Looks like a version of the Spider-Man Macy’s Day balloon exists in this universe. That’s weird, eh? This issue opens with a 2-page sequence of Wolverine remembering his life. Including, it is of great interest to note, flashes of things before the Weapon X project that wiped his memories, and ending with the Avengers and X-Men approaching Genosha.
Wanda’s rewrite of reality unlocked Wolverine’s hidden memories. That is a huge deal. A character-redefining deal. So much of his mystique in the preceding 30 years was his hidden past, a place people liked to insert all sorts of ridiculous things into, especially in the 90s. But now the world’s upside down, he suddenly knows all about it. Logan freefalls an absurdly long distance from the helicarrier to the city below, hitting a building like a missile and somehow not dying, because by 2005, his healing factor has gotten so exaggerated he literally cannot die. Used to be he just healed fast, but he could be drowned or suffocated, say, and while his bones were unbreakable, the rest of him was not. Now he’s immortal. There’s an infamous moment a year later that makes this look totally plausible, but it’s in a book I don’t own. A busted up Wolverine surveys the unfamiliar Times Square, wondering what’s going on, and then we get a few pages of the Pulse in this reality, mostly about the House of Magnus’ big day (Get it? House of M!), but also including…
Peter Parker is openly Spider-Man and has a kid! We brush right by that, tho, as Wolverine is harassed for reading the paper without buying it, then steals a motorcycle off a guy who is maybe Cannonball so he can hightail it to Westchester and find Professor X. But when he gets to the mansion, he finds some random guy living there.
We don’t see Logan mete out justice, but the next day, he’s at Stark Tower, hoping to see the man in charge, only to be told he doesn’t live in the city. But he’s also found by a squad of familiar SHIELD agents…
Jessica Drew, Rogue, Toad, Nightcrawler and Mystique. Logan knocks out Jessica and runs for it, evading the assembled mutants and getting to his bike. Nightcrawler teleports on behind him, but is then shot by arrows, and Logan escapes… until he and his bike are confused by the shadows of Cloak’s, uh, cloak, coming out of nowhere.
And then all hell broke loose in real life. Hawkeye, in particular, kind of became the symbol of people’s frustration with the extreme nature of Disassembled. So many beloved characters killed or shuffled off the board in such a sudden, random fashion really did a number on long-term fans, and you know, understandably so. Hawkeye’s last words became an inescapable comics internet meme before anyone used the word “meme.” And now, a scant 10 months later, here he is. And once he was revealed at the end of this issue, some press about ti quoted someone behind the scenes, either Bendis or an editor but I think Bendis, saying that as soon as they killed Hawkeye, they started brainstorming ways to bring him back. This cheapened an already divisive moment for a lot of people, and chaos reigned. I was very put off by it, and said as much on Bendis’ forum. He did not take kindly to my opinion, but it’s how I felt. These days, comics will “kill” anyone if they think it’ll make a buck, and everyone knows no one is dead for long. The most recent high profile Marvel death as I write this remains an incredibly sore point for me for its utterly mercenary, completely cynical nature, purpose and turnaround time. But in 2005, death still meant something in superhero comics, to some degree, and therefore, for a lot of us, Hawkeye popping up on this page just felt crass. But it’s far from his only appearance in this story, so we’ll see more about that.