Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: All-New Wolverine (Vol. 1), Issue #4! In the previous installment, the Taskmaster shows up for approximately two pages before Laura Kinney stabs him through the hand, knocks him unconscious, and Bellona shoots him in both kneecaps. With that barely-threat neutralized, Kinney catches up with Captain Mooney and tells him that the Sisters are under her protection until further notice!

They go into hiding for about 14 nanoseconds before Kinney decides to take them to Doctor Strange, who will quote-unquote “save them” somehow. Not sure how or why, honestly. Unless Doctor Strange has an attic in his house behind a bookshelf à la Anne Frank, I don’t see much saving happening.

Maybe Doctor Strange can whip up some invisibility potions! That’s the kind of thing he does, right? Maybe he’s got one of them Harry Potter cloaks.

All-New Wolverine (Vol. 1), Issue #4 [March, 2016]
Written by: Tom Taylor

Doctor Strange has a lovely home, doesn’t he? Masks on the walls. Skulls and books lying everywhere. Gabby is unnerved, but Kinney tells her that’s normal. A couple more days locked in Strange’s dungeon and you’ll be whistling a different tune!

“The cupboard just winked at me,” says Bellona, narrowing her eyes. “It doesn’t have a face. But I know it winked at me. Inanimate objects shouldn’t wink.”

Strange bounds into the room looking quite smiley. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, I just had to exorcise something.” He goes up to Kinney’s ear and asks her, uh, why there are four of her here. He doesn’t get a straight answer, so he whips out his Eye of Agamotto to look deeper into their—OH GOD!!

-Gabby is fundamentally good, but she has witnessed much evil.

-Zelda is… not so good.

-Bellona is a fuckin’ psychopath.

Sounds like a recipe for trOuble with a capital “O”! Strange asks to speak with Kinney alone, where he tells her that these women may not be deserving of her salvation and protection. Kinney responds by asking him to look at her with the Eye of Abogado, or whatever. And he sees bad things. Bad, bad, bad things. Terrible things! Oh wait, he was looking at a bowl of spiders.

“Are you sure I deserve salvation?” she asks him. Strange tells her that she is the right person to replace Logan, but she doesn’t think “replacement” is the right word. She barely even knows what she’s doing!

Good point. Maybe that’s why he was always trying to get dates with strippers.

“The Sisters deserve the same chance I had. Will you help?” Kinney asks.

“How?”

“Something has been done to their minds. They can’t feel pain, but it’s killing them.”

And while Doctor Strange explains to Kinney that there may be hope yet for these ladies, Bellona puts several bullets into the cupboard. “It winked at me again!” she cries as incandescent light flows from the cupboard out of the bullet holes. Strange is beside himself! That cupboard was a doorway and Bellona just broke the seal! Arrrghh! That’ll take hours to take care of! Go. Just go. Get out. Go. Now.

Just kidding! Strange is like “sigh” and then whips out double-bladed axe to fight the hellish woolie mammoth-looking demon with the snakes coming out of its mouth that’s coming out of the portal. But it runs away out into the streets. So Bellona chases it with her gun while Strange works on closing the portal. Gabby has a gun too. They all have guns!

Eventually, Wolverine leaps right on top of it and buries the double-bladed axe right into the middle of its head. Good night, hell beast.

The Sisters bicker about insubordination and loose cannon-ism so fervently that they don’t even notice that Zelda lies supine on the sidewalk as if dead! Strange feels a weak pulse on her throat, so they need to move fast! TELEPORTATION TIME! *teleportation noises* Aaaaaaannnnndd, they’re at a hospital. That was nice and easy.

Look, buddy. What you do with those gnomes on your own time is nobody’s business but yours.

Doctor Strange used to work at the New York Hospital and now he can come and go as freely as he pleases and disrupt daily operations with unsympathetic abandon. “I need to look inside her head now,” he says with a constipated look of seriousness on his face as Kinney pushes Zelda into the Medical Imaging room.

As the now-conscious Zelda gets loaded up into an MRI scanner, she holds Kinney’s hand. “You saw our sister in Paris, didn’t you?” she asks with wild eyes. “You saw yourself die.”

Yep. Duh. Keep up.

Zelda understands how hard that is, since at beginning in the Alchemax facility there were ten of them to begin with. Zelda watched some die during experiments, some left to starve in cages, some humorously shot out of cannons. “That’s when we realized what was happening. That’s when we decided to escape and end on our own terms.”

“Laura,” Zelda continues. “Save her. Save Gabby. We managed to protect her. She’s not like us. She’s what we should have been.” And Kinney promises that they’ll both save her. Just hold on for a little bit lo–

Then she dies! Just kidding!

Outside the room, where Bellona and Gabby were ordered to stay put, a doctor walks by and asks what they’re doing there. Bellona is a millimeter from stabbing the guy’s hand as he reaches for the phone to call security, but Gabby stops her. “Our wizard friend is in there trying to save the life of our older clone,” Gabby smiles. The doctor is like “huh?”, “what?” and “ok, fine” and walks away.

Errol Flynn has blinded me with science!

Meanwhile, after thirty-five seconds of intense brain scanning, Strange finds nanites swirling around Zelda’s noggin! “They’re far too small and too numerous for me to operate on,” he says, further explaining that Zelda may only have days or hours or years or seconds to live. Kinney’s like “shit, I told her otherwise.”

Well, tough nuggets. Doctor Strange can’t do anything even though he’s the greatest sorcerer in the entire seven universes. He tells Kinney that they can fight this with SCIENCE. He promptly snaps his fingers and the Sisters are all immediately swathed in this weird, bright blue light, which causes them all to be transported somewhere, I don’t know where, but it’s important because it has just what Kinney needs.

She has come up with a brilliant idea, you see. Here’s the gist: nanites are small, right? Super small? And how do you kill small things? By becoming small yourself. Only by becoming smaller can one overcome the oppression of small things!

In other words, Kinney is going to steal a little bug suit being held in a glass jar in some random laboratory. Comic over.

Final Thoughts

Maybe the Wasp comes into play here. Or perhaps the All-New Wasp who is really fat and likes to change the subject to cheesecake.