X-23 #1 Review

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Anyone interested can find me at the Big Apple Comic show hanging at Danielle Corsetto’s booth. Hope to see you!

Story Title: Innocence Lost (Part 1)

Story by: Craig Kyle
Written by: Craig Kyle & Christopher Yost
Penciled by: Billy Tan
Inked by: Jon Sibal
Colored by: Brian Haberlin
Lettered by: Chris Eliopoulos
Publisher: Marvel Comics

Harley Quinn is pretty cool, isn’t she? I mean, she started off as a cute comic foil for the Joker on Batman to, I assume, raise the levity of the character a notch. Plus, there is so few Batvillains that are female, so they upped the T & A factor. It worked, and Harley is now an established part of the Batman/Joker mythos. It wasn’t until NYX though, that I had ever heard of a character named X-23.

All I knew was in issue #3 there was a hot gothy hooker who had just apparently killed her john with Wolverine claws. Suddenly, X-23 had made her splash in the X-verse, and I still had no idea that she was originally on the X-Men Evolution cartoon.

So, NYX dies it’s horrible and sad little death and we are left with Marvel wanting to introduce this Wolverine-ette into the main X-Verse. They push her into an X-book quickly, suddenly, and she all but disappears until now. This is the story of the Little Wolverine That Could.

STORY!

Introduce Doctor Sutter, a cute brunette chippy that looks remarkably close to our unnamed X-23. By page two you already can start to assume what’s going to happen. Anyway, Sutter is working for the Weapon X project deep in the bowels of Canada. She’s been given the task to clone the DNA they have of one Wolverine and make a new one. It seems the first one has gone rogue or something, but since I’ve never heard such stuff I can only pontificate upon it. (Yes, this is sarcasm.)

So Sutter does what she’s supposed to do. She figures out a way to create another Wolverine from the bits and pieces of the DNA they have of him – here’s the rub though, it’s going to be a girl. Well, be damned if the Weapon X project doesn’t think that will work. Wolverine, a girl? How preposterous! Girls can’t kill people! Girls don’t even know anything besides their nails and, apparently, genetic markers. So she is poopoo’d.

Sutter, though, knows it’s the only way to get the job done – so she does it. She finishes her research and throughout some backbiting with her co-scientists, she is impregnated with little Wolvie-ette. End of ish.

How does it stack up? It’s filled with scientific jargon that, if I felt the urge to research, wouldn’t hold up to any kind of science litmus test. (That’s a science reference.) The story is laden with cliche, from the doctor having to take on the specimen herself – to the masogynistic way that it seems Weapon X handles not only female scientists, but the possibility of female subjects. All of it lead to a very lackluster read. Not horrendous, but nothing I would have staked my life on being amazing. Just be thankful Claremont didn’t write it.

ART!

Well, aside from the cover looking like our new Weapon X gal is a grumpy old muppet, the art is a mixed bag too. Reeking a bit of ‘Liefeld Line-a-Tosis’ Billy Tan at least knows the shape of the human body. He actually comes across like a much more poor man’s Mark Silvestri than a rich man’s Liefeld. The book’s characters smells fo the old Image house-style, with some of the panel sensibility of Marvel. Not BAD art, it just gives me flashbacks to the early days of Top Cow. The coloring and shading are perfectly peachy, and nothing to note there.

Overall!

X-23 is one of those titles that people are walking in with a brain for or against it already. If you are huge on Wolverine canon, or loved the cartoon, or have a thing for hot gothy prostitutes – you are already sold on this series. If you were giving this issue a chance to be your watermark, it sadly has let you down and you are now going to wait until she appears in continuity again. An average comic, when I seriously felt that it could have been quite a bit more.