The state of mutantdom in a post-Krakoa world is unstable, though not all of the new X-Men range of books quite agree on how unstable. There are street carnivals dedicated to mutants over in Uncanny X-Men, there are more pointedly anti-mutant military institutions over in X-Men, while in Laura Kinney: Wolverine, there’s an endless procession of singular mutants in trouble.
You see, Laura’s got a mission – a very broad mission: she’s going to help those individual mutants. In her first issue she discovers a dead-drop at the old X-Men treehouse in Central Park, a sort of secret missing-person message board, and for the first three issues, the book roughly sticks to this unique origin-point for Laura’s mission.
Marvel
The first five issues of the series – collected in Laura Kinney: Wolverine Vol. 1: One Mutant Army – are uneven, not exactly in quality but in concept; our first issue sees Laura in full lone wolf mode, doing the sorts of hardcore slicing, dicing, and sleuthing one might expect of a Wolverine on a singular rescue mission. It’s a smart way to set the baseline for the character’s current mission and mode – violent but morally driven – before the rest of the book devolves into a sort of Marvel Team-Up: Bad Asses Edition.
Because with issues two through five, the book becomes a series of buddy cop stories, first with Elektra as Daredevil and then with Winter Soldier. This shift could be seen as a sort of celebration of the sorts of team-ups that were ever-present in solo books of the 1990s: solo books became a sort of revolving door of guest spots for characters looking to cross-promote their own books. It was a surefire way to drive up sales for one or both of the featured players.
Marvel
The shift could, from a more jaded standpoint, be seen as a diminishing of Laura’s agency. Her mission becomes muddled with the influence of her peers; by the time we get to the Bucky story, the Central Park dead drop has been forgotten and, to some degree, so has her purpose of tracking down the mutants who have fallen through the cracks in that post-Krakoa society. Bucky blanket pitches her with tracking down an old war criminal baddie with the vague promise that mutants are being harmed, somehow.
Marvel
The characters chosen are meant to temper Laura’s inner demons: both are killers, humans made weapons by shadowy overlords. Like Laura, they’ve been manipulated but have come to the side of the angels; ostensibly, they’re here to teach Laura valuable lessons about herself. The book doesn’t commit itself to proving Laura has learned any lessons at all. The book never quite seems to move our lead much in any one way or another. Emotional growth doesn’t play much of a part in these five issues. This is a relentless pursuit of vaguely-justified action over character introspection.
None of this makes Laura Kinney: Wolverine a failure. The action is precise, exciting, and compelling, and Laura remains as badass as she’s ever been. These issues feel like a wind-up for something bigger, something more impactful, but that doesn’t make them sleepers in their own right.
It might be best, however, to return Laura to her singular mission, to use the book to further define the status of mutants in a new batch of comics that can’t quite decide. The lost and overlooked ddeserve a champion as strong as Laura.
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