UNCANNY X-MEN #162: Beyond the Farthest Star!

Wolverine Alone 2: Lost in Brood York

Originally Published October 1982

We begin... in medias res!

Like many of the great stories of our time we find ourselves dropped into an unfamiliar setting with the action obviously underway. Wolverine, clad in tattered alien garb, is alone, skulking through an exotic alien jungle. And according to the narration up there, he may or may not be dying.

We soon see that he is running from a cadre of Brood Hunters who want to bring him down with their crazy laser weapons.

He puts up a good struggle but is in no shape to outfight so many of the alien attackers. He escapes, only to find himself trapped in a giant alien spiderweb. And what's worse, he appears to be plagued by an acute abdominal distress...

Wolverine reflects on how we got here - how they were aboard Lilandra's yacht having a grand old time celebrating Charles' awakening, until suddenly the festivities were crashed by Deathbird and the Brood.

The X-Men were taken captive, and put until a hypnotic suggestion to make them think everything was okay. Wolverine, being Wolverine, knew this was not the case, but could not convince his teammates otherwise.

One by one, the X-Men are called before a mysterious figure, who appears to be a ginormous Shi'ar woman, but is in fact...

I'm sure that's nothing.

Agitated by this memory, Wolverine wakes up in the web, and fights his way past several scavenger beasts who seek to make a meal out of him.

Once he has scared off the beasties, Wolverine lies down, too exhausted to keep fighting and thinking maybe he'll just die. Instead, he continues to ruminate on what happened after the X-Men were kidnapped - awakening on what appeared to be the Shi'ar homeworld, but he knew to be an illusion.

Unfortunately, he couldn't convince any of the other X-Men of the same so he unfortunately had to to go it alone, like a true badass loner.

While creeping around the castle, Wolverine comes across none other than Deathbird's ally Fang (formerly of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard, and who once got his clothes stolen by Wolverine.) Fang appears to be tortured by the Brood, much to his confusion since they are supposed to be allies, but the aliens only guffaw at that. It turns out they're not ones for alliances and pacts.

Most horrifically, we see that Fang is not merely being tortured, but - transformed!

Wolverine pieces it together for us - all of the X-Men have been implanted with a Brood Egg, which will soon hatch and take over their body and psyche, transforming them into gross alien miscreants! What a world!

Wolverine has something of an existential crisis - is it even possible to stop what is happening? If not, what's the point of fighting, of escaping? But he decides all the same to make a stand.

Though he cuts down all the Brood Hunters, eventually the time comes and the transformation is triggered. What will become of Wolverine?

Naturally, Wolverine's mutant healing factor kicks in and destroys the invading species.

Wolverine has survived... but at what cost? He must go back for his friends, and yet if there's no way to undo the Brood implantation, they're doomed, and he will have to kill them too.

To be continued!

Further Thoughts:

This is a really admirable issue. We finally learn exactly what the Brood are about and what the unique danger is that they present. They are not simply hunters and predators, but corruptors who co-opt some of their victims very bodies into their own twisted ends. With the framing device of Wolverine's escape, it's all explained in a way that maximizes suspense and excitement while still giving us exactly the information that we need. And in the end it gives us that all-important "I can't... but I must!" moment when Wolverine realizes he may have to get stabby with his friends.

Dave Cockrum turns in a tour-de-force here, keeping Wolverine busy with a nonstop chase and battle, and nailing the hazy feeling of the flashbacks. It's one of the most interesting, compelling and exciting issues he has ever drawn.

One of sneakily notable attributes of this issue that I didn't call attention to above, but you might have noticed, is the narration captions. Usually, those little boxes would be used for scripter Claremont to fill us in on the meaning of the action, and provide colour commentary, using a third-person omniscient voice, and any thoughts that the Wolverine character were to provide would appear in those fluffy thought bubbles we always see. Instead, perhaps because this was to be a one-man show with scant dialogue, and the idea of cluttering up the page with tons of bubbles was unappealing, Wolverine "narrates" the action, relating his thoughts, observations and motivations to us, the reader, giving us a more immediate and personal, yet limited and suspenseful, perspective.

At this time, Chris Claremont was also working on the Wolverine Limited series with Frank Miller, who made such captions a trademark in his own work. (I looked around and couldn't find one in his contemporary Daredevil comics until after this issue, but don't quote me on that.) However, because the X-Men is usually an ensemble book, this kind of narration has not usually been commonplace since, even as it has become more normal in the years following Watchmen, which used the technique extensively.

 

Lastly, while Wolverine's healing abilities have been commented on before, it's rare that they have been so integral to a story. So far they've only been as powerful as the story needed, and until now they've never needed to be the reason why he was able to expel an invasive alien parasite. It was inevitable, of course, that this would someday snowball to where Wolverine routinely comes back from near death, or even apparent actual death, and while you would think this would take some of the excitement away, this being comics, the opposite happened and it became all the more exciting watching Wolverine get himself into extremely deadly situations knowing he could barely be injured let alone killed.

I mean, it's comics after all. Knowing he isn't going to die doesn't really hurt because you already know he's not going to ever die - because it's comics!