Story and Art by Barry Windsor-Smith
Lettered by Jim Novak
Edited by Terry Kavanagh
Assistant Editors Mark Powers and Kelly Corvese
Editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco
Originally published in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84.
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"Logan could have killed us all . . . I met his eyes for a second . . . filled with hate and fury . . . but I couldn't tell if it was some animal bloodlust . . . or horror at what we have done to him!"
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Review by William D. Tucker.
Weapon X is comic book science fantasy body horror dealing with themes of out of control rage, human experiments, mind control, and the question of free will. Strong stuff for Marvel Comics in the early 1990s . . . strong stuff even now, actually. Usually, you would have to go to David Cronenberg, Shinya Tsukamoto, or Katsuhiro Otomo for this kind of action, but here it is on paper and in color. Only the lack of full frontal nudity and swearing marks it as a Comics Code Authority Approved book. Weapon X is, unusually for its time, an uncompromised work of mainstream super hero horror comics.
There's a man named Logan who likes to drink and fight and wander. He spends his nights in flophouse rooms just like the Blues Brothers or in Men's Only accommodations run by fundamentalist Christians like what Charles Bronson sets up in Death Wish 2. Logan is full of rage which fuels his rootlessness. If he has no attachments, no emotional connections, then his conscience need not be troubled if he goes around breaking the faces of other rage-poisoned men in barroom brawls.
Wake up. Fight. Get shitfaced. Fall asleep. Repeat.
Logan need never step outside of this perfect rage-servicing system ever again. For he is a mutant with retractable claws and a strange 'healing factor,' a power that allows him to quickly heal from any and all injuries short of a direct hit from a ballistic missile. He cannot be easily killed, nor is the average drunken street brawler ever likely to humiliate him with defeat. Logan has nothing to fear.
Or does he?
As it turns out, Logan is of great interest to a secret organization that wishes to capture him to use as a live subject for horrifying psycho-surgical experimentation. Their purpose is to transform him into a living weapon that can be controlled at-a-distance, presumably for assassination purposes like poor Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate.
But this secret operation has a much more effective technique than flaky Communist hypnosis. This is real science, true penetration into the mind via ultra-technology. And we get to see the whole process play out step-by-step. In Weapon X we get to see things from the perspective of the mad scientists even more than we get Logan's side of things. Yes, it's all comic book stuff. But it's so detailed that after you read it you'll probably come to expect this level of precision from other comic book villains, maybe even demand it. I know I did . . .
Logan is tranquilized, captured, stripped, shaved, and put in a sensory deprivation tank with all sorts of intravenous feeds of powerful painkillers and hallucinogens and who knows what else. Logan's kept in a medically induced coma for an unknown period while the mad scientists penetrate his brain with probes that allow them to view his innermost thoughts on huge telescreens.
Logan's body is injected with a liquid adamantium substance that's manufactured in a nuclear reactor via processes that verge on the alchemical. This fanciful liquid steel bonds with his skeleton and the retractable/extensible knuckle claws that Logan has chosen not to use so as to conceal his identity as a mutant. After the adamantium bonds with his claws he inevitably causes injury to himself if he extrudes them, something he was choosing not to do prior to being captured. Once he is under the control of the mad scientists, they force him to extend and retract his claws-they force him to tear his own flesh.
They force him to bleed.
So, it's not just a pure application these people are after-they get off on sadism, as well as total control of a human mind.
Themes of paranoia are threaded in, beginning with the premise of being an outsider kidnapped by a sinister cabal-who are themselves serving an unseen master-and mutating into grotesque sequences of Logan running endlessly through a nightmare terrain that provokes strange spiky growths to burst forth from his already violated body. This is the horror of being out of control, of being invaded by technology, of losing your grip on reality, and always at the mercy of unknown sadists serving unknowable motives and masters. Taken out of the context of the expansive X-Men mythos, this works quite well as a standalone mindfuck.
In addition to the compelling themes, we also have definitive visual portrayals of Logan in both his disguise as an alcoholic nobody and as a wild, bestial killing machine. When his rage is fully loosed, he slices scores of heavily armed and armored soldiers, and stands victorious-despite being pierced by many bullets-upon a hill of corpses. Logan, nude, stalks frozen psycho-scapes where he does battle with fearsome bears, tigers, and wolves. All the while, he is surveilled by the cruel, inscrutable faces of the mad scientists and their workaday technical staff. Dark fantasies of retribution are piped from Logan's brain onto telescreens. Eventually, Logan is reduced to being a live video game avatar to be piloted by the mad scientists through terrifying scenarios of primal combat. All of this is rendered in wintry white, lurid red/yellow/pink, chilling blue, and shadowy black. The colors are about what you expect from a comic of the time, but they are deployed vividly.
I think, too, it must be noted that Weapon X has a single author: Barry Windsor-Smith. I think this is the main reason why the narrative flow is intricate without losing momentum. Dialogue text plays over the barrage of techno-invasions of Logan's body and mind. It's all worked out with precision timing. There's none of the static that's inevitably generated by the bullpen approach of your average super hero comic book of the time. Windsor-Smith is able to weave it all together as he sees fit, without having to second guess another writer or artist.
Anytime I read another comic about Logan, I inevitably find myself thinking back to Weapon X. I even think of it when I read the ones that were published well before Weapon X even existed. Truly, its power changes Logan's past, present, and future.
Now that's a mindfuck for you!
