Saturday, July 09, 2022

Saturday Splash Page #28

 
"Tales from the Collector's Storage Unit," in Wolverine and Jubilee #3, by Kathryn Immonen (writer), Phil Noto (artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer)

Hey, remember when Marvel had vampires attack the X-Men on their little island nation near San Francisco? No? Sure you do, it was when they made Dracula look more like a Final Fantasy villain. Anyway, point being, to show the event "mattered", there had to be a casualty. And lo, did Jubilation Lee become one of the blood-drinking undead. And there was much consternation. among the muckety-mucks on Utopia about whether Jubilee could be trusted.

Which is, as I recall the same issue X-23 was experiencing at the start of her first ongoing series. Mutant teenagers are surprisingly unfriendly and cliquish. Maybe not so surprising if I focus on the "teenager" part instead of the "mutant" part.

Anyway, the healing factor in Wolverine's blood for some reason blunts the vampire instincts or influence, so he's pretty much her keg, and her keeper. Which puts Jubilee in a rebellious mood. Noto's art is pretty good at capturing the mix of emotions Jubilee is dealing with. The despair and frustration especially. Both of which get her mixed up with some other vampire, which gets her banished to some weird space as a way to force Logan to do something for that vampire lady. There's a dragon involved, or at least something that looks like a dragon. I think the fact Logan and the audience are unclear on what this accomplished for the vampire lady is intentional on Immonen's part. Jubilee got used, and nobody's really sure to what purpose. But the whole experience lets her actually try to make decisions for herself and adjust to her new circumstances.

It's a little hard to parse what Logan's trying to accomplish. On the one hand, he's using his time-honored tradition of being an asshole until the teenage girl stands up for herself. Which does lead to an amusing bit where Jubilee threatens to hit him with his own motorcycle, but ends up just trashing it so he has to walk all the way home. On the other hand, when she does buck against the leash he's putting on her, he yells at her, drugs her, and drags her off to Siberia. But no one's ever said Logan's a good role model. Yet they keep putting him in charge of children.

Rockslide's in there as a supporting cast/comic relief person. I feel like Noto struggles to draw Rockslide. Kind of a reverse Greg Land, who is better when he has to draw things he can't photo-reference. The proportions are all off somehow, and while I imagine in real life a face made of rock wouldn't be terribly expressive, Noto's artwork doesn't lend itself to the liberties that would address that. 

Rockslide seems to want to help Jubilee, and occasionally says something profound, but mostly just acts like a moron and gets intimidated by Wolverine. I suppose he's just more obvious about the fact he really has no idea how to help her. Everyone's trying, but they're hampered because all their approaches are about minimizing risk or the level of threat Jubilee poses, not actually guiding her through this.

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