For these two issues, Marvel Comics Presents abandons the format of unrelated 8-page stories and instead produces a single, 2-issue Typhoid Mary story. Marvel released a plethora of mini-series in this time period. It’s unclear to me why they didn’t do that for this story as well—except that maybe there were production problems meeting the deadline for the shorter tales?
The story involves a program experimenting on mutant children. Wolverine, on orders from Professor X, runs a black op to rescue the kids—and breaks Typhoid Mary out of confinement to help. (Why though? I thought X-Force was supposed to be the covert mutant team?)
Over the course of the story, Typhoid Mary develops a third personality: Bloody Mary.
The children have psychic powers and Vengeance and Daredevil sense they need help, so those two characters also get involved. This is the first time Vengeance meets Wolverine, so of course they fight.
Note Wolverine’s black costume.
In the end, Mary reveals crimes (she was raped by a doctor) and corruption at the mental institution where she was being held, so she gets released (uh….that’s not how it works…) and vows to go on a spree.
Overall, there’s not a whole lot of new stuff here. I continue to like Typhoid Mary as a character and enjoy reading about her, so this story works for me—but I admit that Daredevil and Vengeance (and frankly even Wolverine) are unnecessary.
This same story could have just been about Typhoid Mary dealing with evil doctors who experiment on kids. Also, all the meaningful stuff is about Mary—who gets the third personality noted above and then, in the very end, seems to be healed of her schizophrenia by one of the psychic children.
Some of the characters from this story will reappear in one more MCP story, but it’s not worth tagging them.
Other than the weird and implausible actions by the criminal justice system, this is a perfectly good adventure with enough subtext about feminism, violence, and meaning to raise it significantly above the average tale.
Plus…Buttshot!
