All-New Wolverine: The Four Sisters was the opening arc of Tom Taylor's series about Laura Kinney assuming the mantle of Wolverine during the stretch where Logan was dead, but there were somehow more books about him than ever. The overarching plot is about Laura tracking down a group of clones of herself Alchemax made with some of Laura's genetic material they got from the bunch that created her. David Lopez makes the older clones look very similar to Laura, while Gabby is a bit less so. All that might just be her tendency to smile a lot, something none of the others, including Laura, do often. Alchemax CEO Guy insists the clones are inhuman monsters who killed a bunch of people when they escaped. Alchemax CEO Guy is, of course, full of shit.
Also, it is weird to me to see a fictional company I associate with 2099 Marvel in present day Marvel. It's not 2099 yet!
Laura ultimately tries her best to protect the other girls - Gabby, Zelda, and Bellona - both from Alchemax, who wants to treat them as test subjects, and from themselves. From their urge to take bloody, murderous revenge on these people who took away their ability to feel pain and expected them to be obedient weapons.
Those efforts lead to one issue of teaming up with Doctor Strange, and then another issue of teaming up with the Wasp. There's a little advancing of the plot in those issues, but in practice, they feel more devoted to using other characters to tell the audience how different Laura is from Logan. Mostly with regards to how she handles her anger. Strange remarks that she has all her father's rage, but she can control it, channel it. The Wasp is surprised that, once they encounter a nanobot, Laura hasn't just charged over there snarling and clawing it to pieces. Excuse me, have you not read Kitty Pryde and Wolverine? Logan can channel his berserker fury whenever he wants!
I'm joking. I know that even if someone has read it, they would never admit to it. I'm not entirely clear on why, but apparently it's a shameful act. The tattered remnants of the comicsblogowhatchamafloogle are a strange land even to its inhabitants.
Taylor also does the bit where Strange looks at Laura's soul and is just stunned by her experiences, which, c'mon man. I didn't buy that move when Starlin tried it with Strange and Adam Warlock in Infinity Gauntlet, I'm not buying it here. He's Doctor fucking Strange, he's seen shit most other Marvel heroes couldn't comprehend. Don't try to hard sell me.
But Taylor does keep playing it where Laura holds back. She wounds - as one of the sisters points, she won't kill a guy, but she'll cut his fingers off - but she refrains from killing. Even when she thinks Taskmaster has killed the girls, she doesn't kill him. Nathan Fairbairn tends to color panels entirely in red during the moments when Laura's on the verge of cutting loose.
It's an interesting character choice, given Laura's whole thing with the trigger scent (which Taylor addresses in the third arc). People have been able to send her into a killing frenzy whenever they wanted, so I can see her wanting to make the choice not to kill. And she does emphasize it's a choice, one she makes, and one she doesn't entirely hold others to. She lets Gabby have a moment alone with Alchemax CEO Guy, knowing how that could end.
Taylor's writing is a bit quippy at times, lends itself to snappy responses. Sometimes that's amusing, sometimes he starts to overdo it. The issue with Dr. Strange I think veered over that line with some of Gabby's comments about 'cabinets of horrors' and so on. But he does use the fact Laura's bones aren't coated with adamantium (other than the claws) so she tends to get broken a bit more and have to heal, and that's painful. The bits of her interacting with the time-traveling teen version of Angel, who is her boyfriend apparently, are sort of cute. It's a different slant on her questionable social skills, dealing with the largely sheltered rich boy who really doesn't understand her life, but is trying his best.
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