Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: All-New Wolverine (Vol. 1), Issue #1!

What makes Wolverine “all-new”? Did he get a fresh manicure? Has he been preserved in carbonite? Did someone shove an ice pick in his forehead and now he’s all nice and warm and fuzzy? I “can’t wait to see”.

All-New Wolverine (Vol. 1), Issue #1 [January, 2016]
Written by: Tom Taylor

Oh snap! It’s something I never expected!

“SNIKT! X-23 was created to be a weapon. For a time, that’s all she was. But Laura Kinney escaped that life with the help of the man she was cloned from, the man who became her mentor: The Wolverine. Tragically, the original Wolverine has fallen, and the mantle has been left empty. Laura will live as Logan’s legacy, and she will fight for her brighter future. She will leave behind her old life and make a new one. She is the ALL-NEW WOLVERINE.”

In short, Wolverine now has titties! If she’s even a fraction as grumpy as her predecessor then I’m in for a real treat!

We begin in Paris, France. I can tell because all the action is happening directly under the Eiffel Tower. I don’t know what’s going on other than there’s a lot of foot traffic, it’s raining, and an obviously terrified woman keeps kicking the faces of men in suits who want to point their guns at her. When a pedestrian stops, stares, and says “No! You’re one of them, aren’t you?”, the woman is like “no, it’s not what you think, I’m not an assassin, at least I’m not anymore, who said anything about me being an assassin now or ever??”. Then the woman tells the man to GET DOWN while someone has the woman in his sniper scope.

“Where are you?” she glares, looking around for her assailant. Then she pushes the man inside an armored car and tells her men to take him to a bomb-proof bunker. Then man thanks her, then she gets sniped right through the middle of the forehead!

This is the prologue. Strap in, because it’s just going to get even more hectic and tense. I predict many bullets flying into areas where many other bullets are also flying.

“Hey, Laura,” says the gruff mouth from the hazy face of Large Adult Wolverine. “Laura? Kid? You with us?” This part is actually from the past. “Turns out, that drug runner had a bazooka.”

Laura winces as she gets up off the ground. They’re in a meadow surrounded by burning fire. “I’m sorry,” she says, brow crinkled in an expression of sorrow and worry. “I had a chance to take him out. I had a chance to kill him.”

Wolverine tells her to shut the fuck up! Don’t apologize for anything! Especially not to him! Sure, the two of them were designed in a lab. Sure, the two of them were meant to be killing weapons. As in, weapons for killing. Not “killing the weapons”. You can’t kill weapons, can you? Anyway, Wolverine assures Laura that killing is easy! “I’ve killed loads of people. So have you. You know what’s hard? FIGHTING it. Fighting what they programmed us to be. Fighting against all the hate they beat into us.” Yadda yadda, no shame in letting someone go.

Laura sniffs the air. She still has Bazooka Man’s scent, and even though all her internal organs are spilling out of her anus as we speak, she still wants to get up and chase the guy down.

She learned from the best, Logan. If she wants to run around with 17 broken ankles, so be it.

“I’m sorry you weren’t cloned from someone with more sense,” Wolverine says. “Hell, I’m sorry for all the bits of me you were born with.”

Laura looks cross-eyed with her stupid ask. “I’m not,” she rebuts. She has all the good bits: regeneration powers, watchful eyes, a formidable penis. Wolverine doesn’t argue with her any further, because why should he? Stubborn, right? He instead smiles and assures her that they’ll find this guy and torture him a bit. How does that sound? Laura snikts in response. Good lass.

“I’m not disappointed you didn’t kill him, kid,” says Logan. Wolverine. Logan Wolverine. “You’re the best there is at what you do. But that doesn’t mean you have to do it.” Yeah yeah yeah, overflowing with wisdom this guy.

Fast-forward back to Paris where Laura is yelling on the ground, in the ray, without a single scratch or visible bullet wound. The public surrounds her, taking pictures. She slowly gets up, remembers where she is, and gets on the phone asking the individual on the other end if they have eyes on the shooter. The answer is no. So she’ll keep looking.

While the crowd surrounds her, she starts donning her Wolverine uniform. The voice at the other end is like “don’t cause a scene, ya ninny”, but she causes a scene anyway. She becomes Wolverine – the all-new Wolverine, as it were – and snikts out some dangerously sharp claws! “I want them to see the Wolverine coming,” she says, standing majestically in the rain. Everyone is taking photos and videos with their phones. I would be too if I ever even thought about setting foot in Paris for any reason whatsoever. Maybe the food. But not the art! Fuck the Louvre! Burn it down!

Nothing like foiling a little Eiffel Tower snipin’ to feel productive.

The assailant pops out from behind a rail and tries shooting at Wolverine, but he misses. Wolverine SNIKTS the gun in half, but then gets punched in the face by the masked man. Or woman, as it appears.

Wolverine tells her to stop this crazy fighting! “You — you of all people – should be helping us. You don’t have to do this! I just want to help you!”

The masked woman gets punched and gutted and maimed and thrown around and dismembered and murdered, but she appears to be unfettered. “That doesn’t hurt?” Wolverine asks, gripping her hand. “Nothing hurts,” the masked woman responds. By now, the Parisian police have arrived to “help”, so the masked woman gives up. “I failed,” she says to what I presume is some sort of radio. “He’s in the car. Call in the drone.”

“You will never stop us. You will never hurt us. No one can ever hurt us again,” she says as she climbs through a hole in the chain link fence at the top of the Eiffel Tower and drops to her death. Wolverine is like “Stop it! Rrrraaagghhh!! Stop killing yourself!!”

Before the police can gun down Wolverine like the pesky little worm she is, she leaps out of the Tower and tells Angel (you know, Angel. That guy. Not the one on Buffy. I’m talking about Angel. The Marvel Angel) to be ready at the count of three. After three, he swoops in and grabs her in mid-air.

“Just counting to three when I don’t know exactly where you are and gravity is involved, is a terrible idea,” he scolds while STUBBORN LAURA “WOLVERINE” KINNEY grits her teeth with a face that says “no it isn’t.”

Wolverine worries that they lost the drone. Angel is not as worried!

No one Hiroshimas the capital of France on my watch!

Wolverine demands that Angel carries her above the explosion, an action that Angel is more than hesitant to carry out for her. Plus… he wants to discuss “the plan”. It sounds very relationship-y, but Wolverine is not at all in the mood to indulge Warren “Angel “ “Buffet” McDougle’s need to talk about “the plan” until after she gets killed! Now move!

So Angel drops her on top of the explosion-causing drone. She snikts to the side and almost falls off, but she eventually gets the correct footing and stands on top of it as it flies around crazily. “ANGEL — CLEAR THE STREET. GET EVERYONE OUT OF THE WAY. I’M BRINGING IT DOWN.”

Angel picks up two people at a time from the street and carries them off to safety, a procedure that would take a normal flying man in real life approximately forty hours to complete. Not Angel! He clears the area in seventeen seconds while Wolverine, using only the power of a fierce glower and nothing else, is able to bring a drone down. Who said comics had to be entertaining or good?

The drone lands on the street and explodes, sending Wolverine thudding across the cobblestones. Angel is worried for about two panels, but she’s fine. Of course she’s fine. She’s Wolverine. The All-New Wolverine.

“I just rode an exploding predator drone. You think I’m afraid of a public display of affection? I just… hngg… have a dislocated shoulder, some third-degree burns, and three to six cracked ribs. So, squeezing me before I have time to heal might not end well,” she says.

Love is a tricky bitch.

After a few minutes of rest and recovery, Angel hoists Laura’s bulk and carries her over to the dead masked assassin, who is already getting crowded by people with cameras and phones and cameraphones. Laura moves through the crowd, approaches the dead woman, lifts the masks off her face, and reveals…

Laura Kinney.

No one seems surprised that the dead woman is also the alive woman.

“She couldn’t feel pain. Some bastard took feeling away from her. Angel. Get us out of here.”

Angel lifts Laura out of the scene while the fat police run fatly to the dead woman. “There are more out there. I have to stop them. And I have to save them.”

Final Thoughts

Yeah, ok, she’s X-23 and she was made in a lab, so there are other X-23s running around and cavorting. I get it. That’s why she doesn’t want them to kill themselves. Well, I for one hope that each one dies spectacularly in each ensuing issue! Only then will I have any fun.