{"id":2732,"date":"2014-10-19T15:28:39","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T14:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2732"},"modified":"2014-10-19T15:28:39","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T14:28:39","slug":"death-of-wolverine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2732","title":{"rendered":"Death of Wolverine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Death of Wolverine<\/em> is an interesting comic, for a variety of reasons wholly external to the comic itself. \u00a0It’s also, to be fair, quite an interesting comic for a variety of reasons that are on the page too. \u00a0If nothing else, it’s a book that’s clearly taking its best shot at what many would surely consider a nightmare brief.<\/p>\n

This is the first work that Charles Soule has done for the X-books. \u00a0He’ll be sticking around for a while, since he’s also writing the upcoming\u00a0Wolverines<\/em>\u00a0weekly, in which a bunch of characters who are very like Wolverine but aren’t Wolverine must fill the void left by his absence<\/a>. \u00a0So in reality,\u00a0this marks the start of his run on\u00a0Wolverine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Soule is an interesting writer. \u00a0He’s had a prolific output for Marvel and DC\u00a0over the last year or so, by his own account\u00a0writing eight titles a month while\u00a0maintaining a legal practice<\/a>. \u00a0It’s a seemingly impossible workload and one that he’s said he intends\u00a0to cut back on<\/a>,\u00a0now that he’s signed an exclusive deal with Marvel. \u00a0That output has been a fairly indiscriminate\u00a0mix of editorially-dictated titles\u00a0and more interesting\u00a0creator-driven work like\u00a0She-Hulk<\/em> or\u00a0Letter 44<\/em>. \u00a0Not only is Soule the guy who took on\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em>, he’s the man who accepted the task of digging Inhuman<\/em> out of a hole.\u00a0Perhaps\u00a0he has unusual tastes, maybe\u00a0he relishes the challenge of an unpromising remit, or quite possibly\u00a0he’s simply\u00a0calculated\u00a0that\u00a0these\u00a0are worthwhile relationship-builders with the major publishers.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0with this book he faces a\u00a0difficult\u00a0writing challenge on any view. \u00a0The problem isn’t\u00a0that the title and the pre-release hype give away the ending, mind you. \u00a0Predictability is vastly overrated\u00a0as\u00a0a problem. \u00a0The vast majority of stories, or at least genre stories, are hugely\u00a0predictable, at least on the broad\u00a0level we’re talking about here. \u00a0Nobody watches\u00a0Guardians of the Galaxy\u00a0<\/em>seriously thinking\u00a0that the heroes might\u00a0lose; nobody watches romantic comedies seriously contemplating that the couple won’t get together. \u00a0Any tension is about how you get there, not what the destination is.<\/p>\n

Nor is it a problem that everyone knows Wolverine\u00a0is\u00a0bound to be back sooner or later. \u00a0We’ve been through this cycle many times before. \u00a0Kill the character off, have a temporary replacement for a while to build interest in the series, bring the character back triumphantly in a few years time. \u00a0It’s a tried and tested way of reigniting interest in a fading series.<\/p>\n

The easiest way to write the death of Wolverine would be\u00a0to acknowledge it for what it is – a plot twist\u00a0setting up future storylines based on the lead character’s temporary absence – and just to play it accordingly. \u00a0To some extent Soule does that, since the series\u00a0seems to be doing double duty\u00a0reintroducing Lady Deathstrike to the cast and setting up material for\u00a0the villains in\u00a0Logan Legacy<\/em>. \u00a0But\u00a0the problem is that that option isn’t available, because Marvel is bound and determined to pretend that we can’t all see the resurrection coming. \u00a0And so this story has to be presented as a mock finale, in four issues which don’t really have anything much to do with the preceding story, except to the extent that they\u00a0pick up on the “no healing factor” status quo. \u00a0And that’s where things get\u00a0seriously challenging.<\/p>\n

Endings have always been a problem for superhero comics, because they aren’t really designed to have them. \u00a0They’re designed as open-ended,\u00a0and capable of continuing indefinitely. \u00a0And even the model of superhero\u00a0continuity as a\u00a0single unified\u00a0myth\u00a0has fallen away in recent years. \u00a0The ingredients haven’t been put in place to give Wolverine a clear ending, and to get to that point, you’d like rather more than four issues to set it up.<\/p>\n

Ideally, for example, you’d do it as a long-running story\u00a0following through from the loss of his healing factor. \u00a0But\u00a0Paul Cornell already resolved his storylines before\u00a0leaving the book, however hurriedly, so that’s out the window; the loss of his healing factor is now just a part of the regular set-up and the chance to do a direct plot flowing from that has been lost. \u00a0Where does that leave us? \u00a0There’s the tour of familiar locations – the Canadian wilderness, Madripoor, Japan. \u00a0There’s a selection of guests from Wolverine’s past, some of whom are really being reintroduced so that they can appear in\u00a0upcoming issues. \u00a0But with the status quo Soule inherits,\u00a0the story pretty much has to be about Wolverine bravely fighting on against a threat only he can deal with, despite the loss of his healing factor, and thus getting himself killed.<\/p>\n

This makes the selection of the threat pretty critical to the success of the story, and that’s where we hit serious difficulties. \u00a0Wolverine’s rogue’s gallery has never been his strongest point, and Sabretooth was already the focus of the immediately preceding story. \u00a0In terms of arch-enemies, that only leaves Weapon X (or Romulus, but seriously now). \u00a0Unfortunately, the\u00a0main bad guy at the Weapon X Project was the Professor, and he was already killed off back in the 90s. \u00a0That leaves us with\u00a0second-fiddle villain Abraham\u00a0Cornelius, who just isn’t quite up to this role.<\/p>\n

The story does its best with the material available. \u00a0It wants to say something about Wolverine as a character, so it\u00a0decides that Cornelius’ motivation has to be all about a misunderstanding of Wolverine. \u00a0So\u00a0even as Wolverine dies, he achieves his\u00a0ultimate victory by\u00a0proving Cornelius wrong about who he is. \u00a0And so the story becomes\u00a0a defining statement about the character, something that will stand even when the death itself is later reversed. \u00a0This is\u00a0all pretty sound in theory.<\/p>\n

So the idea is to have Cornelius, as the mad scientist, driven by a wildly out of date understanding\u00a0of Wolverine. \u00a0Cornelius still sees Wolverine as\u00a0a violent lunatic, and so he believes that his only legacy has been to make a\u00a0murderer\u00a0into a more powerful murderer. \u00a0In a hopelessly misconceived attempt to atone for this, he’s trying to re-make Wolverine “properly” by giving the same\u00a0sort of upgrades to better people. \u00a0But without the benefit of Wolverine’s healing factor to withstand the adamantium, they all just die on him, so he wants to capture Wolverine and use his healing factor to\u00a0help solve the problem and make a better\u00a0Wolverine for the future. \u00a0Of course, Wolverine doesn’t actually have his healing factor any more, but Cornelius is too behind the times to know that.<\/p>\n

Like I say, you can see the idea. \u00a0The modern version of Wolverine is confronted with an out-of-date stereotype of him as a one-dimensional killer, and he proves how he’s changed. \u00a0Thematically it ticks a lot of boxes.<\/p>\n

But it’s\u00a0an anticlimax. \u00a0Cornelius’\u00a0scheme is inherently incapable of being carried into effect, so Wolverine doesn’t\u00a0really\u00a0get the chance to thwart it. \u00a0And by extension, he doesn’t really get to prove anything about himself by doing so. \u00a0We’re left with Wolverine\u00a0rescuing some anonymous victims from Cornelius’ automated surgery machines, and getting himself killed by drowning in\u00a0molten adamantium when he resorts to puncturing the holding tanks\u00a0because he can’t stop the process any other way. \u00a0It sees things coming full circle to some extent, but it doesn’t land\u00a0thematically in the way it seems to hope for.<\/p>\n

This is a shame, since the book\u00a0bounces along quite nicely until it gets to the point. \u00a0Issue #1 is really very good, with Wolverine\u00a0trying to hide out quietly in a cabin but being\u00a0endlessly besieged by low-rent baddies (pursuing a contract offered by Cornelius), most of whom are effortlessly despatched off panel. \u00a0There’s a rare attempt to push the idea of Wolverine’s enhanced senses with\u00a0out-of-context captions telling us what he’s picking up;\u00a0while this doesn’t match the visual invention of some of what’s been done on\u00a0Daredevil<\/em> with similar material, it’s a\u00a0genuinely nice touch. \u00a0Steve McNiven –\u00a0frankly, a surprisingly high-profile artist to be working on a project like this – does some excellent work throughout the series, selling\u00a0a sense of fatigue and inevitability about the whole thing. \u00a0Even where the\u00a0overall plot leaves something to be desired, the story leaves McNiven plenty of\u00a0details where\u00a0he can do something more interesting, and he\u00a0rises to that.<\/p>\n

The middle two issues\u00a0read rather better in the knowledge that they’re setting up characters for upcoming stories; without that information, in the context of something that’s supposed to be read as a finale, they seem a bit too much\u00a0like flab. \u00a0The use of Sabretooth is particularly bemusing, since it’s wildly at odds with his depiction in the immediately preceding story (and more to the point, nobody reacts to the change accordingly). \u00a0Besides, if he’s not going to be the\u00a0focus of your\u00a0Last Wolverine Story, it’s maybe better just to\u00a0avoid him entirely.<\/p>\n

Then we have those last few pages. \u00a0Like I say,\u00a0drowning Wolverine in molten adamantium makes a certain degree of sense\u00a0as a way of finishing him off. \u00a0But\u00a0having him\u00a0carry on walking<\/em>, covered in molten metal, for several pages after that\u2026 is a problem. \u00a0Yes, it lets him have one last confrontation with Cornelius. \u00a0Yes, it lets him finish the series\u00a0watching the sunset. \u00a0Yes, by completely obscuring him at the end, it gives you one possible backdoor for when you revive him. \u00a0And yes, McNiven\u00a0manages to make that\u00a0final panel looks vaguely\u00a0like a note of tragic dignity.<\/p>\n

But it’s too much. \u00a0This is Wolverine without his healing factor. \u00a0He’s covered in molten metal. \u00a0Shouldn’t he just be instantly dead? \u00a0And if this stuff isn’t solid, why isn’t it just falling off onto the floor? \u00a0And more basically, how is he seeing out? \u00a0Even by the standards of comic book physics,\u00a0it just begs too many questions of the “hold on, how the hell is that meant to work” variety\u00a0that undercut the impact the scene is going for. \u00a0It’s a sign of how good McNiven is that\u00a0he manages to haul it over the line into not being laughable –\u00a0most artists, I suspect, would\u00a0not have managed that. \u00a0But it doesn’t\u00a0ultimately work.<\/p>\n

Still, for the most part\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em> at least manages to get into the category of “interesting failure”. \u00a0It’s talented creators having a sincere stab\u00a0at\u00a0a very difficult remit, and some of it may read better\u00a0depending on where Soule’s longer-term plans are heading. \u00a0It’s not iconic material, but\u00a0did anyone really expect that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Death of Wolverine is an interesting comic, for a variety of reasons wholly external to the comic itself. \u00a0It’s also, to be fair, quite an interesting comic for a variety of reasons that are on the page too. \u00a0If nothing else, it’s a book that’s clearly taking its best shot at what many would surely […]<\/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-2732","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\/2732","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=2732"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2779,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions\/2779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}