Listen to the episode here.
Art by David Wynne. Wanna buy the original? Drop him a line!
Come to our RCCC party and meetup! Details here!
This story looks cheerful! (Marvel Comics Presents #72)
Oho, I see what you did, there, Barry Windsor-Smith! (Marvel Comics Presents #72)
(The indefinite article, not Ororo Munroe.) (Marvel Comics Presents #72)
“Why did you resign?” (Marvel Comics Presents #73)
That palette! (Marvel Comics Presents #73)
The Professor is a huge jerk. (Marvel Comics Presents #74)
Wolverine’s self-image is… somewhat alarming. (Marvel Comics Presents #76)
Terrific use of sound effects, either way. (Marvel Comics Presents #77)
Hell, as designed by Lisa Frank. (Marvel Comics Presents #78)
That linework, though! (Marvel Comics Presents #79)
I know it’s supposed to be an alarm, but I can’t shake the idea that Wolverine is just yelling “AAOOOGAH” over and over. (Marvel Comics Presents #80)
Seriously, what an asshole. (Marvel Comics Presents #81)
Well, shit. (Marvel Comics Presents #82)
Even a functionally feral Wolverine knows that ninjas can’t catch you if you’re on fire! (Marvel Comics Presents #83)
This man has literally no redeeming characteristics. (Marvel Comics Presents #83)
Get good and at home, Wolverine, because you’re gonna be spending a lot of time in variations on this scenario. (Marvel Comics Presents #84)
And then, things got weird. Weirder. Differently weird. (Marvel Comics Presents #84)
The twist was the lack of twist that turned out to be the actual twist! (Marvel Comics Presents #84)
I’m still not entirely sure whether this is supposed to have happened for real or not; and that’s why I love this story. (Marvel Comics Presents #84)
THAT. PALETTE. (Marvel Comics Presents #84)
WOW. (Marvel Comics Presents #84)
Next Episode: More MCP, featuring “God’s Country” and “The Retribution Affair”!
LINKS & FURTHER READING
- Come see us at RCCC, and party with us on Friday night!
- The Milgram experiment is both horrifying and really important.
- Here are a large number of photographs of snow leopards with their tails in their mouths.
The real WeaponX:
http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/camp-x.htm
Wow, Congratz on being the first of the X-Pods to cover this ! finally, ive been waiting and wondering why none of them are covering it.
when I think of what deserves to be on the WOLVERINE MOUNT RUSHMORE, this would DEF’ly be on it & the Miller/Claremont LS (& 2more).
WOLV1movie: a HUUUGE diff from the WEAPON X procedure in the comix & in the movie is: in the comic, he was just living his life and got grabbed off the street and taken there and operated on and kept there all AGAINST his will. That’s part of what made it so powerful. and in the movie, he freely CHOOSES to get the procedure done. f which is a huge difference to be noted. Guess A PG movie couldn’t come at it from that angle.
APOCALYYYYYPSE!!!!?!?!?!?!?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEtRoZ5FWNc how no way. cool factoid.
I’m saving up to get that operation. Anyone know where I can get some Adamantium for cheap?
I LOVED seeing the WEAPX part in XM-APOCALYPSE (movie). though I was bummed out they didn’t have a shot of him, stabbing and lifting a guard above him, like the iconic TPB cover.
I gotta use that family guy link again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEtRoZ5FWNc . WHAAAAAT?! I’d never read WEAPONx b4 Miles. But…like…HOW COME?! 😛
DIGITAL COLLAGES OF THIS: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B04CFmLs1ApDLS1FRDBNd214RW8?usp=sharing
WOLV V2 50 for other listeners to check out: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B04CFmLs1ApDZ3VlZlpXeDVCelk/view?usp=sharing
as much as I love this comic….obviously in real life terms, that whole adamantium’afying procedure makes no sense. so it’s saying that they put a thin coating of it over top of the exterior of his entire skeleton. the metal would have to be melted into a liquid and you would have to painstakingly operate on one section of the body at a time. pull part completely all the tissue etc to get each section of the bone totally exposed get the bone coated, and then put all the tissue back. and start on the next section. all that molten hot liquefied steel, if he pumped it into his body wouldn’t his body just melt off instantly?
Another big difference between this and Wolverine: Origins is that that the film is, well, giving us the origins, answering all the questions, whereas Windsor-Smith is self-consciously refusing to do so. The only very concrete information that this adds to what we already knew about Wolverine is that somebody put the adamantium in him for that person’s own purposes. Which is what we would have assumed, anyway.
This is another thing that impressed me about this story. I slightly disagree with our hosts about the pacing. For me, it bears the marks of someone used to working with long American monthly comics and trying to make that work for a shorter compass. It’s fun to imagine how this would have been paced as, say, a weekly 2000 AD story: I’d say that you’d have ended the first episode on the death of the young technician.
I think that it does work, though, because the details, the art, etc., are so compelling that one ignores that relatively little is actually happening and in a different story a lot would have come across as padding. Logan really doesn’t need to kill both wolves and a bear, for instance – and a snow leopard (for all that it’s the best Mac operating system and Apple should have left well enough alone) comes across as a step down from a bear, because it’s not visually as impressive on the page. I’d say wolves, then have a bear replace the snow leopard.
In principle. In practice, it all seems to work, and does so despite the fact that it’s one long exercise in not answering the reader’s questions.
As a reader of the original Marvel Comics Presents version of this story who dug out the issues to revisit it before listening to the podcast, I can tell you my impressions. First of all, Presents was a biweekly title so we weren’t waiting an entire month between installments. And I was a bit surprised how abruptly the story started. Turns out 15-year old me missed the prologue chapter. Then I was surprised that the story was only 7 issues long. Turns out 15-year old me gave up on the story after the part where Logan chopped off The Professor’s hand. Which, given how unpleasant and uncomfortable the story is to read, doesn’t really surprise current me. I never even made it to the twist! Anyway, the first half of the story really is remarkable in terms of artwork and design and the storytelling is unique. But given where I stopped back then I can’t really blame teenage me for giving up on it when I did. It is not an easy or fun read in any way.
An excellent listen. It’s been years since I read this, and you made me really want to check it out again. Can’t go wrong with BWS art.
One quick note: you discussed how Logan’s funky hair is implied to be a side-effect of his mutation, as it always grows back in the same style. As far as I know this has only been specifically mentioned once – in the Heroes for Hope one shot (which may or may not be canonical). In this dream/hallucination (OR IS IT?) sequence, Logan loses his powers and mutanthood.
‘He rises… a naked Logan, no longer the half beast thing. Hair normal, no claws, no uniform. A normal man.’
Operative words: HAIR NORMAL!
His hairstyle is therefore definitely part of his mutation, or at the very least Logan thinks it is.
https://shadowandflamewithmagik.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/heroes-for-hope-x-men-frank-miller-1.jpg
So happy you guys finally covered this! Its easily my favorite Marvel comics story of all time. One note about Romulus though – he’s perhaps not as directly responsible for everything that has happened to Logan as we have been lead to believe. As you guys briefly mentioned on the show the “lupine race” backstory was revealed to be nothing but lies by Romulus used to mess with Logan’s head – that suggests that his claims of how much he’s impacted and involved with Logan’s past is also suspect. It wouldn’t be much of a retcon for that to be revealed as more lies as well.
Kang the Conquerer knows where he came from… where did all you zombies come from?