Storm, Bishop, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke, the Beast and Thunderbird all agree to leave and search for Destiny’s diaries, while keeping their activities secret from the main team. Viper expresses her hope that one day their marriage will be more than purely symbolic he tells her to get lost. Viper shows up to return the broken bone claw that Kitty kept during Wolverine vol 2 #125-128 Logan takes that as a message that the missing Kitty is okay. “Mr X” is what Wolverine calls him, but strictly speaking he’s anonymous throughout.īy Chris Claremont, Thomas Derenick, Rick Ketcham, Norm Rapmund & Liquid! To be fair, though, there are other stories later in the run that strike a better balance.įor completeness: strictly speaking, the villain of this arc is never named. It’s drawn by Sean Chen but the plot seems to cry out for Simon Bisley. There’s a tone problem here, where Mr X is so extreme that you feel he belongs in something more comedic like a Deadpool story. Mr X is casually killing people all over the place without even being mildly inconvenienced as a result, which all feels a bit much.
The two main problems with the Tieri run are an overreliance on casual sadist villains, and a lot of dodgy comedy that doesn’t land. The basic concept of Mr X is solid too he’s another anti-Wolverine who embraces his murderous urges, but this time with a superficial classiness. Mr X is eventually revealed to be a low level telepath, who can normally beat Wolverine because he can anticipate his moves, and that’s quite well foreshadowed here. It has genuine strengths – he gets the voice of the character well, and his long-term plotting is pretty solid, something that becomes more apparent when you re-read the whole run.
Tieri never really does anything with the Apocalypse storyline, but at least by acknowledging it in this way he smoothed it over a bit. As in his story for the 2000 annual, Tieri has Wolverine attribute this to the aftereffects of his time as a Horseman of Apocalypse, but it’ll eventually be revealed to be a side effect of the missions that Weapon X are sending him on without his knowledge. Wolverine is troubled by the way he had to succumb to his berserker instincts to defeat Mr X, and is determined to be ready when Mr X comes back.Ī subplot has Wolverine plagued by dreams in which he’s murdered the X-Men. So apparently Wolverine didn’t know too much after all – or maybe Mr X’s weird sense of the rules overrides that. He dumps Logan in a raft, and leaves a message that Mr X will get back to him in due course. He does rather better this time, and Blok is forced to intervene – which Mr X regards as cheating. Outraged that Mr X treats murder as a game, Logan flies into a berserker rage, escapes his restraints, and attacks Mr X. Mr X gives Wolverine a choice between “accept my superiority and join me in my new murder avant-garde”, or dying because he now knows too much. He’s also trained under the world’s greatest masters so that he can face ever greater opponents. Mr X takes Logan to his private island, where he explains his back story: as a child, he encountered a dying woman, could feel her passing, and became obsessed with recapturing that feeling. Logan fights off all the thugs, but loses to Mr X in single combat. Testing Wolverine to see if he’s worthy of being an ally, deranged mercenary serial killer Mr X sends a bunch of soldiers after him, led by the Major, and including Blok and the Ladykillers. The Ladykillers are a female duo who go by the names T and, deep sigh, A. Welcome to the Frank Tieri run, which continues (with some interruptions) through to issue #186 in 2003. There are other books that came out in 2001 – like Grant Morrison’s New X-Men – which we won’t reach until the 2002 instalment, because that’s just how it winds up fitting together.Īlso, I’m going by shipping date, as best as I can establish it, rather than the notional cover dates listed on for these issues (which don’t even appear on the covers by this point).īy Frank Tieri, Sean Chen, Norm Rapmund and various colourists So when I say “2001”, I’m using Wolverine’s solo title as the yardstick.
CLAREMONT SERIAL KILLER PSYCHIC TASK FORCE SERIES
This means that getting everything to fit into a coherent timeline can involve quite a bit of stretching, and series can often be miles out of synch with one another. And there’s a point I should flag at the outset: a hallmark of this era is that Marvel weren’t really paying much attention to how various titles would fit together, and were also doing some quite lengthy storylines with no obvious gaps in them. Part 9: Department H | Part 10: The Silver Ageīill Jemas and Joe Quesada took over at Marvel in 2000, but it’s in 2001 that their direction for the company really becomes apparent. Part 3: 1914 to 1939 | Part 4: World War II Part 1: Origin to Origin II | Part 2: 1907 to 1914
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