Scanned Thoughts: Wolverine and the X-men #31

Every week, a new comic comes out and I dip my brain into this beautiful concoction of ink and tree pulp to fully appreciate it. Wolverine and the X-men #31 is the latest blend of ink and tree pulp to mix with my brain matter. These are the twisted thoughts that emerge as a result.

We see Kid Omega guiding a new student with a face that looks like a botched vaginal rejuvenation surgery to the new Hellfire Academy. All I can think when I see this is who the fuck is stupid enough to make Kid Omega in charge of anything? I want to feel sorry for the kid, but he apparently killed a walrus when he sneezed with his new powers. And the animal lover in me just can’t justify that. The location of the Hellfire Academy isn’t clear, but I’m guessing that’s by design. If you’re going to have a school of mutant deviants, then it’s a good idea to hide it. That way you get less bitching from the neighbors.

The first class involves Mystique lecturing on the merits of being a narcissistic douche-bag, but I still can’t pay attention to it. I’m too distracted by her sexy teacher’s outfit. Granted, most everything Mystique wears tends to be pretty sexy. But I haven’t seen her do a sexy teacher look outside of my masturbation fantasies so this is a nice little treat.

But even a sexy outfit isn’t enough to stop Kid Omega from being a total ass. Rather than just quietly admire Mystique’s ass, he points out to her that she hasn’t really accomplished jack shit lately. She has annoyed Wolverine and the X-men, but that’s about it. Hell, he even points out that Wolverine succeeded at killing her at one point. There’s having balls the size of mortar shells and then there’s just being fucking stupid. Mystique basically gave her students permission to rip Kid Omega’s head off and even offered extra credit. You get the sense that this is the kind of school we all believe our childhood bullies attended.

And wouldn’t you know it? Teenagers respond to incentives. But Kid Omega’s balls are still as big as his stupidity. He fights them off and even tries to catch up with Idie, who was the other student from the Jean Grey Institute who defected. Granted, she may be planning a double cross, but she doesn’t care to team up with Kid Omega. And who the hell would want to?

But Idie is a background character it seems. She wants nothing to do with Kid Omega. She’s basically keeping to herself and has the brain damaged Broo as an attack dog. While Kid Omega’s plans are clear, Idie’s aren’t. She doesn’t come off as the master deceiver or skilled tactician. She’s a teenager. She only recently learned how to use tampons. I find her story much more intriguing, but instead we’re stuck with seeing the Hellfire Academy through Kid Omega’s douche-bag perspective.

Like any school, the Hellfire Academy has classes. Unlike other schools, these aren’t the classes you can sleep through or text ex-girlfriends during boring lectures. We’ve got a science lesson with Sauron, (alien) biology with Starblood, hunting with Dog Logan, hellish literature with Master Pandeomnium, public relations with Madame Mondo (basically Mojo with boobs), and study period with Husk who appears to be on her period in the worst possible way. It’s almost quaint at how the Hellfire Academy tweaks the usual school curriculum to turn young mutants evil. And Jason Aaron throws in a touch of juvenile schoolyard humor as well. And believe it or not, it involves more than just fart jokes.

The Hellfire Academy still comes off as the kind of school that will make Mr. Rogers’ head explode. But it’s portrayed as a unique and almost appealing sort of way. Maybe we all have our inner douche-bag that wishes there was a school like this where we could refine our inner bully. It’s not overly serious. There may be some social commentary about how fucked up American schools are. But in the end, it’s just fun.

That is to say it’s fun for everyone except Toad. I don’t want to feel sorry for the guy. He’s a lifelong member of the Brotherhood of Mutants and he has a history of just being a whiney little bitch. But despite getting some sweet loving from Husk, he’s still the fucking janitor. So that means his job at the Hellfire Academy is the same as his job at the Jean Grey Institute. He didn’t upgrade. He didn’t downgrade. He’s got the same exact job. But near as we can tell, he’s still tapping Husk and I think that’s worth it. If every janitorial job came with the promise of pussy on the side, the whole world would be a lot cleaner.

In between this extensive tour of the Hellfire Academy, we briefly visit Wolverine and the staff of the Jean Grey Institute. As you can imagine, losing Idie and Kid Omega to the Hellfire Academy pissed them the fuck off. Wolverine has never been known for dealing with his anger in a healthy way. Neither has Rachel so they make the perfect team to visit a sentinel factory and threaten the workers with torture that would give Dick Cheney a boner. It doesn’t work and we find out that the team has been having similar luck at sentinel factories all over the world. It leads Wolverine to basically say that the Jean Grey Institute has failed.

Melodramatic? Fuck yes. Logical? Fuck no. Wolverine is pissed and the whole team is upset. That’s all I can gather from this. And maybe I’m the only one that remembers, but didn’t Storm and Wolverine swap spit a few issues back? Then we had that shitty Dog Logan arc and now it’s completely forgotten? Is Jason Aaron ever going to revisit that plot? Or are we just supposed to assume that Wolverine and Storm kiss for fun and never do anything after. When in the history of fiction has that ever been a compelling story? It seems like all this did is show how Wolverine is pissed. I know he’s capable of other emotions and this is a missed opportunity.

Back at the Hellfire Academy, we find that they stole more than just students from the Jean Grey Institute. They stole their training regiment. And since this whole school is based around the premise that shit is unfair, they pit the kid with a snot problem against Kid Omega. Aside from spewing snot on Kid Omega’s clothes, he does jack shit. Maybe this is a metaphor for that kid in grade school who always had snot running down his nose, but it’s another touch of Jason Aaron’s quirky humor. It also earns the snot kid a trip to the principal’s office, which in a school like this is an entirely new circle of hell…possibly literally.

Being the arrogant prick who also happens to be a teenager who doesn’t think shit through, Kid Omega decides that if he’s going to do what he need to do he’ll need to get sent to the principal’s office. That means pissing his teachers off enough so that they send him there. In other words, he just continues to be himself for the next few days. It’s probably the easiest mission any X-men has ever had in the history of the universe. It works, but what he finds isn’t exactly another circle of Hell.

It’s the fucking Hellfire brat, Kade Kilgore. Seriously, I thought the whole novelty of having sociopath kids in the Hellfire Club would have been overplayed by now. But we’re still stuck with it and it still is as fucked up as ever. But what isn’t fucked up is Kade’s justification for the school. He sells sentinels because for some reason they let kids be billionaire industrialists in the Marvel universe. And trying a bunch of evil mutants to provoke fear is good for anyone paranoid enough to buy a giant killer robot. I wish I could say this is fucked up, but I get the sense that Montsanto and Exxon would love that sort of business plan and Goldman Sachs would gladly invest in it.

All these revelations are well and good, but Kid Omega is still assuming that he’s deceiving these people. He’s not and they reveal to him that they’ve known about his bullshit from the beginning. It’s not like he’s been subtle about it so that may be the easiest plot uncovered in the history of spying. Somewhere James Bond is rolling his eyes in between orgies. In other words Kid Omega is fucked and the Hellfire Brats intend to do to him what they did to the snot nosed kid. It’s not revealed just what that is, but it apparently turned him from a little snot nosed kid to a hulking snot nosed kid. And if it can do that for him, what kind of shit will it do to Kid Omega? I didn’t think anything could make him more of a douche-bag, but I’ve been wrong before.

Overall, this is a fun book with some shortcomings. These are my obscene thoughts about this issue and I’m not changing them. Nuff said!