, mutant bodies.
Since the beginning of Duggan’s run, one of the most pressing issues facing the X-Men is keeping the secret of the Resurrection Protocols hidden – even if that means mind-wiping a hard-boiled reporter or two. Unfortunately, resurrected mutants tend to leave a body behind when they die. There’s no official Krakoa Corpse Delivery Service, so that poses a problem when a mutant dies a very public death (see: Cyclops forced to pose as Captain Krakoa) or when the enemy gets ahold of a mutant corpse (see: Inferno, X-Force, Wolverine…uh-oh).
These stolen cadavers prove to be a sore point in X-Men #10 after Rogue scans Orchis’ installation on Phobos and the team realizes what they’re holding. In addition to one of Nightcrawler’s discarded bodies (“Ah don’t think [Feilong] shoulda decorated with mah friend,” says Rogue) and a grotesque gallery of Logan’s adamantium skeletons, Orchis is holding another living mutant in stasis. Laura snaps into action; seeing that the captive mutant bears traces of adamantium, she seizes on the remote possibility that it could be one of her many cloned sisters and infiltrates the Orchis facility.
Wolverine is on the hunt – and I missed her. Throughout this X-Men run, we’ve mostly glimpsed Laura through the eyes of Synch, and while “Oh no, I remember our 500-year love affair in a time-displaced vault and she doesn’t” is as soapy and operatic as the best X-Men love stories, it shouldn’t be Laura’s only story. She has other motivations. Namely, looking out for, as the title calls them, the “sisterhood of the metal bones.” As Pepe Larraz’s striking (ha) cover reveals, however, it’s not a sister she finds stashed away on the moon but a semi-estranged aunt – Lady Deathstrike. Betrayed by Dr. Stasis and passed around for experimentation, Deathstrike is dying from adamantium poisoning. Remember that bit about how Laura shouldn’t have a metal skeleton, again?
With every new Javier Pina-drawn issue of X-Men, I am more and more excited to see what he brings to the page. Issue #10 is another spectacular-looking issue, rich in dynamism and small character details. There’s Rogue in her hooded Uncanny Avengers costume, going a-hunting on Arakko with a big honking rifle, or Polaris in the team debriefing, drawing an X in the foam of her latte. Teaming with colorist Marte Gracia, Pina draws a fight between Wolverine and Deathstrike that is quick and vicious and, thanks to heavy shadows, suggests the damage adamantium claws can do without the characters slipping and sliding in their own viscera.
“Why’re you helping me?’ “Why’re you asking? Would you prefer to be on your ass?” Even after the aforementioned hacking and slashing, Wolverine still ensures Deathstrike’s escape from her captors (thanks to a little help from Rogue and an ear-shredding reverse fastball special).
For villains like Feilong and Dr. Stasis, bodies are commodities that can be upgraded or discarded at will, whether they belong to them or not. There is an oft-voiced concern among readers that the Resurrection Protocols make life cheap for the X-Men – why should Wolverine risk herself for a dying Lady Deathstrike, who can just be resurrected later anyway? But that is how Orchis thinks. By saving Deathstrike without hesitation in X-Men #10 Wolverine defies them as assuredly as if she had sunk a foot-claw right into Stasis’ floating metal face.
