World Enough and Time

12 Things I Loved about Daken: Dark Wolverine #4

Every time this comic comes out, I fear it won't be the same - the quality will slip, the subtle tensions will fall apart, the funny bits won't be funny any more, or the exciting parts exciting. Will the plot become predictable, as with so many other comics?

So far, as written by Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu, drawn by the wonderful Giuseppe Camuncoli, it's delighted me every time. This is what I liked about #4:

( 1. Reed and Sue are written like adults. )

( 2. The ugly costume is burned to scraps. )

( 3. Daken's sincere repentance. )

( 4. Daken wears a Fantastic Four T-shirt. )

( 5. Daken flirts with Ben Grimm. Who else dares to flirt with the Thing? )

( 6. Ben is won over. )

( 7. Daken and Johnny talk about peace. )

( 8. Franklin has Daken pegged. )

( 9. Reed and Sue aren't gullible. )

( 10. Daken proves he's still a ruthless bastard: he steals a newspaper. )

( 11. We have a twist in the plot. )

( 12. Madripoor, city of wonder - or is it Sin City? )

( 13. Way and Liu have been watching 'Leverage'. )

From The Fannish Five: Name five characters who would love to attend a family reunion.

Seems oddly worded, but if the question means "five characters whose family reunion would be interesting to see" - well, then! Funny how most of the characters in most of what I read lack relatives. So many orphans. And so many people with villainous brothers.

1. Francis Crawford of Lymond. If we allow all the semi-related to attend - the illegitimate half-sister, the adopted son on his enemy, the uncle/father and the grandfather/father... What a bunch they would be! I am myself a great fan of Rankin, the First Baron, and would love to see him and Sybilla together.
   
   
2. The Summers family from X-Men. Add in the alternate future generations (like Rachel, always a favourite) and the dead and the demonic... Not sure where Jean Grey would fit in here: maybe she'd better stay dead, though it would be fun to see Emma Frost (Scott Summers' current love, the White Queen) meet Madeline Pryor (his first wife, the Goblin Queen). Polaris and Magneto should be there - would that include Wanda and Pietro, as Havok's ex-half-brother- and ex-half-sister-in-law? Or Wiccan and Speed, as the semi-existant magical half-nephews? And Hulking, as the boyfriend of one of them? Heh: this could be fun, figuring how big a crowd we could get. Can we add in Cable, his wife and son (long-dead in the distant future) and Stryfe? At some point, thinking too much about the Summers family ends in a headache from exploding brain synapses.
   
   
3. A sort of tie here for two comic book 'families' who both are and are not literal families: the Batman family (at DC) and the Wolverine family (at Marvel).
   
   The first consists basically of those in batcostume and their closest friends: Bruce Wayne, his son Damian, his adopted son Dick, the various Robins, Batgirl, Batwoman, Oracle, the Birds of Prey, Alfred. Maybe Catwoman (with Helena? can I call her Helena Wayne?¹) or Talia al-Ghul².
   
   Though Wolverine tends to treat the X-Men as family, and has had a number of wives and lovers, the Wolverine family consists of only three people: Logan, his son Daken, and his clone X-23. Probably better not to have them all in the same room together, though in the right circumstances, it might be fun. I'd like to see X-23 and Daken compare notes. Have they ever met, canonically? Not as far as I know - which means it's a meeting just waiting to happen.
   
   
4. The Winchesters: Sam, Dean, and their father John. Just because I adored John and would like to see him again in any capacity. Castiel could join them - a guardian angel is sort of like a family member, right? I'd like to see Castiel meet John Winchester. Then there's the newly-alive-again grandfather and those cousins. Guess we'd have to allow Adam, dead or alive.
   
   
5. The Doctor in Doctor Who. For someone who has no relatives and is the last of his kind, there are an awful lot of potential relatives: a mother we seem to have barely glimpsed, a father, at least one wife and possibly two (can we count River Song?), a child or children unspecified, a granddaughter Susan, a clone-daughter, and - anyone else? Well, since it's a big party, and can include all of time and space, I'd allow any of the regenerations of the Doctor who want to attend, and any of the companions as well. The TARDIS is big. It could handle the crowd.

---

¹ Let me explain this a little for non-readers of Batman: Selina Kyle (Catwoman) had a daughter named Helena. We never learned for sure who Helena's father was, but Bruce Wayne showed considerable paternal-style interest in her, and we know Bruce and Selina had been sleeping together at some point before that. The Earth-2 Batman (don't ask, it gets complicated) and the Earth-2 Catwoman had a daughter named Helena Wayne, who became The Huntress.

² Talia al-Ghul is, canonically, the mother of Batman's son Damian.

I wanted to do a commentary and picspam on The Incredible Hulk #603, just because I enjoyed it so much. This story is full of father issues.

Now, I don't normally read The Incredible Hulk. I think the only times I've read the Hulk comics is when I got them as hardcovers from the library, and read that wonderful run by Paul Jenkins about a decade ago. I'd never read anything by the current writer, Greg Pak. I think maybe now I'm missing something there. Judging by this, he's well worth reading. This issue came out about a year ago.

The variant cover on the issue I bought wasn't promising. It looked silly.

This wasn't ... Okay, it was on the light side, a contrast to all the dark and depressing Wolverine Origins material I'd been reading about Daken. This was delightful.

So: a monster and an assassin walk into a bar... The big green monster is Skaar, son of the Hulk. The assassin is Daken, ( son of Wolverine. )

Ten reasons I'm loving Daken, son of Wolverine:

1. He talks back to Norman Osborne. He fears nothing and no one.
   
2. He's clever.
   
3. I like his sense of humour: dark, impish, defiant.
   
4. He wears designer suits. He dresses better than Tony Stark - except when he doesn't. Wears tattoos and nakedness well, too.
   
5. With a good artist, he's gorgeous. Wild hair.
   
6. Wolverine loves him, even though he breaks his heart.
   
7. He has funny phone conversations on rooftops with Johnny Storm.
   
8. He has moments of painful vulnerability.
   
9. He remains ambiguous, with an edge.
   
10. He's bisexual, or omnisexual. Pansexual? But avoids defining himself.
    
11. He's the best there is as what he does, or maybe second-best after his father.
    

My explorations of the history of Daken, son of Wolverine, led me today to read the beautiful hardcover edition of Dark Avengers: Molecule Man by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato. Bendis is one of my favourite comic book writers; Deodato one of my favourite artists. I enjoyed this thoroughly.

But Daken's presence is token at best. He's one of the team. He's there. He gets a few reaction shots and maybe twenty words of dialgogue; and that's it. This isn't his story. It's about Norman Osborn and Victoria Hand and Owen Reese, the Molecule Man.

The Molecule Man has always been a lame villain, but in the hands of Bendis, he turns into something interesting, the fulcrum of a fascinating plot. Besides, I have a soft spot for him. He was in one of the first Marvel comics I ever read, Fantastic Four #20.

The story in brief: ( while the Dark Avengers are... )

How would Daken have turned out if Wolverine raised him?? How are they going to play this? That Daken is inevitably doomed to a sociopathic life? Or he turns out to be an accountant whose favourite hobby is golf?

Or maybe it's that the family that kills together, stays together.

Really, I'm having trouble imagining Logan as a single parent regularly going to the PTA.

And while I'm talking about Daken again, I found an interesting paragraph from a review of the recent Daken: Dark Wolverine #1 by David Prepose at Newsarama:

...Where Way and Liu succeed is they don't just take Daken through the horror and the mud... They take him to all the beautiful people, as well. It's a bit of a soft reintroduction to the character after the duo's stellar first arc, but as the man says, there's a terrible beauty to Daken, thanks to his pheromone-emitting powers. Seeing him mill around with models and designers is a fairly unique method of getting him a new costume — but it allows Camuncoli to amp up the expressiveness. When Daken looks at you, eating a strawberry, watch out — the soft lines around his eyes have the making of a snarl just beneath.

That description makes me think of Desire in The Sandman, another beautiful, dangerous character:

Desire: Have a grape.
Dream: I do not want a grape.
Desire: I can make you want a grape.

The chills up the back effect is the same with Daken.

I continue my quest to read all appearances of Wolverine's son Daken, also known as Dark Wolverine, and my attempts to figure him out. Spine-chillingly sane, is he also as evil as he seems? What lies under his various masks? Is there anything to him but blade-sharp intelligence and cruelty? What does he want?

The Norns offered him Ragnarok, universal destruction, and he turned it down.

Yesterday I read (and talked about) Wolverine Origins #31 - 36, which were early stories about Daken and his relationship with his father. Those were from early 2009. Today I read Dark Wolverine #83, cover dated April 2010, which is about Daken and his view of himself. What a difference a couple of years makes. What a difference in sophistication and style. The writing (and storytelling) by Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu is dramatic, powerful, subtle, and original. It helps that the artist was good - Italian Giuseppe Camuncoli, impressively portraying the subtleties and strengths that make up Daken.



It helps too that here we get events through Daken's own point of view - and the Norn's assessment of him, a man potentially strong enough to become the god they need.

The story takes place during last year's Siege of Asgard, when Norman Osborn (Daken's boss) decided to destroy Asgard. In the ( middle of the battlefield... )

And here's Daken's reply to me, in my impatience to find and read all of his stories:



Best line of the comic is the first one: Everyone falls.

1. Can anyone here suggest a word processing program with which you can start numbering the pages automatically on page 2? Or with which you can omit page numbers from any given page or pages?

2. Anyone know where I can find Dark Wolverine fanfic? Or good X-Men slash?

Battling, and failing to resist, my new pash. In my recent comic book reading, I've become increasingly fascinated by Daken, son of Wolverine from his first marriage to the Japanese Itsu.

I can just imagine Daken's smirk.

Daken (whose name means 'mongrel') had mostly been featured as a villain in Wolverine: Origins - or so I believe, since I've never read Wolverine: Origins - yeah, I love Wolvie, but a fan can't read everything. Daken is and was an assassin - and I don't usually like assassins personally, except for Elektra. Looks as if Daken might be another exception. The DK book Wolverine: Inside the World of the Living Weapon has this to say (page 170):

Wolverine was captured by the government peacekeeping force SHIELD for staging an attack on the White House in order to gain information about his past. He was subsequently freed by a mysterious man disguised in a SHIELD uniform. As the man took off his helmet, Logan realized that he was looking at his own son for the very first time.

I like fraught father/son relationships (admittedly, this one is a little extreme); I like arrogant characters (Magneto, anyone?); I love mixed-race characters; I love older men, especially if they don't look it; I love bisexual characters - and the fact that Daken had the balls to flirt with Bullseye (Marvels's worst bad-ass assassin psychokiller) and even kiss him charms me no end.

Not only is Daken omnisexual like Captain Jack Harkness, one of his superpowers is to control pheromones. He really can get anyone into his bed, and not just by turning on the charm, though he has that, too. Master manipulator. I'm not the only one who likes him: I found this lovely picture by O-Key on Deviantart: Daken's pheromone problem.

It occurs to me that Daken reminds me of Shinobi Shaw, one of my favourite Marvel villains - not a biggie, and as far as I know he hasn't been around for ages, which is a pity. I loved him and his Hellfire Club. Had him flirting with Sam Guthrie in one of my Magneto slash stories.

Now picturing a Daken/Shinobi team-up...



Sadly, the Daken action figure is ugly, and some drawings of him are, too. No character is better than his writer or artist. I've gone through worse with Magneto. Sadly, I suspect the writers and artists are going to keep him on the dark side of darkness and play him as an ugly monster as they are wont to do, rather than the ambiguous, sexy, possibly-redeemable character I want him to be. Not that I want him redeemed, mind you. Just redeemable.

We shall see.