{"id":2578,"date":"2014-06-15T11:41:27","date_gmt":"2014-06-15T10:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2578"},"modified":"2014-06-15T11:41:27","modified_gmt":"2014-06-15T10:41:27","slug":"valentines-day-savage-wolverine-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2578","title":{"rendered":"“Valentine’s Day” – Savage Wolverine #20"},"content":{"rendered":"

The regular\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> series is (obviously) the more important of this week’s two Wolverine issues, but let’s deal with this one briefly. \u00a0The\u00a0theory of\u00a0Savage Wolverine<\/em>\u00a0is presumably that with the ability to do stories from any point in Wolverine’s long\u00a0history, you have a vast range of scenarios to draw on. \u00a0You can go anywhere in the world over a period of a century or so. \u00a0If nothing else, diversity ought to be readily achievable.<\/p>\n

And yet here we are, three issues later, back in the Prohibition. \u00a0Perhaps that’s more of a scheduling error than anything else. \u00a0Frank Tieri has always leaned towards crime stories and it’s unsurprising that he would think this period suits him. \u00a0In terms of his interests, it certainly does.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0of his healing factor? \u00a0That sounds like\u00a0a\u00a0perfectly fair\u00a0starting point. \u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n

But it’s a story that doesn’t\u00a0really do a great deal with the hook. \u00a0As\u00a0with Richard\u00a0Isanove’s story, Logan is\u00a0smuggling whiskey in from Canada. \u00a0This time he has a\u00a0girlfriend in tow – a character it would have been nice to see more of, actually, since she seems to hold her own alongside him, which\u00a0makes a change from the usual daughter figures he tends to get paired with. \u00a0Logan\u00a0crosses paths with Al Capone’s guys, and the girlfriend goes the way of all love interests by being murdered. \u00a0Turns out it isn’t Capone at all but Sabretooth, who’s meant to be a Capone henchman but has gone off the rails.<\/p>\n

This, I think, is\u00a0where the story takes a wrong turn; the moment\u00a0it turns out to be Sabretooth serving as Wolverine’s eternal nemesis yet again, and killing his girlfriend\u00a0yet again<\/em>, 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. \u00a0At which point you’re\u00a0re-treading old ground. \u00a0This might conceivably have worked if\u00a0the idea was to have all the local colour drain away to show Wolverine\u00a0forever coming back to the same old feud, with the takeaway being that it’s a tragic loop he can’t escape. \u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The regular\u00a0Wolverine series is (obviously) the more important of this week’s two Wolverine issues, but let’s deal with this one briefly. \u00a0The\u00a0theory of\u00a0Savage Wolverine\u00a0is presumably that with the ability to do stories from any point in Wolverine’s long\u00a0history, you have a vast range of scenarios to draw on. \u00a0You can go anywhere in the world […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2578","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\/2578","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=2578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2579,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578\/revisions\/2579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}