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A Review of 'Weapon X #1-20'

My Opinions on Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente's Weapon X Run

By Just a guyPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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I've managed to catch up to Greg Pak's run on Weapon X that features the Batch H storyline and a crossover with Totally Awesome Hulk, which is also written by Greg Pak. Many fans seem to not like Pak's take on some of the characters like Sabretooth. Many felt that Sabretooth was acting out of character. I felt that the first two to three story arcs were not my favorite, but I did enjoy reading them nonetheless. The Weapon X team consists of Old Man Logan, Sabretooth (Victor Creed), Warpath (James Proudstar), Lady Deathstrike, and Domino. Having Old Man Logan, who we will now refer to as Logan, on a team with Sabretooth (basically his arch-nemesis) and Lady Deathstrike (another one of Wolverine's prominent villains) is a dream come true for me. The roster is definitely what caught my attention in the first place. I will be honest, I like Greg Pak's writing style, but I felt that it didn't match the story. It could be that Pak has written the Hulk or Hulk-related titles over the last few years and didn't really know how to write the characters in Weapon X? I do, however, feel as the title reached its more recent issues, it began to improve quite a lot. Another factor that kept me reading was the possible chaos that would result from the story.

Essentially, the first 13 issues (I think) follow the Weapon X team (with some help from Amadeus Cho, the Totally Awesome Hulk) trying to prevent the creation of a Government experiment called Batch H. So this government group is called Weapon X, and you'll learn soon why the team is called Weapon X as well (literally Sabretooth wanted to just take their name and use it against them). The Weapon X program was a government program to create the perfect human weapons, which stemmed from, or was inspired by (I'm having trouble remembering this off the top of my head) the Super Soldier program that created Captain America (Steve Rogers). What the Weapon X program has also done is give Wolverine and Sabretooth their Adamantium Skeletons. They gave Lady Deathstrike cybernetics, which gives her the long claws on her hands. The Weapon X Program has done some messed up and heinous stuff. And what the government organization is doing in the Weapon X title is to create weapons made for Mutant Extinction which is lead by William Stryker.

William Stryker is a racist, religious fanatic that thinks that mutants are unnatural and sub-human and has made it his life's mission to exterminate all mutants in God's name, which he has tried to do more than a few times. Wolverine has quite an extensive history with Stryker being involved with the Weapon X program while they were experimenting on Wolverine and grafted adamantium to his skeleton. William Stryker actually died back in 2005 if I'm not mistaken with the "Decimation" storyline, but has come back. The reason as to how will be explained, but just keep in mind that he should be dead.

What William Stryker was using this iteration of the Weapon X program for was to create the ultimate mutant killing weapons that are either human or human-like. The first time we see these weapons is in the first issue where Logan is in the woods and comes across two lost hikers who need to know where civilization is. So Logan points them in the right direction. I want you to understand something here. Logan is pretty cautious when it comes to people engaging him. He doesn't know who is an agent of some malignant group that is either trying to get his DNA or brainwash him or maybe attempt to kill him. Well... this time he decides to let his guard down as the hikers walk away, and that when he gets attacked by these:

These robots were made to capture or gain DNA samples of the following mutants: Logan, Sabretooth, Warpath, and Domino... and Lady Deathstrike (she's not a mutant but she is important to the experiments the Weapon X program is running). What Stryker, or rather, the head scientist of the Weapon X program, Dr. Alba, wants is to collect the DNA from the mutants so that they can give their experiments all of these mutants' abilities.

Essentially, they want Logan and Sabretooth because they have healing factors, claws of adamantium, and adamantium skeletons. Weapon X wants Warpath, a Native American mutant named James Proudstar because he has super strength and a healing factor. The need Domino because Domino has some... interesting powers. Essentially she can create her own luck. They explain her powers in the first story arc of the title by saying that she can create a probability field within a certain proximity (not entirely sure what that threshold is though) and allows anything that is highly improbable to happen. The reason that they want Lady Deathstrike is because she has cybernetics that make her fingers super long and sharp and she uses those as weapons due to having nanobots in her body. So what Weapon X does is create nanobots made of adamantium for use in their experiments. Nanobots have been used for a variety of things in comic books. They have been shown in Marvel to be sources of mind-control or as tools that help improve bodily function or improve injuries and help with internal bodily complications.

A non-member whose DNA Weapon X also wants is the Totally Awesome Hulk, which they manage to do when they send their robots after Amadeus Cho. Reverend Stryker and Dr. Alba want to use all of the powers of these mutants... and the one cyborg and the one Hulk to create what is a Hulk/Wolverine Hybrid. Conceptually, this sounds like a fanboy's greatest dream. In practice, the character doesn't really seem to be anything new. If anything, he seems to have a very similar story to people that have been in the Weapon X program. They experimented on Weapon H, had him do terrible things, or at least they tried to make him do terrible things, which we have already seen with Wolverine, Deadpool, and other characters that originate from the Weapon X Program. However, Greg Pak is writing the Weapon H series so there is likely to be more character development when it comes to the Weapon H character. That is what Greg Pak is good at. Greg Pak is fantastic when it came to characterization, be it direct or indirect. So seeing Weapon H grow as a character is definitely something I look forward to seeing Pak do.

I do think that the story was an okay read for the story arcs that focus on Weapon H, but things definitely get better when the roster is changed up. I'll be honest, I have never seen a comic book team that has Wolverine (or at least and older version of him) become better when they get rid of him. Yeah, the title gets better when Old Man Logan and Warpath are removed from the team. Leaving Domino, Lady Deathstrike, Sabretooth, and Omega Red in the team. This story arc is currently going on, but so far it's worth the read. Greg Pak is co-writing with Fred Van Lente. The art style changes too and definitely suits the tone of the story so far, so I suggest you check this title out starting from the Nuke story arc. The Nuke story arc is hilarious and is where I say a good jumping off point would be.

I really want to go into the Nuke story arc and the story arc introducing Omega Red. So I will be doing that in another post. I still have yet to write about the Captain America titles, Falcon, some other DC titles, so expect some more content coming out fairly soon. That concludes this post, so feel free to check out the others in my profile. See you in the next one!

Note: I do not own the panels, arts, characters, and images. All panels, art, characters, and images belong to their respective owners.

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About the Creator

Just a guy

I like to read comic books, watch tv shows, and write about them. Ill also write about other things too!

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