Warning! Spoilers for Extreme Carnage: Scream #1 and X-Force #21 ahead!
After years of fighting the atrocities perpetrated by a single entity, Marvel has made it clear that Wolverine will never beat Weapon X. The Weapon Plus Program was responsible for turning Wolverine into a mindless killing machine before he was taken in by the X-Men, while also lacing his bones with adamantium. Logan has battled Weapon X anywhere it rears its ugly head across all forms of media including comics, animated cartoons, and even multiple live action films. The latest incarnation of the evil organization proves that Wolverine’s efforts are for nothing because Weapon X isn’t in fact an entity, but an idea.
In Extreme Carnage: Scream #1 by Clay McCleod Chapman with art by Chris Mooneyham and Marcio Menyz, the symbiote antihero Scream is working to dismantle the company Alchemax one mutated experiment at a time. In the first pages of the issue, fans witness the horrors inside the Alchemax labs as its scientists are creating monsters anyway they can, primarily through the use of symbiotes. Scream, like Wolverine with Weapon X, is determined to take down Alchemax once and for all until she is interrupted by the return of Carnage. Even though she is thrown off by the most wicked symbiote to ever roam the Earth, and even if she was successful in taking down the targeted facility, Scream’s mission would be an assured failure, the same inevitable failure Wolverine faces in his continued pursuits including his most recent one.
X-Force #21 by Benjamin Percy, Robert Gill, and Joshua Cassara, is the latest Marvel comic that catches readers up to speed on what the actual Weapon Plus association is up to, and once again Wolverine is there to try to stop them. This time going by the name Xeno, Weapon Plus is manufacturing Man-Things through deadly experimentation. Wolverine is sent in along with his X-Force teammates to the U.S. coast to combat what at first seems to be leaked pollution. It turns out to actually be Xeno’s toxic waste that is mutating the living creatures that are exposed to it, turning them into grotesque versions of the Man-Thing. While Wolverine isn’t yet aware that he is fighting against Weapon X once again, its presence in the issue along with its influence in Extreme Carnage proves that he is fighting a battle he cannot win.
Alchemax and Xeno are similar in that they both share the exact same ideals. The two initiatives are nearly identical in their pursuit of creating the ultimate weapon out of living subjects regardless of whatever side effects the subject may experience. The reason Wolverine or Scream cannot defeat them is because Weapon X isn’t just Weapon X. It is Alchemax, it is Xeno, it is any company, organization, or group of disturbed individuals with the capability of conducting life-altering and horrifically spectacular modifications to the human body to create the ultimate weapon.
Weapon X is like Hydra without the fascism, but makes up for that lack of heartlessness tenfold by the human rights atrocities found in its laboratories. If a hero cuts off one head of Weapon X, two more grow back. The different iterations are sometimes unaffiliated except in ideals alone, while other times they are directly connected. But Weapon X will always survive no matter which brutal antihero works to take it down, proving that no matter how ferociously he fights and not matter how disheartening it may be, Wolverine will never beat Weapon X.