{"id":2529,"date":"2014-05-10T16:10:48","date_gmt":"2014-05-10T15:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2529"},"modified":"2014-05-10T16:10:48","modified_gmt":"2014-05-10T15:10:48","slug":"that-one-fella-hes-trouble-savage-wolverine-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2529","title":{"rendered":"“That One Fella, He’s Trouble” – Savage Wolverine #18"},"content":{"rendered":"

With\u00a0this issue,\u00a0Savage Wolverine<\/em> drops its format of rotating\u00a0creative teams with each arc,\u00a0and brings us a standalone\u00a0story\u00a0by Jen\u00a0Van Meter and Rich Ellis. \u00a0Van Meter’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time – she’s best known for the Oni series\u00a0Hopeless Savages<\/em>, but that was a good while back.<\/p>\n

Savage<\/em> stories don’t have to take place in present day continuity, which\u00a0gives the freedom to do stories set\u00a0throughout the twentieth century. \u00a0That’s clearly something\u00a0that attracts a lot of writers,\u00a0and here we have another\u00a0historical story. \u00a0It’s 1963, and there’s tension in a small town because the local bigots want to stop some people who aren’t white from going to a rally. \u00a0Logan is passing through and sorts\u00a0it out. \u00a0Boil it down and that’s basically the plot.<\/p>\n

Stories like this may be set in the mid-twentieth century, but they cast Logan in the role of a quasi-Western wandering lone gunman. \u00a0It’s a slot that his lone-wolf persona\u00a0fits quite nicely, but\u00a0that doesn’t stop the result being a fairly generic story in which the hero happens to be the future Wolverine.<\/p>\n

At the end, this story\u00a0tacks on some rather weird additions which are evidently supposed to raise it beyond\u00a0that generic plot. \u00a0First, it turns out\u00a0to be the day of the Kennedy assassination. \u00a0And granted, the story goes\u00a0against the cliche\u00a0of\u00a0showing Kennedy’s death as a loss of innocence,\u00a0instead playing up the idea that Kennedy-era America was not very innocent at all. \u00a0But the bottom line remains that this\u00a0turns out to be a story about the Kennedy assassination as told from the perspective of characters who were busy doing something else that day,\u00a0which really doesn’t work.<\/p>\n

Second,\u00a0there’s an\u00a0awkward last-minute attempt to turn this into a Wolverine story\u00a0and making it about him. \u00a0The story really wants us to buy into the idea that Logan learns from this the importance of having friends and decides to hang out with some bikers (who were barely in the story itself at all).<\/p>\n

What does that have to do with anything that preceded it? \u00a0Er, not a lot, except that apparently if you stay isolated from society you might end up by Lee Harvey Oswald. \u00a0(“That’s what dangerous and alone look like after too long. \u00a0That what you want?”) \u00a0This isn’t even particularly historically accurate – Oswald\u00a0had a family and a job. \u00a0Granted that the characters watching the TV news wouldn’t know that, it still undermines whatever point the story thinks it’s making here.<\/p>\n

This is a fairly standard\u00a0\u00a0fill-in issue which tries\u00a0to go for something bigger in its last few pages, but ends up missing the mark and looking forced in the process. \u00a0It doesn’t work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With\u00a0this issue,\u00a0Savage Wolverine drops its format of rotating\u00a0creative teams with each arc,\u00a0and brings us a standalone\u00a0story\u00a0by Jen\u00a0Van Meter and Rich Ellis. \u00a0Van Meter’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time – she’s best known for the Oni series\u00a0Hopeless Savages, but that was a good while back. Savage stories don’t have to take place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2530,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2529\/revisions\/2530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}