Punch Up: “To Me My ❌-Men”
Chapter forty-One:
1986*
Weapon ❌
1986 Daredevil No. 236 by Windsor-Smith, Simonson, Wiacek, Sienkiewicz, Scheele, Rosen, Nocenti + Macchio & Anderson
January-July, 1991 Marvel Comics Presents No. 72-84: Weapon X by Windsor-Smith, Novak + Kavanagh & Corvese
February, 1986 Uncanny X-Men No. 205 by Windsor-Smith, Orzechowski, Claremont + Nocenti
*1991
Mixtape Tracks: I Go Blind by 54-40; Same Song by Digital Underground; Valery Loves Me by Material Issues; The Wagon by Dinosaur Jr; Counting Backwards by Throwing Muses; Together on the Sand by NoFX, 3 Strange Days by School of Fish, Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog; Behaviour Control Technician by Fishbone; It’s Shoved by The Melvins; Who do you Worship? By De La Soul; Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers by Primus; Milk by Anthrax/SOD; Money Talks by Living Colour; & Brilliant Mistake by Elvis Castillo
Chapter 41 of “to me my ❌-Men,” a proper dark off the spinner rack vibe, via Daredevil, to prepare us for a Barry Windsor-Smith masterpiece; introducing the Weapon X program, The Body Shop, and The Reavers. Our 7th masterpiece; Chapter 7’sWolverine, Chapter 17’sDemon Bear, Chapter 21 & 30’s Life Death, Chapter 27’sLegion, Chapter 32’sLongshot, Chapter 36’sBorn Again, being our other six+ masterpieces, thus far.
Previously on “to me my ❌-Men” DIY Two-In-One, we checked in on our Canadian friends & then the Mutants helped David get his mind right AGAIN! Pushing back against being reductive in thinking, we are simply here to introduce you to a story about a girl, named Kitty, and her reluctant mentor, Logan. We are here to experience their world, its characters and relationships in a broader sense. We have discovered and done our part in developing a foundation of their unconventional family dynamics, and a spectrum of aesthetic vibes within the eclectic nature of their stories.
In this telling we have identified six(+) comics masterpieces. Here, sandwiched between two floppies, oozing with quality in their own rights, is our 7th.
Here we are checking in with Matt & Nat. In this we have an another proper Marvel 25th Anniversary headshot cover with the Marvel Universe boarder, by Walter & Bill cover; underselling Barry Windsor-Smith interiors.
Back on the cover, you got your black costumed Spidy, Hulk, Shellhead, our Captain Marvel, Stephen, OG Namor, WWII propaganda Cap, tiny wasp and ant-man, Puck reps Canada, proper ❌-Men: Kitty, Rogue, Logan, Piotr, Ororo, Rachel, Kurt, and OG ❌-Men: Bobby, Jean, Scott, WWIII, Hank, Matt, WandaVision, Clint, Luke, first fam: Ben, Jen, Sue, Reed, Jonny, and glue guy Thor. Until the MCU can honestly show ALL these characters ON SCREEN in a nod to these covers we still have our demands to be met.
Windsor-Smith & Nocenti make for a low key 80’s creative super team. This comic comes off as just another days work to them, but if you look around the comics landscape of 1986, you can see who are the pros pros. These are two right here.
A lecture is commencing that comes off as mad scientist, but with that horrifying refined and grounded 80’s Blade Runner vibe. Wrestling with the subject of what drives a person in the space between psychological and physical, the soul, the gut, the beast, the lust. It refers to the body as “twisting mass of nerves muscles and bones.”
“I take the rains in my fists and twist them into a coil that I can direct…”
“…as I please.”
Max Scheele is free to play with Windsor-Smith’s lines to create overlay effects that inform our understanding of space and the mechanics of this graphic presentation.
His lecture is an audience of one: Nat.
She distills the subject down to: “Some kind of Psycho-Surgery.”
The Doc confirms: “we strip the mind down and reveal its core and reptilian brain—a much finer machine.”
He suggests this for her, as a theoretical upgrade in her own espionage work. But quickly moves on to the subject at hand, a step beyond Nuke, Agent Hazzard; his introduction.
He had the ‘proper childhood trauma. Took the pathos and bypassed the guilt.’
Nat: “So what tipped him over the edge.”
Stupid super scientists.
Nuke’s events triggered a problematic side of Hazzard. Interesting, if we expand this concept across 24/7 news, talk radio, print media, and SM, and apply it to the USA and World population broadly. Just saying.
He snapped back to his original traumas.
Hazzard will either self implode like a “black hole,” suicidally or he will go “super nova,” and take casualties.
Nocenti is hella smart.
Nat’s assignment is to push him towards the Black Hole. WOW! 🤯When folks talk about how soft we are now. This is the kinda thing, that makes me recognize the sentiment. I mean I was 11 when this came out.
‘Hazard loves his country, then God, and then his Mother. Maybe you can use his mother, Nat.’
The number of the beast is on the screen and Nat notes it.
Doc: “Murder, Natasha … is the ultimate intimacy. Good luck.”
Nat 💭: “Doctor heal thyself.”
If it quacks like a duck. Nat recognizes a quack.
Nat has to walk the hall through some real twists of meat, bones, and THE NERVE. The four fellow agents call her out from her moniker, to her intimacy with Daredevil, to her Russian past, to her current assignment…applying mindlessly pressure that is a constancy in a women’s life on Earth. Dangling access to a club, she wouldn’t join ever.
We are introduced to Jack Hazzard, who is not exactly the raging bull we were sold. He is contemplative and trying to move away from the violence Nuke represented to him. But he is also being interrupted by Sally, who had a crush on him in high school. Her scraggly Superman blue hair and her Wonder Woman tube top has me developing a crush on ink on paper. She is really opening up to Jack…who is an:
AMERICAN DREAMER
Things go sideways, and who is pulling the strings and what the strings are is becoming opaque. Matt is on a rooftop…and has about the same level of clarity as we do. Somethings off. Joe has two folks suffering after an encounter, and he is still in a war zone, on Independence Day, 1986. Doc might be behind it. Matt’s swinging in.
Guy on the street is dead and on fire. Nat is there, been following. Talking with Matt.
This is the first time they have gotten a chance to catch up since Matt’s life was torn asunder. She uploads him on current affairs and she prefers to take this one in her own, but then changes her tune. They are back together like it’s SF for the night.
Hazard is with his Mom and nephew. And eventually the paths converge. As they fight and talk, eventually Hazard helps Nat pull the trigger on a gun facing him. It’s over, only he already poisoned the mind and armed his nephew.
In our reading, we have ignored much, including the initial appearance of Logan in 1974’s The Incredible Hulk. In that issue it is mentioned, a connection to Weapon ❌. This comic we are reading is from 1991, a collection of pages from Marvel Comics Presents, that became the graphic novel, Weapon ❌ by Barry Windsor Smith. We know this story takes place before 1974. Perhaps inside we will get a clear understanding, but don’t hold your breath. The point is, this takes place before our 1980 beginning and our current 1986 purgatory of time. We had an addendum issue of Uncanny X-Men No. 205, as we had No. 172 at the end of the chapter that was the 4 issue Wolverine limited series. Our initial in-depth exploration into the character. 205 connects the most critical thread of a kidnapped character with arches who will be with us at the end of our story. While not my actual onramp, 205 marks an opportune onramp, if looking to cut this story in half. Of course, I would counter, you are leaving seven masterpieces on the shelf.
And so we turn the page to number 7…
A scientist is shuffling through “experiment-❌ papers, Logan is is driving in search of a big storm. He senses he found it.
Logan is fantasizing about writing his mother. He doesn’t know her. He’s doing his introduction to a Wolverine comic, drinking. He switches from everyone has a Mom to secrets.
Our scientists is focused on the Cornelius files.
A bearded man makes a call, he could be the “mercy killing” quack. A theme continues from DD.
The scientist is The Professor, the bearded man is Dr. Cornelius, and The Professor is completing his little team, interviewing Carol Hines from NASA.
As Logan is at the gun range, the file has been opened and explored on him.
Confusing sequence, to tired to figure out. Neighborhood OD or Logan shot…cut his fingers on a broken glass. Was reading an article about mutants. Logan is taking caring loose ends on the streets, before heading to the Yukon. While experiments are being conducted on a canine.
Logan will be anonymous and hidden in Klondike.
Logan is in his mind about the end comin’
As he is about to leave, he is taken. Not an ❌-Men comic without a kidnapping.
Already a panel talking about he was just shaved a second ago and already has stubble. Super healing hair.
The alternating panels have shifted to him struggle against his captors, and him already being housed in the experiments liquid chamber and the wires and needles set to administer the experiment that will provide his ADIMANTIUM skeleton.
The pace and clarity is disjointed on purpose. This is Logan’s lived experience. The line work and coloring balance his rough edges and the saturated reality of this moment. The technologies lights provide a stabilizing design that highlights moments of dry reality in scientific moments.
The team, really doesn’t understand his healing factor. They selected him for evidence of toughness, but not realizing till now, this is something else entirely.
Interpersonal dynamics are not perfect. The Professor becomes disengaged at a critical moment of consideration.
The Professor was surprised to discover Logan is a mutant and is on the phone with whomever brought him this subject.
Logan becomes aware of his circumstances and being monitored so are the team. There is empathy of his pain and circumstances being expressed, as they created the context for it. He breaks free and the closest person with a lab coat is dead.
Before he can take more out he falls unconscious. The tie him in the wires. The Professor makes the call to pay off the family who just lost their son, and paper over the events.
The Professor and Dr. Cornelius have a discussion of trust and a conversation about mutants…this is far back enough, that the concept of mutants is not wildly known, even within the scientific community.
Logan begins to wake, but The Professor has some sort of blast at his fingertips that puts him back down.
They decide they must start from the beginning with Logan. And Cornelius has tech that can be suggestive if they start over. A pattern is emerging, of stripping him down to most basic elements and then him fighting back as his healing factor gets ahead of the experiments. A torturous cycle that is changing subject and the teams humanity.
They test him in the Alberta winter. Sending wolves at him. He slaughters them.
Equipped with a helmet and machinery, he does the same to a bear.
Logan breaks free and slaughters an army of men next.
The team turns on each other. Logan has empathy for Carol. The Professor is not so lucky.
He escapes and is confronted by a large cat. Somehow the team is alive…but then Logan shows. And we make assumptions from there.
Logan is left to wonder.
The cover of Uncanny ❌-Men places us once again in February of 1986, with implications that it is an image from some time predating 1974. The Windsor-Smith line art and colouring is pink in hue, with other warm highlights of yellow, orange and a cooling purple. Logan clearly has be wearing a costume, brown or yellow is harder to discern.
A look inside reveals this is not a continuation of the streets of Ottawa to the frozen landscape outside Alberta’s Weapon ❌ facility.
This is the debut of THE BODY SHOP, a location nexus hub for much of what I care for in Marvel comics. This is the first time I have really focused in on the issue (beyond browsing) that introduces it, as my first proper Uncanny ❌-Men comic was 207, and 205 is newly acquired. The story here is taking pace between three Alpha Flight issues, that I don’t have, and am not sure in this moment I have even browsed.
We are witnessing the transformation of Daredevil character, Yuriko Oyama, whose father associated with Yakuza, and was the scientist who developed the process to adhere adamantium to bones, and whose notes were stollen to administration Weapon ❌’s experiments. In the films Yuriko is transformed in Alberta, but in the comic she is transformed by our old friend Spiral (Rita Wayword from Longshot), in her (I don’t actually know where this place exists…could be a pocket dimension…maybe we will find out) Body Shop.
The Body Shop
We Will Make a New You
We can see Yuriko, Rita, and three others, on the first page. Wade Cole, Angelo Macon, and Murray Reese, who are former Hellfire Club henches, likely transformed here in the body shop. This is their third appearance, but our first in this reading. I skipped their second issue, but nearly began this entire story with their debut issue, No. 133. I had issue acquiring the issue, but the real reason in the end, was I wanted to go with my oldest ❌-Men comic held since the 80’s that also frames the story in a way that begins with the POV of my generation, Kitty. I do love No. 133, but this is mostly because I got obsessed with the ballad of Harvey and Janet through the pod Jay & Miles ❌-plain the ❌-Men. A love affair subplot of two Hellfire henches. Pretty much the most exciting thing happen in the Marvel Universe during early winter of 1980. But for our purposes, things don’t kick off till winter returns at the end of that same year.
Wade, Angelo, and Murray’s appearance here, marks the unofficial debut of The Reavers (No. 229, it becomes official, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like one…), and Spoiler: these guys will be instrumental and present at the end of this storytelling experiment.
We are in Yuriko’s mind, as the extremes of the torturous transformation are evident to us the the four others who witness, as are the beautiful horrifying colors and shapes that lead her to deconstruct into the question:
“What have I done?!”
Yuriko is admired by Spiral, as Spiral admires her creation. Rita, herself, a temporal paradox, of being Ricochet Rita (see Longshot chapter), who is attacked by a future version of herself, captured and forced to sit for the ❌-Babies (forthcoming, thus future version) transformed by Arize (see Longshot) for Mojo (see Longshot) and then joins Val’s Freedom Force, as she needs a side hustle, because she is trapped in the past on Earth, as punishment for failing to kill Longshot and her passed self, Rita. But her real job here is, trained by Arize, selling alien cybernetic parts to amputees etc…thus The Body Shop.
Yuriko in turn, admires Spiral. And now she is exactly who she needs to be to enact her vengeance. Her “biometric transformation,” into a “cybernetic organism” like Reese, Macon, and Cole, her now fellow Reavers. However, in the same breadth, Rita/Spiral makes clear, our Lady Deathstrike/Yuriko, is beyond this simplification…as a derivative of Yuriko’s fathers experimenting and through the goal to counter her arch, Logan, she she now has her own unbreakable claws to cut through anything.
The deal struck with Spiral, is to reverse the work of the Body Shop on the four Reavers, once they have completed their work.
Spiral: “The Body Shop guarantees satisfaction, or money back.”
Spiral is basically cackling inside, as she is amused by humanity’s paradox of dreaming to acquire what is not ours through murdering other dreamers, while dancing with the devil, “believing you will spin away with soul intact and untainted.”
They exchange eternal gratitude and reciprocal “my pleasure.”
Naturally the scene shifts the South Street Seaport, in Manhattan’s Financial District.
Yuriko, has inherited her father’s disgrace, which is rooted in a failed WWII kamikaze mission and his struggle to atone, a debt piled up, and his daughter, Yuriko burdened the atonement path. Somehow: “The key is Wolverine and the secret locked in his Gaijin brain. His will is the immovable object, but mine is an irresistible force that will not be denied. He will break or be destroyed. Or I shall.” A villainous soliloquy à la Claremont.
Yuriko’s words wash over a winter evening’s boutique shops where in a bathroom our formerly kidnapped friend Katie Powers and her new nanny Miss Randolph are out on the town. Katie is focused on being the independent five-year-old she is (I was the same after the divorce). She is more annoyed by an adults helping hand (then some of us might have been).
Katie uses her super powers to dry her hand when Randolph’s back is turned.
It’s still the Holidays. There is a choirs on the street.
The Reavers are firing on the street. In the chaos and snow Katie looses her sitter.
WONDER WOLF
Logan is there in his brown boots and superhero shorts w/ belt. Katie is over dressed for Christmas. The old friends are meeting up AGAIN during this holiday season.
Logan is the one on the run this time.
Ann Randall (a random NYC finest from an old Dr. Strange issue) and her new partner Sid, confront Logan who is looking extra creepy to them. Not that Katie is sure about her safety here, they don’t seem to understand that Logan and Katie are tight. They think they are witnessing a kidnapping…when this isn’t Katie’s first of it was…and it isn’t. Both these friends have been taken more than they care to admit…well…Katie are not actually on the same page here…she is making the reasonable argument, that Logan is holding her a bit to tight and maybe they should trust Ann and Sid here.
Katie: “I thought we were friends!”
So…
ZPOW!
Katie is independent and frees herself.
“COSTUME ON!”
“Friends don’t hurt friends, Mr. LOGAN…Mr. LOGAN…are you sick?”
The Powers kid nurtures Logan away and thinks through potential solutions.
She hails a cab.
The cab is crashed and attacked by Reavers.
Logan is not right, but his instincts have always served him well enough. He saves Katie.
Logan doesn’t know himself and may be speaking on Japanese (spitballing here).
His memory is slowly recovering.
The Reavers have them in their site, but Lady Deathstrike wants to be in close for this.
Katie is like…I’ll just designate them. And Logan who can speak English now is like…the hell you will kid.
He wants her to do the brave thing, and trust him.
Logan surgically takes out the boys.
Lady Deathstrike v Wolverine round one…presented in that classic Milleresque longshot panels hand to hand combat. Japanese and English banter.
She seeks her freedom through his death. He has other plans and destroys her, to discover the hell she has put herself through at the Body Shop. He is empathetic to what she is, as he has had his own path. She claims it was the path to arch him. She wants a warriors death. He doesn’t oblige. Walks away from a mangled living mess.
Katie can open her eyes and the Lonewolf and Cub for the night walk off panel.
Next: Nine issues of interchanging ❌-Men & ❌-Factor
