I’ve been taking stuff out of order\u00a0so as to get the X-Men titles up to date for the relaunch. \u00a0So\u00a0it’s time to go back and pick up on the Wolverine books. \u00a0“Return to the Wastelands” is\u00a0a curious three-parter. \u00a0At root, it has one very simple job to do, but it takes a strange\u00a0route to get there.<\/p>\n
The story opens with Logan waking up back in the Wastelands, the post-apocalyptic\u00a0future he left behind. \u00a0For the first two issues, it cuts back and forth between two plot. \u00a0In the Wastelands, Logan returns to check\u00a0up on the Hulk baby – Bruce Banner’s grandson – whom he left behind with Danielle Cage. \u00a0Of course, somebody has wandered off with the baby, and it turns out to be Kang. \u00a0Ostensibly thanks to Kang’s time distortion, the baby has now grown up to become an evil adult Hulk called the Warlord.<\/p>\n
In amongst this, we have flashbacks to Logan being sent to a space station to answer a distress call from Alpha Flight. \u00a0The space station is overrun with the Brood and Logan is meant to be helping to liberate the place. \u00a0You know the routine.<\/p>\n
As\u00a0it turns out,\u00a0after a while the other X-Men followed Logan to the space station to provide reinforcements. \u00a0\u00a0Jean promptly got taken over by\u00a0one of\u00a0the Brood and she’s using her psi-powers to make him see bad things. \u00a0So he’s not in the Wastelands after all. \u00a0Part three then plays out\u00a0in a vaguely trippy way with Logan having hallucinations,\u00a0largely\u00a0focussed on the Hulk baby,\u00a0in between trying to free Jean from the Brood by just cutting off the thing on the back of her neck. \u00a0He wins. \u00a0The upshot of all this is that Logan now feels worried about leaving the baby behind in the Wastelands, and he decides he needs to find a way back, if only to retrieve\u00a0the kid.<\/p>\n
That’s the simple job that I mentioned at the start. \u00a0It\u00a0gives Logan a quest for the next arc – get back to the Wastelands, and in the first instance, find somebody willing to\u00a0help with that. \u00a0But boy,\u00a0it takes a roundabout way to get there, and a seemingly pointless one. \u00a0All the\u00a0stuff with the Brood seems to be just an excuse to\u00a0bring about the\u00a0hallucinations; all the stuff about Kang stealing the baby seems to have no purpose except to allow the baby to show up as an adult without getting too trippy too soon. \u00a0Beyond that, is there any real point to all this?<\/p>\n
My best guess is that it’s trying to remind us of some points that might be significant to the bigger picture. \u00a0Perhaps it’s intended just as a way to keep the Wastelands in play as a major plot element, without actually going there. \u00a0At some point we all know that the real Wolverine is going to come back and\u00a0Old Man Logan will be politely packed off somewhere. \u00a0Maybe he dies a heroic death, but that’s going to ring a bit hollow if\u00a0another\u00a0version of the same character is coming back from the dead at the same time. \u00a0So heroically sacrificing himself\u00a0by returning to the Wastelands to look after the kid… sure. \u00a0That’s an ending of sorts.<\/p>\n
In the short term, though, it’s a lot of running around to no great effect. \u00a0I don’t much care for the Wastelands anyway – but like a lot of Mark Millar concepts,\u00a0it’s cranked up to an insane degree, and so there’s a bit of a clash when you place it alongside the hangdog, elegiac tone that this book often seems to be going for. \u00a0When artist Andrea Sorrentino goes over the top,\u00a0it’s not so much by leaning into the melodrama as by\u00a0going for unusual, striking images, so that you have lots of little elements of a Kang panel superimposed over a Brood fight, pages made up of broken shards, or a double page spread of Jean single-handedly\u00a0defeating the Brood which is suffused in red. \u00a0It’s memorable, but aesthetically it feels to me like it wants to be taken very very seriously,\u00a0while the Wastelands concept is\u00a0very very\u00a0silly. \u00a0Sorrentino wants to do visual bravura, and the extended dream scene is a way of letting him do that, but ultimately, does this story really have the content to justify the fireworks that Sorrentino is throwing at it? \u00a0I’d say no.<\/p>\n
“Gone Real Bad” works rather better,\u00a0perhaps because it’s drawn by Filipe Andrade, whose\u00a0art is more direct and exaggerated. \u00a0Marvel’s attitude to artists is strange these days – they’re certainly not pressing artists to work in a house style, but instead we’re getting the\u00a0other extreme where\u00a0very\u00a0different artists are treated as interchangeable and the jarring style shifts are just something we’re supposed to ignore. \u00a0Sorrentino is meant to be the lead artist on this book, and if that’s the style you’re going for, then Andrade is a weird choice to alternate with him. \u00a0But for\u00a0me, Andrade’s cartooning has a tone that works much better for a series about a post-apocalyptic\u00a0Wolverine.<\/p>\n
These two issues consist of\u00a0Logan\u00a0first\u00a0trying to get the magicians and scientists of the Marvel Universe to fix him up with some time travel. \u00a0Everyone refuses on the grounds that this is a very bad idea, and so\u00a0he resorts to breaking Asmodeus out of prison – a minor Avengers villain who once managed to briefly send Hawkeye and Wonder Man back to the past. \u00a0Or that’s what the story says, anyway. \u00a0I’ve never heard of him, but\u00a0he’s identified as Charlie Benton, in which case he’s a minor Dr Strange villain from the late 60s\u00a0(and he’s\u00a0meant to be dead). \u00a0Still, none of this really matters for present purposes; as far as this story is concerned,\u00a0the important bit is that he’s a Z-lister who might\u00a0nonetheless be willing and able to do what\u00a0Logan needs. \u00a0That leads to some quite funny scenes where Asmodeus has to take Logan to\u00a0his\u00a0collection of mystical artefacts, which he keeps in a lock-up because he can’t afford a mansion. \u00a0It’s difficult to imagine that\u00a0working with Sorrentino.<\/p>\n
Of course, you’d have to be an\u00a0idiot to trust a minor supervillain to send\u00a0you through time, and by all appearances, Logan\u00a0in this story is exactly that stupid. \u00a0Fortunately, it looks like we’re not actually getting\u00a0a storyline about returning to the Wastelands, but instead a trip through other parts of Wolverine’s personal history, which could be a bit more fun.<\/p>\n
A mixed bag of issues, but at least we’ve got a clear direction taking shape,\u00a0which has long been the\u00a0book’s biggest weakness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been taking stuff out of order\u00a0so as to get the X-Men titles up to date for the relaunch. \u00a0So\u00a0it’s time to go back and pick up on the Wolverine books. \u00a0“Return to the Wastelands” is\u00a0a curious three-parter. \u00a0At root, it has one very simple job to do, but it takes a strange\u00a0route to get […]<\/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-3734","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\/3734","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=3734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3735,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3734\/revisions\/3735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}