Puck Part 70: Wolverine #37 (March, 1991)

Puck returns to the present and makes some stops along the way.

I have this issue.

Still wounded from a bomb attack in Wolverine #36, Judd is being carried by Ernest Hemingway and another member of Inez’s Resistance Party over a mountain pass to seek medical attention at a Republican Army field hospital. Logan, meanwhile, is in the middle of a fight with Lady Deathstrike when the time vortex that brought them to 1937 Spain appears again and threatens to take the two combatants back to the present.

Judd suddenly bolts from his stretcher shouting at Logan not to leave him behind, and runs back up the pass. He catches up to Logan, still battling Lady Deathstrike, and they all wind up on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific the day Lady Deathstrike’s father crashes onto it during World War II. The trio then find themselves in New York at Christmas in the mid-eighties when Logan first fought Lady Deathstrike in Uncanny X-Men #204 as Judd becomes small again. He follows the fighters as they fall off a pier into the East River, only to surface with Logan back in Vancouver Harbor where it all began. The duo climb into their boat and Judd reaches down to save his photo (last seen in Wolverine #35) from getting wet, only this time the picture includes himself, sitting next to Inez, sitting next to Ernest…sitting next to Logan.

Notes of Interest:

1) Judd tells Logan he remembers being hit by a Legion Kondor bomb while in Spain in1937, causing things to get hazy after that. However, he recalls that Inez told him he jumped off a stretcher and disappeared into the Spanish mountains for three days before wandering into a Republican Army field hospital.

2) Judd still has no memory of seeing Logan during that time, despite holding the photo in his hand.

3) It seems that Judd became a dwarf after the beginning of World War II.

WTF? Moment: Okay…where to start. I have no idea how Judd could go from a bloody mess full of bomb shrapnel and in desperate need of medical care to jumping out of a stretcher screaming and running up a hill. Was he healed? Was he bleeding all over himself as he ran? The presence of the time vortex might have had something to do with it – but the vortex deals with time. Did it somehow take Judd back to just before the bomb was dropped? If so, it didn’t do any sort of short-range time jump with Logan or Lady Deathstrike, and they were much closer to it than he was. How did he even know the vortex was there?

WTF? Moment #2: Judd’s height. In Wolverine #35, he went from 3’6” to seven feet tall and nobody noticed. Here, he reverted back to his dwarfish frame and Hama made the point to have Judd mention it. I guess Hama was making up for his mistake, but he made an interesting point:

Back in Alpha Flight #32, we learned that Judd heard about the Black Blade of Bagdad in 1939. While it’s never mentioned exactly how long it took him to find it, that issue could be read to say that he found it pretty quickly – call it a year – and had imprisoned Razaar by late 1940. If true, that would have happened before the U.S. got involved in World War II, meaning that by the time Lady Deathstrike’s father crashed onto the American aircraft carrier, Judd would have been a dwarf. Therefore, when he found himself on the carrier at that moment thanks to the vortex, Judd would have lost his height then.

But that didn’t happen.

Judd lost his height while the three of them were time-travelling through New York in the mid-eighties. This tells us that Judd spent several years looking for the Blade, maybe the entire length of the War. Therefore, Judd definitely became a dwarf sometime after October, 1944 – when Japanese pilots began Kamikaze suicide attacks.

WTF? Moment #3: Time travel is tricky to write about, period. It was neat to have Judd comment on his memories while they were in Spain, but his injury and subsequent memory issues were poorly handled. How could Judd remember the bomb, but not Logan’s presence before the bomb? What about the time vortex? Judd has no recollection of that either? What about Inez, Hemingway and the others? Did they continue to the camp and Judd just stumbled there afterwards? But, if Judd was no longer with them, and he was the reason they were taking the pass in the first place, why didn’t they just go back the way they came and help Logan out?

WTF? Moment #4: I noticed that Judd was completely healed by the time they reached the aircraft carrier. How did this happen? Does time…truly…heal all wounds?

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