RSS Feed
Aug 26

Wolverine Annual #1 – “Wolf and Cub”

Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2014 by Paul in x-axis

Yes, “#1”.  I know.

This is going in the second “Three Months to Die” trade paperback.  But that’s largely a case of “got to stick it somewhere” (despite the cover banner billing it as part of the story).  So we might as well give it a post of its own.

Although it has nothing much to do with the “Three Months” storyline, this story does take as its starting point the loss of Wolverine’s healing factor and his sudden feelings of mortality.  Its actual point is to give him a chance to say goodbye to Jubilee.  She hasn’t been a regular in his stories for years, but she was his main sidekick back in the 90s, and Paul Cornell hasn’t used her, so it makes sense for the Annual to give her a visit.

Wolverine’s fear that he’s going to die soon is quite interesting in its own right; it’s one of those things that works more on our instinctive knowledge that this is Wrong in terms of the story, since in purely logical terms it just leaves him as an ordinary human.  Admittedly, an ordinary human with a lot of people wanting to kill him, but as Jubilee points out, it’s not like he’s the only mutant ever to have lost his powers.  She did.  So did Storm, actually.  Oh, and pretty much all of the others.  But for all that, it does work in terms of the sense of the character being derailed.  We’ll come back to that when we get to “Three Months To Die” itself, though.

Wolverine takes Jubilee (and Shogo, since they come as a package deal these days) into the forest to pass on some more survival skills to her, and introduce her to the pack of wolves he checks in on every few years.  The plot is pretty straightforward.  Another pair of campers show up – a rather sullen soldier in the course of recovering from a brain injury, and his Air Force wife who’s dragging him on this expedition because she maintains it’s good for him.  A horrible misunderstanding ensues, which results in Brad and Kim heroically rescuing poor Shogo from the nasty wolves, shooting Wolverine, and making a break for it with Jubilee in pursuit – Wolverine being reduced by this stage to helping track them.

For the most part, it’s pretty decent.  It’s a nicely paced story, and the parallels of the two couples work well.  It’s written by Elliot Kalan, the head writer on The Daily Show, but this is not a gimmick story, nor is it played particularly for comedy.  What it does have is excellent dialogue which nails the Wolverine/Jubilee relationship, makes Jubilee’s “vampire single mom” thing actually work, and also sketches Brad and Kim as interesting characters to boot, with a rather more subtly established relationship than you might expect.

Artist Jonathan Marks is not a familiar name – as far as I can see, he’s done a bit of work for Aspen.  His work here is  good stuff – clear storytelling, strong characters, a good sense of place.  And it has the immeasurable benefit of being coloured by Jose Villarrubia, one of the best in the business.  He can make pretty much anything look good, but he’s got plenty to work here.  Hopefully Marks will get some more work on the strength of this.

The pay-off is a problem, though.  It’s heavy-handed, and Wolverine gives us a little speech in narrative captions just in case we need it explained to us.  On top of that, it’s a rather awkward moral about how we men think we’re taking care of women (um, do we?), but actually they’re taking care of us, because they’re strong and nurturing and stuff.  Kalan would have been better off leaving this one to interpretation – if he’d just left the readers to have their own thoughts about the quiet power of motherhood or whatever, he’d probably have got away with it.  Instead the story leave us with a painfully reductive bit of gender essentialism that also has some weird assumptions about what men think to start with.  I could buy Wolverine thinking that way, but the story holds it out as an epiphany that it expects readers to share (his narration isn’t “I think”, but “we”).

It’s a shame about that, because it’s the one bum note in an otherwise very good comic.  Given that it’s the moral and the ending, it takes a bit of goodwill to overlook it… but the rest of the comic almost deserves it.

 

Bring on the comments

  1. The original Matt says:

    The moral at the end of the story really ruined it for me. The pack following jubilee scene would have been bad enough on its own, but to throw the heavy handed moral on top of it… More subtlety would have done this comic wonders.

  2. Chris says:

    Can Wolverine just die already?

  3. Joseph Kerr says:

    Can Jubilee just die already? Don’t forget about the package deal either.

  4. Billy says:

    Just have Jubilee and Wolverine get married, retire, and move to Alaska (or Canada.)

  5. moncler uk says:

    and i also call numerous avenues interiorWhen mens moncler jackets i first got to japan, I placed chasing based on men and women and additionally wouldn’t figure out why. i had to spend a new to comprehend that not only do japan hard drive the actual other if left section of the trail, But regular step to the left along with guests. despite if observing our an error, i had to spend some time to moncler jackets sale get used to walking with regard to departed and by the point i did, irealised i w

  6. Thalia says:

    I’m pretty pleased to discover this great site. I want to to thank you for
    your time for this particularly wonderful read!! I definitely liked every bit of it and I have you
    saved as a favorite to see new information in your blog.

Leave a Reply