Wolverine: Weapon X #15 – Review

by Jason Aaron (writer), Ron Garney (pencils), Jason Keith & Matt Milla (colors), and Cory Petit (letters)

The Story: Can a Deathlok find salvation?

What’s Good: Without a doubt, the main Deathlok focused upon last month is the strongest point of this issue, as he takes center-stage yet again.  He makes for an unlikely protagonist, but a compelling one, as Aaron turns the tables by making the human inside the cyborg the sociopathic monster, while the AI is the empathetic side, showing an interest in humanity and emotion.  In the end, it’s a clever move by Aaron, as he makes the machine component of the Deathlok more human than the actual human component.  The end result is a robot that’s easy to root for and has allied itself with humanity, and as we learned from Terminator 2, that’s badass.

Much of this is accomplished through a fantastic use of textboxes, which act almost as parallel thought bubbles, or even conversations between the AI and the killer inside the Deathlok.  The slow, coming to consciousness for the AI is elegantly done and its eventual superseding of the killer’s mind feels appropriately momentous.  Once the AI is firmly in control, Aaron does a great job in making those textboxes feel claustrophobic and trapping, as the killer’s dialogue goes totally ignored, those textboxes become a kind of prison where the character is locked away.