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.

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: All-New Wolverine (Vol. 1), Issue #3! In the previous installment, Laura Kinney discovers her sister clones in the sewers plotting their revenge against the Alchemax facility who kept them imprisoned for what I have been led to believe are centuries! Captain Mooney of the Alchemax facility, who has tasked Kinney with finding the clones, thanks her for her service. BUT THEN THE CLONES RETALIATE AND MURDER EVERYONE IN MOONEY’S ARMY! Or at least knocks them rather unconscious.

Taskmaster shows up and shoots the three sisters in the brain. Wolverine is like “oh no” and the Taskmaster is like “oh yes”. That sums it up for now. The sisters are likely fine and the Taskmaster will likely eat his own butt for dinner. Such is the circle of life.

All-New Wolverine (Vol. 1), Issue #3 [February, 2016]
Written by: Tom Taylor

The Taskmaster radios the Alchemax retrieval crew. There are myriad unconscious and/or dead bodies to scoop up, sirs. Bring a shovel.

The three Sisters have all been terminated, so can a brother get a hoo-ray?

Wolverine, though? She– *snikt* …she’s still around. And she looks super fucking pissed. So the Taskmaster gets off the phone. “I was only hired for these three,” says Taskmaster, rather sheepishly I might add. “I’m really not interested in you–”

With a mighty “HRAARGH!”, Kinney leaps toward Taskmaster with her claws and attempts a good ol’-fashioned eye-gouging. Taskmaster grabs her hand easily and tells her to calm down. “Seriously, this is just stupid. Do you have any idea who I am?”

He shows her some powerful moves! He can anticipate any attack, mimic any move, and adapt to any fighting style at the drop of an oversized novelty hat!

Then Kinney snikts Taskmaster right through the center of his hand, then kicks him across the face. So much for countering anything. She pulls the face off of Taskmaster and reveals yet another Laura Kinney clone. A scared Laura Kinney clone.

“They said you don’t kill anymore,” says scared Laura Kinney clone Taskmaster.

“I don’t,” Kinney responds, revving up a fist and then knocking her clone completely out cold.

Meanwhile, behind her, the alive and well Sisters don their masks and brush themselves off. Body armor, son. That’s what helped the not-dying! So I’m two for two: the Sisters are fine, and Taskmaster is currently munching on her own butt. The circle of life continues!

Kinney decides that staying put is a dumb move, so she’s going to follow the Sisters to wherever it is that they want to go to. Also, it turns out that Taskmaster is just some random guy, so forget all that stuff I said about another Kinney clone. The artist drew them so similarly that I’m currently reeling right now with abject anger.

When Kinney convinces Bellona to not put a giant bullet through Taskmaster’s tiny head, Bellona calls her a pacifist.

Would a pacifist do THIS? *sits peacefully*

Billie Eilish is right! You all can kiss her “pacifist” ass!

Bellona is like “all these mopes just tried to kill us, you know”. And Kinney’s like “yeah, I know, but, uh, some of them might have families”. While they bicker, Kinney Clone #3 caps the unconscious Taskmaster right in the knees. That bitch will have to crawl for her bones, now. Let’s boogie!

Soon, in the streets of New York City (New York State) (USA) (Earth), the women pile into a “car” that looks more like an armored truck than a “car”, but a “car” is what they call it (“I’m not sure you can call that a ‘car’,” Kinney says).

While plowing through the road at 450mph, Kinney asks the Sisters where they’re getting all their stuff. Weapons, armor, “cars”. The drone in Paris. Gabby is about to spill the beans, but Bellona stops her blabbermouth sister before she has a chance to say anything.

Then other armored trucks packed with people with shooty guns show up on the road behind the Sisters and start shooting their guns at them. “How did they find us so quickly?” Bellona yells. Kinney makes a face like Garfield and tells her, I don’t know, it’s probably because they’re basically driving a tank through the city? What is this? Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? Because hell yes if it is. That game rules.

Anyway, do you want to know how these army-type men found the Sisters so quickly. It’s because Captain Mooney put a tracker in Kinney’s arm. A tracker that she spends two panels digging out with a razor-sharp claw. Yee-ouch, sir.

Now Bellona is pissed, and she ain’t holding back. Bullets fly everywhere. Even armor-piercing bullets!

See?

The Sisters get down the best they can while Kinney Clone #3 (Zelda) keeps driving. Kinney tells the Sisters drive away and hide while she leaps out of the car to deal with the Alchemax forces. She crashes right through the windshield of the armored car behind her and puts a boot in Captain Mooney’s face, causing him to flip the car like a yo-yo across the street. Of course, he emerges from the damaged vehicle unharmed.

“Until I completely understand what’s going on, the Sisters are under my protection,” says Kinney. Mooney lets out a mirthless laugh and calls them “experiments” again. Soulless non-humans. “They’re like you. Experiments pretending,” he tells Kinney. Kinney reminds him that she already kicked his ass once today, and that he’s in a totaled car, so she can hurt him really bad any day of the week!

“We know where you live,” says Mooney. “We know your friends. We know your X-Men. We know about that boy who flies you around. You can’t steal our property. We own them. You can’t hide from us!”

“I won’t be hiding,” Kinney retorts, walking away.

Later, in an old abandoned warehouse, the Sisters lay low. Kinney finds them so easily that you would think she just used Google Maps and typed in “Laura Kinney clones”.

“How did you find us?” asks Gabby. The car was leaking fuel! She just followed the trail! LOL LOL LOL. Kinney also attached the tracker to a hyperactive squirrel, so Alchemax will be chasing acorns before they know which way is up.

But enough celebration. Zelda ruins the party by saying she’s dying. “Whatever those bastards did to our minds to take away our pain, it took something else too. It took years from us.”

Gabby, once again, insists that they all just ran away from the Alchemax facility. They didn’t blow it up or nuthin’, even though Bellona admits that she wanted to. She wants to make all of them pay. To make them feel the pain that they feel. And all that other happy horseshit.

Kinney tells them all that revenge is a dish best served not at all! Fuck revenge. There’s someone in New York City who can help save their rapidly deteriorating lives! “But I’m warning you,” she adds, “this could get a bit weird.”

The house we’re going to will make Paradise look like South Sudan!

A man flies into view wearing a flamboyant cape and not looking much like Benedict Cumberbatch. “Wolverine, what do you want with DOCTOR STRANGE?”

Final Thoughts

What’s Doctor Strange going to do? Jack off?