Art by Ariela Kristantina and Sonia Oback
- Name: Laura Kinney
- Code Names: X-23, Wolverine
- First Appearance: X-Men: Evolution Season 3 Episode 11
- Powers: Healing factor, enhanced senses, adamantium coated claws in hands and feet
- Teams Affiliation: X-Men, X-Force, Avengers Academy
About
In 1943, the writers of the Batman movie serials introduced The Bat’s Cave, a secret underground lair for the caped crusader. Less than a year later, Don Cameron and Jack Bumley made the hideout a part of the comic mythos. The radio show, The Adventures of Superman, introduced a weakness for the man of steel with radioactive Kryptonite. Within six years, Kryptonite had become such a recognizable part of Superman stories that the comics added it. These are just a couple of examples of corporate synergy impacting storytelling in a huge way. It isn’t always successful (remember Spider-Man’s organic web shooters?) but at the end of the day, when comics borrow from other media it does more good than harm. The X-Men were impacted by this in some subtle ways, the wedding of Cyclops and Phoenix, the black leather in Morrison’s run, the recent Apocalypse War event, but nothing was as impactful as the addition of a popular guest character from X-Men: Evolution.
Portrayed by Dafne Keen in Logan
So to ground ourselves on X-23, we need to understand a little bit about X-Men: Evolution. The show runners made the astute observation that the Xavier Institute circa 2001 wasn’t really qualified to teach calculus or chemistry and decided to have the strangest teens of them all attend public high school. Now, not everyone was aged down to a teenager. Professor Xavier, Storm, Beast, and Wolverine were all roughly their comics age, if not a bit older. Writer Craig Kyle decided that he still wanted to see what “teen Wolverine” would be like and created a character to fulfill that. She was young, younger than most of the cast, but she was the weapon that Wolverine’s creators only wished he could be. X-23 appeared in just two episodes of the show but she left a huge impact on an audience who only wanted more.
They got that in the comics when a top-secret facility dedicated itself to recreating Wolverine. Geneticist Sarah Kinney was unable to create a viable clone of Wolverine from the damaged DNA they had of him. After 22 attempts, she tried something novel, duplicating the X chromosome in place of the unsalvageable Y chromosome. It wouldn’t be a perfect clone but it was viable. Dr. Zander Rice forced Sarah to carry the embryo to term and soon their weapon, X-23, was born. The child was tortured in the Facility, treated as more of a tool than a person. They coated her claws in adamantium, trained her in combat and killing, and dehumanized her. They developed a trigger scent to send her into a frenzied rage, pointed her in a direction, and got out of the way. When anyone treated her like more than a weapon, like her sensei did, they would use the scent to force X-23 to kill them. It didn’t matter if she was being used by Rice or tortured by her sadistic handler Kimura, the girl’s life was hell.
Art by Billy Tan, Jon Sibal, and Brian Haberlin
Sarah felt a strange sense of motherhood to the child she carried. At one point her niece, Megan, was kidnapped by a serial killer and X-23 was sent to rescue her. After this, Dr. Rice decided that Dr. Kinney was emotionally unfit for the Facility and had her removed. Rice wanted to commercialize his child soldier, going as far as to create twenty-five additional clones, but Kinney had enough. She ordered X-23 to destroy Zander and the other clones, to cripple the facility. Rice was prepared, he used the trigger scent to throw X-23 into a berzerker rage, but he still fell victim to his creation. X-23 fulfilled her mission but Sarah was caught in the crossfire. With her dying breath, Sarah gave her daughter a name and Laura Kinney ran into the wild, free for the first time in her young life.
Art by Billy Tan, Jon Sibal, and Brian Haberlin
Laura journeyed through life, trying to find the closest thing she had to a family. She ended up in San Francisco at the doorstep of Sarah’s sister Debbie and her niece Megan. Laura and Megan became quick friends and their relationship was enough to get Megan out of the slump she was in after she got kidnapped. Unfortunately, the Facility was not willing to lose their weapon so quickly. They had arranged for an agent to begin dating Debbie and Kimura instructed him to unleash Laura’s trigger scent on the home. Megan was able to help Laura overcome the scent and stop Kimura but Laura knew that her family would never be safe. She left them to find the only other person to understand where she came from, Wolverine.
Art by Mike Choi and Sonia Oback
To her surprise, Wolverine was expecting her. Before her death, Dr. Kinney sent him a letter informing him about Laura and he tried to comfort the girl as much as he could. However, SHIELD was not thrilled about a dangerous mutant with an impressive body count running loose and captured her to be interrogated by Matt Murdock and Captain America. Cap was disturbed at the way Laura was used but understood she was just a child. He knew you don’t blame a gun, you blame the triggerman, and he let her free. With nowhere to turn Laura began selling herself in New York City to get by. She began cutting herself just to feel alive for the moment. It wasn’t until she met some other young mutants that she was able to break out of her funk and find a life outside of the underage sex trade.
Art by Mike Choi and Sonia Oback
She reached out to Wolverine and arranged a way for her to come to the X-Mansion without bringing up her dark past. Going from the sterile Facility to the vibrant school was a culture shock for Laura. She was reserved and rarely spent time with the other students. The Facility had trained her better in education and combat than anything the Institute could provide. It wasn’t until the mutant race was decimated that she found a place at the school.
In the wake of The Scarlet Witch’s curse, Emma Frost formed a squad of the best young students to be trained as the new X-Men. Though she initially didn’t permit Laura from joining, Cyclops thought it would be best for Laura to be among her most qualified classmates and put her on the team. The younger students encouraged Laura to curb some of her more murderous tendencies, and she even started to form a romantic relationship with Hellion (who is just the absolute worst and isn’t good enough for you, Laura). Kimura returned to torment Laura, capturing Mercury in the process, but the one-time X-23 lead her teammates to the rescue.
Art by Paco Medina, Juan Valasco, and Brian Reber
With the birth of the first mutant baby after M-Day came a power struggle for control of the child. To ensure the X-Men ended up with the child, Cyclops ordered the best trackers, including Laura, to join together as the new incarnation of X-Force. Once the baby was secure, Cyclops wanted to ensure the future of the mutant race and kept X-Force going as his secret kill squad. He told Laura that he needed her on the team and she accepted in spite of Wolverine’s objectives. X-23 was a valuable asset in taking on threats before they could threaten mutantkind. She was a weapon again, but she told herself it was for a better cause.
Art by Clayton Crain
Eventually, the team was found out and Cyclops disbanded it. Her friends from the New X-Men were disturbed that Laura returned to her killing was and she felt like an outcast once again. She struck out on her own but was quickly joined by Gambit. The Cajun knew a thing or two about having a dark past and was able to mentor Laura without making her feel ashamed for what she had done. After some misadventures, Laura missed school but knew she wouldn’t be welcome back with her old classmates. Following up on an offer from Black Widow, Laura joined the Avengers Academy.
Art by Kalman Andrasofszky
At the Academy, she struggled to bond with students who understood even less about what she did than her old classmates. She was quickly wrapped up in Arcade’s plot to have his own Hunger Games with teen heroes. She tried to contain herself, she knew she could kill any of the other competitors without much effort, but she thought of herself as more than a sharpened blade. As the ordeal came to a close Arcade released the trigger scent in the arena and Laura lost her control. It took the full measure of Hazmat’s radioactive blast to halt her but the damage was already done. Arcade had been streaming the whole thing online and now the world knew what a monster X-23 could be.
After being rescued from the arena Laura wandered Florida and was soon chased by the Purifiers. The time-displaced original five X-Men found Laura after blindly following a blip on Cerebro and took her in. They were initially apprehensive towards Laura but the young Cyclops knew what it was like to feel alone and reached out to her. He soon left to spend time with his space pirate dad, and Laura was alone again. He was the only thing keeping her with the O5 and when he left she tried to leave too. The time-displaced (but from a different time) Brotherhood of Evil Mutants attacked her as she left and she tried desperately to warn the X-Men. They battled, the X-Men won, and Angel realized that she was pretty great and they began dating.
Art by Stuart Immonen, Wade Von Grawbadger, and Marte Gracia
After Logan’s death, Laura felt the responsibility to keep up his legacy and became the all-new, all-different Wolverine. On a mission in Paris, Wolverine stopped an assassination attempt but was shocked to discover that the triggerman looked just like her. She soon found herself in a plot using cloned versions of Laura as assassins. With the help of the clones, Laura was able to take out this new facility, but with heavy losses. One of the clones died, the other betrayed Laura for Kimura, and the youngest, Gabby, stayed with Laura. She had to find a way to be responsible for a young girl who was a lot like her but soon Laura, Gabby, and their new pet wolverine Johnathan (not joking) tried to do what Laura had always done. They found their place in a world where they don’t fit in.
Art by Marcio Takara and Jordan Boyd
Must Read
So I am gonna get real real with y’all. I like the Kyle & Yoast X-Men stuff a lot less than most people. While I appreciate the role they played in Laura’s creation and development, none of their work with the character resonates with me. In fact, there has only been one run with Laura to make me really care about the character, Tom Taylor’s All-New Wolverine. The book’s first arc The Four Sisters sets the stage for this new Wolverine and has a perfect combination of humor, action, drama, and heart. All this being drawn by David Lopez elevates it to a whole new level. It’s all on Marvel Unlimited or check out the trade on Amazon.
Art by David Lopez
Ranking
Laura is a character I like, but don’t love. It’s a significant problem with distaff counterparts like Laura, they are often held back by being the “girl version” of the original character. On top of that, Laura is a character who it easy to write poorly and often struggles from an attitude that is a little too close to Shadow the Hedgehog. But when she is written well, she sure is a treat. Not to mention I have a huge soft spot for Evolution so that is going to help her case. Kid Omega is another character who falls into the same issues of consistency as Laura but I have enjoyed his stories more. Arcade is the floor for the character because she is way deeper than him as a character. Right above her is Legion and look, I’ve been thinking about Legion a lot recently and I have a ton of love for him right now. However, until TV Legion and comics Legion start to get a lot more similar I and gonna have to rank X-23 above him as the new number 23 (see what I did there? It wasn’t 100% intentional but it worked out nice) in the Xavier Files.
X-23 was requested by /u/wiseguy149, /u/Mastermates90, Tempest504, and Hayden. Thank you all for the request! If you have a request just submit it at the bottom of this article and I will add it to the list that currently stretches well into 2018! If you want to cut to the front of the line, we have a Patreon if you want to support it and get a line cutting reward for just a $1 pledge. We just hit our 2nd goal and now I guess I am reviewing X-Books so that will be coming soon. Oh and we also have exclusive physical items so check those out!
Make sure you check out Legion Quest a new podcast where me and Newsarama reviewer Matt Sibley talk about the FX show Legion. You can follow the show at any of these sources (iTunes | Google Play | Sticher | RSS).
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Next week (well later this week since I was late on this one) we continue the February onslaught of media tie-ins with the Reavers! See you then!
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
