Marvel’s Wolverine vs. the Beast face-off is funnier than it sounds

When writer Benjamin Percy and artist Juan José Ryp cranked up the heat on the inevitable clash between Wolverine and a breaking-the-sound-barrier-on-the-slippery-slope Beast, I thought to myself: This is going to hurt.

Wolverine’s justice has always been a blood-and-guts affair. In Marvel Comics today, Beast is armed with an army of Wolverine-clones that have undergone lobotomy, as well as an advisory panel of equally intelligent clones.

What I didn’t expect: Hank’s crimes against nature are pure office comedy.

What other things are happening in our favorite comics pages? We’ll tell you. Welcome to Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of the books that our comics editor enjoyed this past week. It’s part society pages of superhero lives, part reading recommendations, part “look at this cool art.” There may be some spoilers. The context may not be sufficient. The comics will be fantastic. If you haven’t read the previous edition yet, please do.

Image: Benjamin Percy, Juan José Ryp/Marvel Comics

Wolverine #33 heavily features the “office politics” of Beast’s secret lair — an office where everyone is a clone of Beast, and their “business” is preemptively eradicating anyone who poses harm to mutantkind.

“But,” you say, “what happens when the clones — which Beast made nearsighted on purpose so they’d have to wear old-timey pince-nez — decide they’re tired of playing second fiddle?” Well, Beast has listening devices everywhere, knows when his workforce (beastforce) is unionizing, and just clones five lobotomized Wolverines to execute them and then clones more.

But forget logistics, this is Strangelove rules, we’re here for comedy: Turns out when the Beasts’ secret undersea base gets knocked around all their silly glasses fly off at the same time and it’s incredibly funny.

Image: Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming/Dark Horse Comics

Writer Brian Bendis and artist Michael Oeming’s new globetrotting assassin series has an irresistible hook to it: It takes place in a world where the Italian mafia of 1930s NYC never stopped growing in power. Now it’s a full-on John Wick-style alternate universe where you can smoke weed on commercial airlines, Vatican enforcers have shotguns, and the Pope is a Black woman.

Image: Zeb Wells, Kaare Andres/Marvel Comics

What is the central question in this latest version of Amazing Spider-Man is “What happened one year ago to make all of Peter’s superhero friends hate him and, more importantly, to make Mary Jane… somehow get a husband and two kids really really fast?” Issues 24 and 25 were publicized as the final big reveal of what went wrong in Peter Parker’s life.

It turns out that MJ was trapped in apocalyptic time pocket dimensions where the time passed faster. By the time Peter rescued her, she’d formed a nuclear unit with another survivor. In this week’s issue, we got to see the whole romance, and… I mean, it’s just not that romantic? There’s very little that happens in #25’s flashback that couldn’t be inferred from #24 (except maybe that the kids aren’t biologically Mary Jane’s; turns out that red-headed moppet was just a red-herring moppet).

Two adults trapped in a hell dimension slowly realizing help isn’t coming and falling for each other is high melodrama, but Amazing Spider-Man #25 doesn’t even have them kiss on-panel. Are MJ and the guy in question not actually in love with each other? Is it all a ruse/fake dating for plot reasons/she’s just staying with him because he’s about to die of an alternate-dimension disease? It smells like there will be a secret revelation later.