Laura Kinney spent untold centuries fighting alongside Synch in the time nexus called the Vault. Then he got out, and she died, and the X-Men resurrected her. Except whoops! She didn’t die. She’s out. Now there are two. What’s a clone to do? X-Men #18 is written by Gerry Duggan, drawn by C.F. Villa, colored by Matt Milla and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
I’m Only Me When I’m With You
You’ll know what this issue wants to do two pages in, and I’m happy to report that it does what it wants to do beautifully and almost anachronistically. It’s a romance issue, a talk-first issue, where the fight scenes are a lovely, silly afterthought. The first nearly full-page panel shows Synch soaring over a lit-up, snowy Detroit, the sunset or the Northern Lights or the glow of Jean Grey’s borrowed powers behind him, and Laura Kinney the elder, a Rogue-like streak of white in her hair, anxious but trusting, in Synch’s strong arms.
“I’ve been alone long enough,” says Laura, and they look at each other as if to say she’ll never walk alone again. Or walk at all, since Synch — as long as he’s close to flyers — can fly.
He’s taking Laura the Elder to interrupt a ridiculous vampire fight in the Motor City, where the vampire-fighters are the new-ish X-Terminators team, from the miniseries of the same name. That team consists of Jubilee, Boom-Boom, Dazzler and Wolverine, aka Laura Kinney the younger. You see the problem.
Laura, of course, smells the problem. “The wind just shifted,” Laura the elder says on a rooftop. “She knows I’m here. Her mind’s already reeling from what that means.” And there’s Laura the younger, pretending to look bored, first on a windowsill where she slices up a vampire, then at a Dazzler concert. “I’ve never been to a Dazzler concert,” Synch says. “Is this what they’re normally like?” It’s a good question, and we on Earth-1218 may, as we answer it, suffer from selection bias, since presumably Dazzler concerts with villain fights are more likely to end up in comic books than Dazzler shows without them. That said, my answer is yes.
Laura’s — Laura the Elder’s — answer is “Hnnh,” as she tries, comically, to start a serious conversation with Laura the Younger before the vampires all get done and dusted. “Now’s kind of not a great time to chat.”
The repartee here evokes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which feels very turnabout-is-fair-play given how much of Buffy ripped off misunderstood misappropriated repackaged Claremont-era X-comics. In fact, the premise, if you look at it one way (I thought there could be only one, I’m fighting vampires with my friends, now there are two of us), literally duplicates the premise of a Buffy episode. Two slayers, no waiting!
This Is Why We Can’t Have Ice Things
Right, there’s a B-plot. Scott, Jean, Bobby and Firestar are on patrol in space when an ORCHIS station blows a gasket and threatens to kill all the mutant-haters on board, and of course the adjectiveless X-team save the haters despite their hateful ways. “You’re very welcome, by the way. Good luck with your doomsday nonsense. You guys need an OSHA up here,” Iceman quips in parting, which feels a bit restrained for him: Couldn’t he at least have concluded “Snow problem”? But Scott, of all people, takes up the banter: “Well, we’ll leave you on your orbital death trap.” Fair enough. ORCHIS space guys, by the way, look like AIM goons who dyed their beekeeper suits red. Literal redshirts.
The rescue-against-mutant-interests sets up the issue’s only genuinely unresolved, and genuinely disturbing, emotional conflict: Hank McCoy has been through so much, and put himself through so much, and made so many terrible utilitarian decisions, that he simply cannot believe that Old Laura’s for real. He also disagrees with the team’s decision to save the ORCHIS goons rather than let them die.
Of course he does. “I can’t be the only one who thinks this is simply too good to be true,” he says, but Jean responds: “Yes, Hank, you are. … You’ve spent too long in the dark and it’s damaged your heart.” He’s more tactical, colder-eyed, than, of all people, Emma Frost, whose mean-girl redemption arc feels so complete I’m afraid she’ll come out the other side and go evil again. But not yet! At this point I wouldn’t trust Hank with my moral dilemmas, or my cat, or my takeout order. Much as I love the blue fur.
No Body, No Crime
You know who I’d trust, though? Laura. Either Laura, and the issue builds up to their conversation amid the hack-and-slash vampire fight.
“You know what my first thought was after I was resurrected?” Laura the Younger tells Laura the Elder amid the flying hunks of vampire meat. “I wanted to see the body.” Trust but verify. Why does she have an adamantium skeleton? “Proteus isn’t exactly strong on details. Or he is, but he has ADHD.” Good question, better answer. And the meat flies. Did you know you can order real-life meat cleavers that look like Logan’s claws (not like Laura’s)? They work! I own them! Don’t ask.
Also don’t ask why the Lauras defend their friends, because at this point you should already know. “They’re down in the tunnels fighting vampires so their friends don’t have to. Wolverines are like that.” Then they hash things out: Laura the Younger gets the Wolverine name, they shake hands while covered in vampire blood and they resolve to avoid one another from now on, presumably by occupying separate X-books, Old Laura (but under what name???) in this one, Young Laura with the X-Terminators, who here officially adopt the name.
And then … it’s Synch. And Laura the Elder. In bed. Together. Doing what they want to do. At last.
I got to the end of this issue and thought (and yes, there was a fist-pump somewhere), “Finally Laura gets to be happy! With cuddling on-page!” But we’ve seen Laura happy before: several times in the Tom Taylor All-New Wolverine series that made her (along with Gabby) a fan favorite, not least at the end of her life as envisioned at the end of that run, in one of a very, very few genuinely Utopian, positive X-futures, as well as in her moments of Finding Herself back when Marjorie Liu wrote the terrific series published under Laura’s deadname. (We don’t like to use the deadname, but it’s a letter followed by a prime number.)
So I started thinking: Why are modern writers, on the regular, nice to Laura? And I think I’ve got an answer: She started out so damn miserable. Her origin story, her early life and her default orientations amount to nonstop violent trauma, year after year of it. Her default state, if you know her whole story, is that it sucks to be her. So the way to make her dramatically interesting — and she’s had writers who make her dramatically interesting, Duggan now included — is to chart a path for her to be happy, or at least to solve her problems and end on a high note.
By contrast, other famous X-characters entered the Marvel Universe doing OK, to the extent that writers load them down with troubles, or try to take them down. Warren and Hank are the obvious long-term choices, if you start from the Silver Age. Ororo Munroe’s default state amounts to Better Than Everyone at Everything, and better-adjusted, too: “Storm’s got it together” is a panel, but isn’t obviously a story. Still other X-characters have their foundational troubles so thoroughly baked into their personalities that it’s hard to imagine them happy for more than a page at a time: Chamber, for example. “Laura’s just fine today,” however, invites the question: “How did that happen?” Or rather: “How did that happen?” This comic book is an answer, or rather two answers, one for each Laura. I dig it.
Oh, and the Brood have infected Corsair on the Starjammers’ ship (and he’s not a mutant, so he may be really and truly dead). They’ve finally fulfilled their destiny of imitating an Alien movie frame by frame, they’ve splattered the other Starjammers’ bodily fluids all over the ship, it seems, and they are, of course, headed for Earth.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Has a non-Wolverine X-comic ever contained quite so many panels of blood spatter? (But this is a Wolverine comic.)
- Jubilee’s wearing her iconic yellow raincoat, and Laura the Younger’s in costume, but Dazzler’s dressed for a concert, in stageworthy non-superhero clothes, including some great lace-up boots and multiple necklaces. C.F. Villa gets what these characters wear.
- The issue title “Wounded Wolves” refers to what some consider the greatest single-issue Logan (Wolverine) story of all time. Which is, like this issue, a Christmas story.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
