Comic Book Review: Wolverine And The X-Men #32

In the last few issues of Wolverine & the X-Men, we have been watching the students who recently joined The Hellfire Academy. We’ve seen as the Hellfire Club’s teachers have been giving the students a proper upbringing in how to be evil mutants. The plan is. of course. all in the name of profit. so they have an excuse to sell more sentinels to governments around the world or other various weapons technology. Still, Cyclops isn’t doing enough to drive sales with his radical speeches so the new plan is to have The Hellfire Academy churn out monsters to create mayhem around the world.

Great plan.

Recruiting from Wolverine’s Jean Grey School of Higher Learning? While it’s gotten 4 students for the Academy, this probably wasn’t a great plan. Ticking off Wolverine tends to end up badly for everyone who’s done it so far.

At the end of the last issue it appeared as if they were going to be tossing Quentin Quire into a machine that would radically alter his mutation, body, and personality. Basically making him a more efficient villain for their goals. This issue we found out that he was actually rejected by it. They are now trying to break down his will so that the machine will take him and mold it into their creation.

Wolverine does end up finding a creative way to look for his students. With no one else able to find them, he enlists the aid of the Bamfs to chain jump him around the world. He buys off their services with alcohol and they get moving and continue moving throughout the entire issue.

While the rest of the X-Men’s instructors are all spending time trying to locate their missing students and failing, the instructors at the Academy are complaining about their jobs. While this is happening, the Hellfire Club is starting to move forward with whatever its ulterior motives are. Entertainingly, The Black King promotes Sabertooth to the headmaster position at his school. Now it really feels like a parody of what Wolverine has put together.

I’m still not convinced that it’s just money from the sentinels. While the instructors are talking, it sounds as if they believe that Broo will be the next candidate that will be positively transformed by the machine. My guess is that this will be attempted next issue and that is when Idie will step out of her fake roll and try to do the right thing.

Also while the instructors are talking, Toad interjects that maybe the reason they aren’t doing that great is that the students didn’t know what they were really get into. Maybe some of them didn’t even want to be villains. Paige, who seduced Toad into helping, throws him out of the room and yells at him that he’s making her look bad. With Toad being once again getting the shaft, I have a feeling we’re going to see things come to a head. Either he’s going to get angry and go back to helping the X-Men or he’s going to really snap and go off on everyone.

Either way, Toad is losing it soon.

The issue closes with the Bamfs dropping Wolverine off right by where one of the Hellfire Club’s associates is being dropped off, though I doubt anyone won’t imagine that this is going to be the lead in Logan has needed to finally track down where The Hellfire Club is actually hiding out at.

They’d better as we’re already 2/5th of the way through the event and don’t have much time until things have to start coming to a closure.