X-23 #2

There's a difference between series that contribute nothing to a character and those that actively hurt them. This is rapidly proving itself to be one of the latter. (I realize I may come across as somewhat pessimistic, but I'd welcome constructive criticism on my thought process here.)
 
Plot summary: 
Flashback to X-23 sharing a bonding moment with Wolverine. All fine and dandy. Then we find out that the fire at the homeless shelter was just a random accident. In short, it was only added to the last book as a cliffhanger and to provide a reason to bring X-23 back to the island. Gambit, who has been asked to bond with X-23, finds her traumatized and decides, inexplicably, to give her his coat and run away. Back at the island, demon-Wolverine tries to bond inappropriately with her and she stabs him. Hellion sees the latter and manages to get in a few panels of bonding before demon-Wolverine stabs him too. X-23 makes a deal for his life. I'm not going to comment on art because that's a matter of taste.
  
Problems: 

• The plotting is awful. Spending the first issue to explain the character and her relationships for new readers is fine by me. What we didn't need was to send her to the mainland to experience a metaphor-laden fire and then send her back to the island to start the real plot. Inserting an inferno at the end of the first issue and then explaining it away as a gas leak is just condescending. All the necessary characters for the real plot were on the island in issue 1.  Is this a cerebral exploration of the character or is it Nancy Drew?
• As implied above, Liu seems to take every possible opportunity to insert scenes with bonding potential. We've had something like eight bonding moments in two issues. It's overboard. A character that used to lurk silently around the X-Mansion and avoid human contact is suddenly being approached by every supporting character for insightful character-developing conversation, except it's not. X-23 is a semi-sociopathic assassin, not a little lost puppy for everyone to coo over.
• Gambit gets asked to be a guiding figure for X-23. Instead, he sneaks up on her after she's stumbled out of a fire, gives her his coat and touches her lip semi-sexually, and then disappears before the paramedics get there. Later in the issue, after demonically-possessed Wolverine touches her definitely-sexually in order to provoke her, Gambit mentions to Storm that he'd had his eye on X-23 for a while. What the hell? We already have a character who went from an asexual assassin, to a kinky barely-pubescent prostitute, to a schoolgirl with a crush on the class Adonis. Yes, her sexuality is interesting. What we don't need is to explore it by means of pedophilic innuendo.
•  X-23 has always been an underwritten character. We learn more about her by her silence and awkward/inappropriate interactions with other characters than an endless stream of angsty thought captions. Internal monologues don't give the appearance of trauma and dehumanization, they just make a character seem angsty. X-23 isn't angsty, she's animalistic. We get no sense of the predomination of instinct over ego, or of the psychological emptiness of an absent childhood from Liu's approach. Filling a page with words is counterproductive for this character. Actions speak louder than words.
• Marjorie Liu has little grasp of the characters and interpersonal dynamics of the young X-Men. Hellion was the brash alpha male of the student squads. Here, his arrogance, bitterness and sense of entitlement are lost in favour of sullenness and sensitivity. Oh, and his hair is miraculously brown. So he's Wither. And he tells her she's his "best friend", when there are lots of surviving Hellions that he's actually spoken with in the past couple years. As for X-23 herself, she's completely lost the underlying dangerous unpredictability she exhibited under Kyle and Yost's far-better New X-Men run. The author is redefining characters to fill the roles in her little soap opera rather than letting them carry the plot along on their own personalities.
• Hellion gets stabbed through the chest. Again. We already had pages of angst about his missing hands last issue. This just comes across as overkill, and there are plenty of other ways that X-23 could have been induced to join demon-Wolverine that wouldn't just come across as faux-romantic and drippy. It would have been far more interesting to exploit X-23's darker side in respect to the Wolverine in Hell crossover, rather than just the part that's a sympathy magnet. Unfortunately for this series, that's the only bit Marjorie Liu seems to see. 

  
TLDR: 
Marjorie Liu's overly sentimental interpretation of X-23 and her supporting cast, combined with irrational plotting decisions, should make this issue offensive to any fan of the characters.