The Number Of People Involved Weapon Plus Now Makes Me Question If I, Myself, Am A Designer Super Soldier (Anyway, Here’s An Article About All Of Them)

In last week’s Wolverine and Captain America: Weapon Plus #1 from Ethan Sacks and Diogenes Neves, we learned some things. Revelations, if you will, about the Weapon Plus program (the clandestine organization bent on creating super soldiers, that gave us Wolverine). Some of these had been long rumored, some of these expanded on previous canon, and others were just buckwild. I can neither confirm, nor deny, that I am some sort of experiment in meta narrative used to influence the world. Sacks decided to fix any continuity issue pedants might have with this by saying that all these Weapon programs continued in parallel with one another. So don’t complain about timelines, nerd.

Anyway, here’s everyone we know of so far.

Weapon Minus

SHIELD was never comfortable with Weapon Plus as a whole so they created Weapon Minus because their program naming guy liked having fun. That guy was Horace Littleton and he wanted to do humane assassinations (lol) so he developed an LSD based Super Soldier Serum hybrid and tested it on himself. He took the very intimidating code name Dr. Mindbubble. He makes dream bubbles. He’s pretty dumb.

Weapon Zero

This is a Top Cow comic from the 90s. It has nothing to do with Marvel. Please ignore this section until Marvel fixes this egregious error.

Weapon I

This program was better known as Project: Rebirth. It spawned famous movie star Captain America. There were other trials before him (see Isaiah Bradley) and people after him would keep trying to remake him. But Capt is the important one here. I’m not going to recap his entire life. Interesting to note here, Project: Rebirth spawned not only Weapon Plus, but like, several other competing super soldier programs across the world.

Weapon II

Grant Morrison intended Weapon II to be a reference to his and Frank Quitely’s comic We3. Ryan North and Chip Zdarsky decided to take this idea and make a Squirrel Wolverine in their Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Howard The Duck crossover. Life was good. Then Ethan Sacks decided to one up it and say that Marvel’s failed comic pitch for a toy line of animal Transformers known as Brute Force were also created as part of Weapon II. Brute Force has a character named Surfstreak, who is a dolphin with an uzi. Read more about them here, it’s more wild than you could imagine.

Weapon III

Weapon III is the Skinless Man from Remender’s Uncanny X-Force. Fantomex once made living bullets out of his skin, which was pretty dope. He kinda sucks otherwise.

Weapon IV

The Roman numerals for four are the letters I V. Man-Thing is a swamp monster covered in ivy. Ethan Sacks is a mad lad. Anyway this Giant-Size Man-Thing was once a guy named Ted Sallis who The Mountain Goats wrote a song about. Let all who know fear burn at his touch.

Weapon V

Weapon V is for Venom. Specifically the experiment Nick Fury Sr ran during the Vietnam War that combined soldiers with symbiotes. This spun into the Sym-Soldier Program which spun into Project: Rebirth 2.0 which created Agent Venom. That was Venom mixed with that jerk Flash Thompson from the Spider-Man movies. Comics man…

Weapon VI

After years of speculation, we can now officially say this is Luke Cage. He is a bulletproof hero for hire and wants his money, honey.

Weapon VII

Project: Homegrown is actually Weapon VII. It’s where we get Nuke from. Nuke is a Vietnam vet who was brainwashed into becoming a jingoistic killing machine. He takes pills to balance out his abilities, to amp his up or calm him down. At his best, he is a depressing look at the treatment of Vietnam veterans by the American government. At his worst, he just screams ‘Murica.

Weapon VIII

Weapons VIII experimented on criminals and psychopaths. We have no dang clues on who or what this is. my money is on either The Russian from the Ennis/Dillon Punisher, or Stilt-Man.

Weapon IX

The Robfather has long held that Weapon IX was intended to be the Merc with a Mouth, Deadpool himself. However recent developments in Wolverine and Captain America: Weapon Plus #1 stand to challenge that. A white board in an abandoned Weapon Plus facility calls Weapon IX Project: Psyche, led by an M. Hunt. An ad at the end of the issue uses the iconography of the comedy/tragedy stage masks. While none of these explicitly rule out Deadpool, they better align with the mutant Typhoid Mary.

In what is probably the most deep cut reference in the issue, M. Hunt likley correlates to Dr. Hunt, the abusive psychiatrist who drove Mary mad in Marvel Comics Presents #150. The pyrokinetic with multiple personalities, and long time Daredevil antagonist Typhoid Mary has flirted with the fringes of the X-Men, but it appears she is primed to join the center stage.

Weapon X

This is the big one. It’s the one Wolverine came from. I could write several articles about it, but I don’t want to. Watch this video instead. However, Wolvie wasn’t the only person the experimented on. Weapon X experiments included, but are not limited to: Copycat, Deadpool, Garrison Kane, Hulkverine, Krestrel, Mastadon, Maverick, Sabretooth, Silver Fox, Slayback, Vole, Wild Child, Wolverine, X-23, and look, just like, a lot of folks.

Weapon XI

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Weapon XII

OK, now let’s get into some good Morrison nonsense. The Huntsman was created in The World, a snowglobe capable of hyper evolution. He was intended to be part of a team of Super-Sentinels as a PR stunt to make people alright with the genocide of mutants. He took over people’s minds in the Chunnel once.

Weapon XIII

This is Fantomex. I wrote an article about him once. Dude rules.

Weapon XIV

These are The Stepford Cuckoos. I wrote an article about them once. They rule.

Weapon XV

This is Ultimaton. He is a very big robot man who ended up helping raise a clone of Apocalypse in The World once.

Weapon XVI

Weapon XVI is a virus known as Allgod, the Living Religion. It’s main use was for Jason Aaron to get his clunkiest thoughts about religion out of the way so that he could do good things with Thor later.

Weapon XXX

We have no idea what this is. I gotta be honest, it’s a little weird to go from soldiers to hive minds to the concept of religion and then say, “we ain’t even half way to our final form.” I must assume that all of us are Weapon XXX. Weapon XXX is the sexual urge found within nature. Or maybe old timey booze? I got nothing. However Ethan Sacks has more for us in Weapon Plus: Weapons Free whenever that comes out.