Yes, this came out last week, but I’m running late.

Savage Wolverine is apparently meant to be a sort of Legends of the Dark Knight for Wolverine, with different creators taking turns to do their own stories without having to worry much about continuity.  In practice, the previous two arcs weren’t the best demonstration of the format.  Zeb Wells and Joe Madureira’s story was an off cut repurposed from Avenging Spider-Man, while Frank Cho’s vision for the character didn’t get much more elaborate than “here are some things that I think it’d be cool to draw.”

Jock’s untitled arc – which will be bundled in a collection with the Wells/Madureira story for maximum aesthetic whiplash – is rather different, though it’s also likely to be divisive.  Jock’s art seems a good choice for Wolverine.  It’s stark, high contrast, dramatic, and good on atmosphere.  And atmosphere is really what this story is all about, since god knows it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

The story starts off in the far future with Wolverine finding himself on the underside of a spaceship and falling off in order to plummet to the ground.  He’s pursued by a young boy.  Wolverine calms the boy down almost immediately and takes him under his wing.  The boy reveals that he’s been sent by a group who are supposedly the last survivors of Earth, and who have tried to give him (and others like him) Wolverine’s powers.  They’ve also given the boy a serum which supposedly can “save” him and the other subjects.  Apparently they want Wolverine because he’s “their missing link”.

So far so conventional.  Then it all gets a bit hazy.  The baddies recapture Wolverine and the kid but only actually seem interested in the kid and his serum.  Wolverine pursues them and (by a chain of events looking suspiciously like sheer coincidence) they end up in the baddies’ underground base, where the other kids are being experimented upon.  A representative baddie appears to claim that with Wolverine, they no longer need the kids, who are apparently something to do with an attempt to rebuild the human race.  Wolverine and the the kid – who somewhere around here gets named Kouen – beat the representative baddie, discover that the serum is actually a poison designed to kill the kids, and leave.

And that’s it.  No return to the present; no defeat of the rest of the baddies; no explanation of how Wolverine ended up in the future in the first place; no explanation of what the point of the serum was.

This might seem like the hallmarks of a train wreck, and I couldn’t really argue too much with anyone who sees it that way.  But this is a story more about atmosphere and a minimally-sketched relationship between Wolverine and the kid, for which the actual plot is really just a vehicle.  It doesn’t fail to make sense so much as refuse to; it can gesture vaguely in the direction of unspoken explanations because we feel that they wouldn’t really be that important even if they were given, and because the mood of cryptic disorientation seems to justify the device.

Somewhat against my better judgment, I kind of like it as a mood piece.  It shouldn’t work, but it gets away with it, just.