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Apr 26

Wolverines vol 3 – “The Living and the Dead”

Posted on Sunday, April 26, 2015 by Paul in x-axis

I don’t know quite what I was expecting from a weekly series following on from Wolverine’s death and starring the likes of X-23, Daken and Sabretooth.  But it probably wasn’t Wolverines, which, if nothing else, is at least the most cheerfully insane thing that the X-office has produced in ages.

Having started off with a relatively coherent premise – five other test subjects of Dr Cornelius exploit his hypnotic programming to forcibly enlist Wolverine’s associates in the search for a cure for their own fatal modifications – Wolverines has meandered wildly off course.  A big chunk of the cast disappeared during volume 2.  Mystique seized control of the remaining group and wandered off on a vaguely-defined agenda of her own (seemingly something to do with bringing Destiny back from the dead).  Fang, of all people, showed up to torment Wolverine’s rogue’s gallery.

And the whole idea of actually hunting down Wolverine’s body, or indeed doing anything else to address the original problem that started off this series, seems to have fallen by the wayside altogether.  Reading the series is like watching a noisily clanking, alarmingly lopsided machine which whirrs and spins at tremendous speed, appears not to actually do anything in particular, and occasionally sheds a component that flies off into a convenient wall or floor, where it embeds itself and is forgotten.

Even leaving aside the rambling and diffuse plot, the problem I identified in volume 2 remains pronounced.  The series seems to be pulling in two entirely different directions.  Sometimes it wants to be a relatively serious, if melodramatic, story of scheming, plotting and shifting alliances.  The rest of the time it wants to go completely nuts, with ludicrous villains, crazy story points, and random jaunts to the other side of the universe so that Fang can get people intravenously drunk.  You could try to do both at once, of course.  This sort of gleeful trashiness isn’t inherently irreconcilable with character-driven melodrama.  But Wolverines fails to reconcile it, and fails pretty badly at that.

Once again, the actual grouping of issues in this volume doesn’t match up with any particular storyline.  Issue #11, by Charles Soule and Ariela Kristantina, kicks off with Fang continuing his exercise of taking the Wolverines off one at a time to talk to them.  This time it’s X-23, and since she’s the only one of the group who was a Wolverine supporting character rather than a villain, he’s only really interested in talking to her.  Loosely, the idea is to point out that X-23 is clearly staying with the group voluntarily even if she’s using the control words as an excuse to herself, which is the sort of reasonably subtle character point that sits hopelessly at odds with a crazily exaggerated flashback to Fang and Wolverine’s drinking sessions – so exaggerated, in fact, that X-23 simply responds by denying that it could remotely be plausible.  A relatively subdued character like her is particularly ill-suited for the book’s more surreal flights of fancy, but Kristantina is at least an artist who can shift to cover both the book’s tones.

Issue #12, by Ray Fawkes and Ario Anindito, sees Mystique take Fang down – thus cutting off the episodic structure of his arc in mid-flow.  Instead, it ends with the wounded Fang dragging Shogun away to another world so that Shogun can blame himself for Wolverine’s death, on the extraordinarily tenuous ground that he was the masked henchman in the final issue of Death of Wolverine.  Somewhere in here Fang’s death scene is played as if we’re supposed to find it moving, but everything that’s been done with him up to this point has been so aggressively ridiculous that it’s impossible to switch gears like that now.  In fact, with his contribution to the story complete, it’s pretty clear that Fang was a serious error of judgment from start to finish.  Leave aside whatever continuity problems he causes; he’s just pitched so far over the top that he destabilises the whole series in a way it never recovers from.  As for the art, it’s competent at best.

The next issue, with Soule and Jason Masters, goes on a complete detour, as Deadpool uses a collection of Wolverine memorabilia assembled for him by Fantomelle to try and become the new Wolverine.  This involves wearing a set of strap-on claws which he keeps misjudging and maiming himself with, and trying to fight the She-Hulk because that’s what Wolverine did in his first appearance.  (Of course, Wolverine fought the actual Hulk, but even Deadpool’s not stupid enough to try that.)  This is largely pretty funny; it helps that Deadpool has no “serious” plot thread to accommodate, and in fact he never even gets to interact with the rest of the cast, so his issue can go nuts with impunity.  If the series had otherwise been keeping a relatively straight tone, this would have worked as a comic relied issue.

It also keeps up another thread of this series: that the regular cast seem to be the people with the least actual interest in Wolverine himself, even though he’s the absentee star of the book.  That’s an interesting idea in theory, but the book doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.  Daken appears to be the exception, as by the time of issue #14 he’s started wearing his hair in Wolverine’s style, something nobody actually comments upon.

With issue #14, Fawkes and Salvador Larroca have Mystique starting to move her plan into some sort of motion.  The thing about this plan is that it’s basically her arranging a series of seemingly unrelated things just so, because Destiny told her to do so.  One gets the impression that it’s building towards some sort of complicated Mousetrap scenario where things line up precisely and bring about a result that would otherwise be a fluke.  And that’s an unfortunate impression to have when the story seems to want us to speculate on what she’s up to, since the obvious conclusion to draw is that it won’t be guessable anyway.

Anyhow, Mystique manipulates Daken into going after Siphon, so that she can capture him for the benefit of her overall plan.  Quite why this requires the manipulation of Daken, who would presumably have been happy enough to fight Siphon anyway; and quite why it’s particularly desirable to send Daken, who is missing a limb and eye, rather than one of her healthier cohorts… none of that is altogether clear.  But hey, it means Daken and X-23 (who goes after him) get to team up with Blade because Siphon is randomly hanging out with vampires, since he’s a bit like a vampire, even though he’s not a vampire.

Siphon turns out to have a reasonably cute concept, which is that he’s only sane when he’s fully charged with siphoned energy.  In that condition, he’s a largely personable fellow, but the more damage he takes (and thus the more energy he needs to use in healing himself), the more he regresses to animal form.  The resulting fight continues into issue #15, where Juan Doe is on art, and gets to do a fight scene that lasts about half the issue.  Doe is not a subtle artist – he’s all about the big grand sweeping gestures – but nobody’s calling for subtlety here.  Quite what Blade’s involvement is supposed to add to this, beyond padding out the page count, is beyond me.

The series does improve somewhat once Fang is out of the way, and there is at least some sense that it’s trying to build to something, albeit something you have no realistic shot of predicting.  But there’s no particularly satisfying through line to be found here, either in plot or character.  That’s not to say that it feels phoned in; it’s far too bizarre for that.  In fact, the sheer weirdness of the book might at least qualify it for the “noble failure” category; but the spasmodic plotting and overdose of 90s grit makes it an increasingly wearing book to actually read.

Bring on the comments

  1. Luis Dantas says:

    I take it that you meant “bringing _Destiny_ back from the dead”?

  2. BoShek says:

    “Mystique seized control of the remaining group and wandered off on a vaguely-defined agenda of her own (seemingly something to do with bringing Mystique back from the dead)”

    I’m sure you meant to say “something to do with bringing Destiny back from the dead” although the idea of Mystique bringing herself back from the dead might not be too out there for this series.

  3. Paul says:

    Fixed that – thanks.

  4. max says:

    I haven’t read any of this but you make it sound like the Countdown to Final Crisis of 2015.

  5. The big difference is that with Countdown, you could see the editorial mandates behind every twist and turn forcing the story into strange directions; Wolverines, if anything, feels like it could benefit from a firmer editorial hand to tighten up some of its excesses.

  6. JG says:

    Paul, have you stopped reviewing All-New X-Men?

    Haven’t seen one in a while.

  7. Brian says:

    (JG, Paul reviewed Volume 6 of ANX on 3/2 (I just double-checked the X-Axis tag); I’m pretty sure that that’s the last TPB which has come out.)

    The obvious answer to what’s behind the madness in WOLVERINES in heavy metal poisoning from all the Adamantium in the characters’ bloodstream…

  8. Brendan says:

    Is the erratic nature of the book due to editorial torpedo-ing the intital direction of the book, like with PAD’s X-Factor: Defenders of Mutant Town?

  9. jpw says:

    Wolverine is somehow now even more over exposed than before his death. It’s as though Marvel looked at what made the death and return of Thor successful and decided to go with the complete opposite approach.

    Granted, the success of Thor’s return was largely accidental

  10. The latest issue adds to the bizarreness in that it’s a straight-forward, comprehensible, story without any weirdness at all.

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