Tuesday 4 February 2014

Uncanny X-Men #268: When Logan met Steve

Uncanny X-Men #268 is an important step in development of Wolverine into the Logan we know today.  It's The One Where It Turns Out He Knew Captain America from Back in the War.

The story itself is nothing remarkable - some fairly standard ninja fighting, but its use of two split timeframes - 1941 and 1990 - is rare. In 1941, Logan meets Cap in Madpripoor and they help Ivan Petrovich rescue a young Natasha Romanov from Nazis; in 1990 they (the three of them) fight the Hand. It's quite clever, and it's structuralist in a way that Claremont very rarely ever did. They all get on, obviously, although there's a nice bit at the end where Cap suggests that he and Wolverine make a nice team, and Wolverine is all "I don't have sidekicks". Burn.

Even though they've gone their separate ways, this story is part of a pattern of the X-Men become more well-integrated into the general superhero community - see the X-Men and Fantastic Four becoming besties in Days of Future Present for example. Their period of isolation is ending. The 1990s is beginning, the age of the crossover.

1 comment:

  1. I so *love* this issue. Cap, Black Widow, & Logan are 3 of my favorite heroes, and Claremont & Lee manage 2 exciting, finished-in-this-issue narratives about them. I wish we could have gotten a few more years of *this*, instead of what the 90s gave us.

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