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Jun 15

“Valentine’s Day” – Savage Wolverine #20

Posted on Sunday, June 15, 2014 by Paul in x-axis

The regular Wolverine series is (obviously) the more important of this week’s two Wolverine issues, but let’s deal with this one briefly.  The theory of Savage Wolverine is presumably that with the ability to do stories from any point in Wolverine’s long history, you have a vast range of scenarios to draw on.  You can go anywhere in the world over a period of a century or so.  If nothing else, diversity ought to be readily achievable.

And yet here we are, three issues later, back in the Prohibition.  Perhaps that’s more of a scheduling error than anything else.  Frank Tieri has always leaned towards crime stories and it’s unsurprising that he would think this period suits him.  In terms of his interests, it certainly does.

There’s nothing wrong with the hook here – what if Wolverine had been caught up in the St Valentine’s Day massacre, but survived because of his healing factor?  That sounds like a perfectly fair starting point.  And they’ve chosen well in artist Felix Ruiz, who seems to have been reading a lot of Bill Sienkiewicz from the mid-80s – always an influence I’m happy to see on the page.

But it’s a story that doesn’t really do a great deal with the hook.  As with Richard Isanove’s story, Logan is smuggling whiskey in from Canada.  This time he has a girlfriend in tow – a character it would have been nice to see more of, actually, since she seems to hold her own alongside him, which makes a change from the usual daughter figures he tends to get paired with.  Logan crosses paths with Al Capone’s guys, and the girlfriend goes the way of all love interests by being murdered.  Turns out it isn’t Capone at all but Sabretooth, who’s meant to be a Capone henchman but has gone off the rails.

This, I think, is where the story takes a wrong turn; the moment it turns out to be Sabretooth serving as Wolverine’s eternal nemesis yet again, and killing his girlfriend yet again, all the stuff about Al Capone and the Prohibition becomes window dressing in a story about the endless cycle of Wolverine and Sabretooth doing the same old stuff.  At which point you’re re-treading old ground.  This might conceivably have worked if the idea was to have all the local colour drain away to show Wolverine forever coming back to the same old feud, with the takeaway being that it’s a tragic loop he can’t escape.  But the closing page seems to want it to be more of a hidden story that fuelled their rivalry – and there’s just no space in their back stories for any further motivation there.

Bring on the comments

  1. jpw says:

    Ih, so that’s why Wolverine hates Sabretooth!

  2. Si says:

    You’d think that with an endlessly repetitive, tightening spiral of acceptable stories that are the product of a serial with a shrinking, aging audience, you’d try to draw less attention to the cliches, not more.

  3. Suzene says:

    Maybe the thinking is that the audience considers the cliches the equivalent of comfort food?

  4. jpw says:

    What audience? Doesn’t this book sell like 75 copies a month?

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