I\u00a0could have sworn the\u00a0first trade paperback for this series was announced as\u00a0covering\u00a0the first six issues. \u00a0But issue #6 turns out to\u00a0end halfway through the second storyline, so evidently not. \u00a0Never mind. \u00a0Let’s do issue #1-4, which covered the first arc, even if they did end months ago.<\/p>\n
Wolverine is dead. \u00a0Fortunately, we have a spare. \u00a0This is the version of Logan from\u00a0the 2008-9 arc by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven,\u00a0who resurfaced during\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> and\u00a0wound up stuck on the Marvel Universe after the climax. \u00a0In fact, since this is a direct continuation of the\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> miniseries, it’s really issues #5-8,\u00a0but so it goes.<\/p>\n So is there a point to this? \u00a0Well, beyond the obvious one, which is to keep\u00a0publishing Wolverine stories even though he’s meant to be dead right now? \u00a0It’s debatable. \u00a0Using the character in this way, he has to be similar enough to the regular Wolverine to fill the gap, but different enough to avoid it being a really blatant cheat. \u00a0Or at least to make it the sort of blatant cheat that people will shrug their shoulders and accept.<\/p>\n The point of the character isn’t so much that he’s old. \u00a0Wolverine’s already old, and for all that this one has grey hair, he’s only slowed down to the\u00a0extent of dialling back his fighting prowess\u00a0to slightly saner levels. \u00a0This story nods to his healing factor being slower than it used to be, but the bottom line is that we’re still looking at\u00a0someone who can put up a fight against the Hulk.<\/p>\n The\u00a0reason why Millar and McNiven made him old was because their story was set in a post-apocalyptic future and they wanted to stress the\u00a0passage of time and the idea that he was a survivor of a bygone era. \u00a0He was also a bit of a hangdog figure who had given up on being a hero after being tricked\u00a0with illusions into killing the other X-Men. \u00a0But we’re not\u00a0in that\u00a0future any more, and Millar already did the story\u00a0where he recovers his will to fight for a better world. \u00a0And then Brian Bendis did it again in\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>. \u00a0So at this point, once he’s removed from his\u00a0setting, isn’t this version of the character basically just Wolverine?<\/p>\n These four issues – like both\u00a0the Millar and Bendis arcs – are essentially an episodic travelogue. \u00a0Jeff Lemire, who is also writing the character as a regular in\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em>, basically wants to get him from the end of\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> to joining the team. \u00a0This involves touring the modern Marvel Universe while Logan gets\u00a0the culture shock out of his system.<\/p>\n As with the Secret Wars\u00a0<\/em>arc,\u00a0Andrea Sorrentino does an excellent job of selling the character\u00a0as\u00a0grizzled and old, and making him visually distinct from the original Wolverine, even while keeping him in much the same outfits that he’d have traditionally worn. \u00a0There are also quite a lot of visual fireworks here with elaborate and inventive page layouts, some of which are more effective than others –\u00a0it’s hard to see how doing a dramatic\u00a0double-page splash as a homage to\u00a0Dark Knight Returns<\/em> does anything other than distract from the plot, for example.<\/p>\n Logan fairly quickly figures out that he’s travelled back in time and that the world hasn’t collapsed yet. \u00a0That leads to what seems to be the main theme that’s going to\u00a0distinguish him from the original Logan: this one has already seen the Marvel Universe collapse around him and\u00a0sees\u00a0this as his second chance to stop that happening. \u00a0Where he starts, however, is\u00a0not by trying to change the general direction of the world, but instead by trying to hunt down\u00a0individual baddies who specifically caused him trouble. \u00a0So he starts out by hunting down one of the local thugs from his homestead, who in the present day is a Z-list petty villain, and kills him before his career can even get started.<\/p>\n This\u00a0is a potentially interesting idea, but it doesn’t really get followed up because soon enough we’re on to the Hulk,\u00a0who\u00a0was the big baddie of Logan’s future. \u00a0Right now, though, the\u00a0Hulk is Amadeus Cho, which takes us in a somewhat less interesting direction, as Logan starts to figure out – thanks to a teenage Hulk, a female Hawkeye and an elderly Steve Rogers, who ultimately takes him to the memorial where the original Wolverine’s adamantium statute is now kept – that this isn’t his past at all. \u00a0Lemire does a solid job of selling Logan’s suppressed berserker tendencies and of making his disorientation convincing.\u00a0 Reasonably enough, Logan initially writes off all the anomalies as\u00a0one of those odd\u00a0stories he must have forgotten (just because a key player is already dead doesn’t mean he won’t be alive again next Thursday), before finally accepting that he’s wasting his time here trying to change\u00a0his own past.<\/p>\n At which point he goes to have a directionless wander in the\u00a0wilderness until the X-Men show up in\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0Which is not a hugely satisfying resolution, to put it mildly.<\/p>\n With his flashbacks to Logan’s future\/past,\u00a0Jeff Lemire seems to be trying to set up the idea that Logan\u00a0is missing the point by focussing on altering his personal history. \u00a0That’s something where he’s driven by anger and\u00a0by finally being presented with the possibility of changing something\u00a0that he saw\u00a0for years\u00a0as out of his control. \u00a0But the bigger issue (the flashbacks suggest) is that he allowed himself to stop\u00a0fighting for a better world in the first place, which\u00a0is<\/em> a lesson that he can apply here in a more abstract sort of second chance. \u00a0Which is fine, except for two things.<\/p>\n One,\u00a0this arc doesn’t get to him picking up on that lesson,\u00a0no doubt in order to leave it for Extraordinary<\/em>, which\u00a0leaves this arc to be a bit of a deck-clearing exercise.<\/p>\n And two, having Logan learn that lesson really just restores him to the original Wolverine, in which case, why not just use the original? \u00a0To be fair, the next arc seems to be trying to answer that – by\u00a0doing a story where he tries to track down the\u00a0Marvel Universe counterpart of his wife – but that’s still a plot driver rather than\u00a0anything more.<\/p>\n What we have here, bottom line, is a stand-in Wolverine, who isn’t that much different from the original. \u00a0Perhaps that’s in the nature of the character, but it still feels like a somewhat futile exercise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u00a0could have sworn the\u00a0first trade paperback for this series was announced as\u00a0covering\u00a0the first six issues. \u00a0But issue #6 turns out to\u00a0end halfway through the second storyline, so evidently not. \u00a0Never mind. \u00a0Let’s do issue #1-4, which covered the first arc, even if they did end months ago. Wolverine is dead. \u00a0Fortunately, we have a spare. […]<\/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-3320","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\/3320","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=3320"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3433,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3320\/revisions\/3433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}