{"id":2928,"date":"2015-03-15T12:41:46","date_gmt":"2015-03-15T12:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2928"},"modified":"2015-03-15T12:41:46","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T12:41:46","slug":"wolverines-vol-2-claw-blade-fang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2928","title":{"rendered":"Wolverines vol 2: Claw, Blade & Fang"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wolverines\u00a0<\/em>is turning out to be one of the oddest, most haphazard\u00a0X-books in quite some time, seemingly for reasons both intentional and otherwise. \u00a0This second volume takes us up to issue #10 –\u00a0halfway through the run, as\u00a0the whole thing is wrapping up in May before\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>. \u00a0And quite where it’s all heading at this stage is anybody’s guess.<\/p>\n

The first arc\u00a0set up a relatively focussed\u00a0story. \u00a0The Paradise guys wanted to get their hands on Wolverine’s body in order to (somehow) derive a cure\u00a0for their condition; the\u00a0rest of the cast were tagging along in order to\u00a0be released from their post-hypnotic control words. \u00a0So this sets up a series about people chasing the Wolverine statue as a macguffin, right?<\/p>\n

Wrong, apparently. \u00a0Issue #6 concludes the cast’s attempt to raid the fortress of Mr Sinister by having the X-Men show up and retrieve\u00a0Wolverine’s body themselves. \u00a0Most of the Paradise guys disappear from the story at this point – Endo got captured\u00a0during the attack, and Neuro and Skel…<\/p>\n

*reads issue #6 again*<\/p>\n

\u2026um, Neuro and Skel…<\/p>\n

*reads issue #6 again, just to be sure*<\/p>\n

\u2026um. \u00a0Do you know, I’ve no idea what happened with them? \u00a0They’re right there with Shogun and Fantomelle on page 17 of issue #6 (digital numbering). \u00a0Then\u00a0none of them are seen again for the rest of the issue. \u00a0And then in issue #7, Shogun is back on Mystique’s ship, and apparently Neuro and Skel are still with Sinister, but I really have no clue how they got separated, or how Fantomelle got out, and I don’t think it’s meant to be a mystery. \u00a0On top of that, writer Ray Fawkes ends issue #6 with a cliffhanger of Mystique turning into a giant to yell at the rest of the cast, which co-writer Charles Soule quickly brushes aside at the start of issue #7 as if he\u00a0has no idea what the hell it was meant to be setting up. \u00a0Reading these two\u00a0issues in particular, there is a worrying impression of writers who aren’t on the same page and an editor who is asleep at the wheel.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Shogun and Junk are now heavily outnumbered by the guys they tried to press into service and\u00a0pretty much give up on trying to exercise any sort of authority over them, leaving Mystique to seize the lead. \u00a0Since Mystique is entirely concerned with her own agenda of bringing back Destiny (and she manipulates Shogun into freeing her from her control words anyway), this leads the plot off in an entirely unrelated direction. \u00a0Nobody seems interested in going after the Wolverine statue again, and the series doesn’t check in on the X-Men or with Sinister.<\/p>\n

Instead, issue #7 meanders off in other directions, and the focus of issues #8-10 is the arrival on the scene\u00a0of Fang, of all people. \u00a0Yes, the one from the Imperial Guard. \u00a0The guy whose costume Wolverine stole for a few issues in the mid-1980s. \u00a0Fang is apparently visiting Earth for his annual drinking session with his good buddy Wolverine,\u00a0is most put out to learn that Wolverine is dead, and decides that\u00a0one of the book’s cast must be responsible, or at least that he should honour Wolverine’s death by making their lives a misery. \u00a0After all, X-23 aside, they’re all Wolverine villains. \u00a0Fang\u00a0then starts dragging cast members away\u00a0one at a time to give them a spotlight issue in which he torments them in tribute to his dead friend. \u00a0(He does make clear that X-23 will be the exception.)<\/p>\n

So we get an issue of Daken being forced to fight a dimwitted Frost Giant after Fang tells the Giant\u00a0that Daken is its deadbeat father. \u00a0The idea\u00a0is apparently to get Daken to fight a raving moron with daddy issues as a mockery of Daken’s own core concept. \u00a0Sabretooth gets a rather stranger and more elaborate scenario in which he’s dragged across the galaxy to confront a race of genocidal torturers who like to believe that they’ve reformed. \u00a0And up to a point they have – they’ve found religion, and now they kill people\u00a0painlessly<\/em>. \u00a0Obviously this is some sort of attempt to test the idea of a reformed Sabretooth, but it’s only partially successful because Sabretooth’s change of heart wasn’t organic. \u00a0It happened because he got zapped by magic in\u00a0Axis<\/em>.\u00a0 And since\u00a0it wasn’t a genuine or meaningful\u00a0character development in the first place (even within the logic of the story), there’s no dramatic mileage in challenging\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

This is\u00a0a strange, strange series. \u00a0Fang at least serves one important role, by being the character who actually gives a toss about Wolverine; at this stage, pretty much every other member of the cast appears to have lost interest in him altogether. \u00a0Of course, while this book is taking Wolverine<\/em>‘s place on the schedules, it isn’t\u00a0officially\u00a0Wolverine<\/em>, and it’s hard to complain too much if it’s more interested in its own cast. \u00a0But his absence hangs over the series in a very odd way; not only is he not in the story, but the characters would be wandering off to do their own thing entirely if it wasn’t for Fang intruding on the plot to drag them back to Wolverine.<\/p>\n

Presumably this is a deliberate choice, but I’m far from clear as to why. \u00a0 Of course, there’s long been a running joke that Wolverine\u00a0is forever\u00a0wheeling out\u00a0longstanding friends you’ve never heard of,\u00a0so casting Fang in that role makes a sort of sense. \u00a0Rather\u00a0more curious is the fact that Fang – who was the Imperial Guard’s\u00a0version of Timber Wolf – has suddenly been massively powered up to an insane level,\u00a0winding up somewhere between Lobo and the Beyonder. \u00a0It’s genuinely hard to tell whether this is a plot point, an astonishing continuity error, or an intentional retcon which the book is trying to brazen out. \u00a0It’s baffling, whatever it is.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0collected editions are also starting to look \u00a0weird. \u00a0The first volume ends on a cliffhanger, which led me to suggest\u00a0that it was a deliberate strategy to\u00a0pace the more-or-less-monthly trades as a serial. \u00a0But with the wild lurch in plot in this volume, it’s starting to look more as if Soule and Fawkes have structured the book in six-issue arcs, yet it’s\u00a0getting collected in multiples of five\u00a0regardless.<\/p>\n

All of this having been said,\u00a0there is quite a bit to enjoy in these issues,\u00a0if you turn your attention to\u00a0the\u00a0characters rather than the plot. \u00a0The idea that the Paradise characters are out of their depth dealing with the likes of Mystique, let alone Sinister, and that their initial advantage evaporates pretty quickly, comes across quite nicely. \u00a0Neuro in particular works as a confident would-be schemer who isn’t quite as good as he thinks he is. \u00a0And it’s a good Mystique story, grounding her in her love for Destiny and making her a lot more human than she’s seemed in a while. \u00a0At the same time, she’s convincing as\u00a0someone who can outwit all these people and take control of the situation even when she starts off with no apparent leverage.<\/p>\n

There’s an interesting subplot with Shogun starting a relationship with Deathstrike, apparently unaware that Ogun can talk to her when he’s asleep. \u00a0Daken’s spotlight issue gives him some effective audience sympathy because Fang is being so gratuitously excessive towards him. \u00a0The religiously enlightened murderers in Sabretooth’s issue are a fun idea, as is the fact that they come from such a wimpy section of the galaxy that they don’t even have to be particularly powerful or effective to pose\u00a0an existential threat to everyone else. \u00a0Fantomelle gets to do another of her comedy thefts, ineptly attempting a flirt-and-divert strategy despite\u00a0being straight out of a cloning facility and thus having no experience of flirting. \u00a0(“That is an amazing towel. \u00a0Where do you get a towel like that?”)<\/p>\n

And there’s some decent art on an issue by issue basis, though it’s fair to say that the book lacks a visual identity – when you go from the jagged Juan Doe to the delicate Peter Nguyen to the painted colours of Jonathan Marks in three weeks, the shifts of style are very noticeable. \u00a0The more episodic structure of the Fang issues helps there, of course, but it’s not as if there’s any particular sense that the artists have been matched up with particular series.<\/p>\n

But I’m confused by this book – it combines genuinely good character moments, frequently strong art, and concepts that seem to be intentionally crazy, but also has a meandering\u00a0and diffuse plot, a\u00a0strange\u00a0use of characters, and some\u00a0acute problems of incoherence. \u00a0 Perhaps all of this will be brought together in the end in a way that makes sense. \u00a0There are intriguing elements in here, alongside seemingly inexplicable oddities, and\u00a0it’s looking less and less like\u00a0it will amount to a workable whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wolverines\u00a0is turning out to be one of the oddest, most haphazard\u00a0X-books in quite some time, seemingly for reasons both intentional and otherwise. \u00a0This second volume takes us up to issue #10 –\u00a0halfway through the run, as\u00a0the whole thing is wrapping up in May before\u00a0Secret Wars. \u00a0And quite where it’s all heading at this stage is […]<\/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-2928","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\/2928","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=2928"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2966,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions\/2966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}