{"id":4128,"date":"2018-05-03T22:17:11","date_gmt":"2018-05-03T21:17:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4128"},"modified":"2018-05-03T22:17:11","modified_gmt":"2018-05-03T21:17:11","slug":"hunt-for-wolverine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4128","title":{"rendered":"Hunt for Wolverine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wolverine’s return was the great climax of the\u00a0Marvel Legacy<\/em> one-shot. \u00a0And that was last September.<\/p>\n

Now, over six months later, Marvel finally gets around to the follow-up. \u00a0Yes, I gather there’s been some “where’s Wolverine” pages at the back of various comics, but they don’t make it into any of the digital editions, presumably because Marvel are classing them as glorified house ads. \u00a0Rightly so, by all accounts. \u00a0But with\u00a0Hunt for Wolverine<\/em>, Charles Soule – who killed off Wolverine in the first place – does the set-up work for a bunch of parallel miniseries that are going to bring him back again.<\/p>\n

A cynic might wonder whether the intervening six months has been spent figuring out what the plot is. \u00a0Such a reader might well remain just as cynical at the end of this issue. \u00a0It does loop back to Marvel Legacy<\/em>‘s\u00a0scene of a lone Jean Grey walking into the building with the broken Wolverine statue, reacting, and saying “Welcome back”, but boy, it feels like a dutiful inclusion from a story that has no real need for such a scene.<\/p>\n

There are two stories here, both written by Soule. \u00a0“Secrets and Lives”, with art by David Marquez and Rachelle Rosenberg, has the Reavers – the old-school, Australia-era Reavers, complete with the likes of Donald Pierce and Pretty Boy – trying to steal the Wolverine statue. \u00a0(You know, the one that was formed by the adamantium setting around him in the death issue. \u00a0The one that always looked a bit silly but was played as if it was very touching.) \u00a0There’s one new Reaver, essentially a living transport helicopter, which is a nice idea, and gets enough page time to suggest that she’ll be back in one of the minis.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the Reavers are a bit down on their luck and they figure there’s got to be somebody out there willing to pay for the body of Wolverine. \u00a0As it turns out, though, that shack in the middle of nowhere with the Wolverine statue is pretty much a honey trap for dumb villains to get picked up by the X-Men. \u00a0We get a flashback of various characters paying their respects to the recently deceased Logan, before Storm finally makes the obvious point that leaving Logan’s body trapped in a lump of metal and sticking it on a pedestal is not especially fitting. \u00a0Where this is all heading, of course, is that the Reavers actually do manage to get the statue open, but there’s nothing inside, because it turns out that Kitty phased Logan’s body out of the statute months ago and they took it off to be buried properly. \u00a0Job done, continuity duly retconned, and let’s not bother ourselves about that statue any more.<\/p>\n

Visually, the flashback scenes are better; the present-day stuff is all a bit chaotic, though the Reavers’ designs work well. \u00a0Still, it’s the quieter material that feels stronger on the whole, both the flashbacks and the coda. \u00a0Mind you, Marquez pulls off the broken statue as a surprise moment; and the retrieval of Logan’s body doesn’t really work, because he’s both relatively unscathed in a way that makes no sense, and unrecognisable at the same time.<\/p>\n

The story ends with a scene “today” in which the X-Men find out that the grave is empty and decide to start looking into it – which is intercut with some enigmatic scenes of Logan in shadow doing stuff that will presumably make sense down the line. \u00a0That leads us into “Hunter’s Pryde”, moves on to the real job of getting him back into circulation. \u00a0The art here is by Paulo Siquiera, Walden Wong, and Ruth Redmond; since this is more of a character piece, and Soule gives them something to work with in terms of acting, it looks fine.<\/p>\n

This one is basically the set-up for the minis, establishing that Kitty is asking Iron Man, Daredevil and the Lady Deathstrike are all independently looking for the body along with the X-Men themselves. \u00a0This is where you get the tacked on scene with Jean Grey, who has to stay behind at the shack after everyone else leaves, and even points out that she didn’t actually know Logan all that well (she’s the time-traveller from the Silver Age, after all). \u00a0It’s not a very convincing ending when you think about it, though it sort-of-kind-of gets away with sending the “see, we’re going to make it all fit together, we promise” message.<\/p>\n

Still, I’m pleased enough to see Soule writing the return stories. \u00a0It’s not so much that it avoids somebody else having to undo his story, though that’s nice enough in its way. \u00a0But while on the one hand Soule seems to be a writer willing to take on the most thankless of tasks for Marvel, he’s also pretty good – I have a lot of time for his current Daredevil<\/em> run – and often manages to bring something interesting to the most ill-conceived and spreadsheetish of projects. \u00a0Which, clearly, is good news when you’re writing three interlinked miniseries about the return of Wolverine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wolverine’s return was the great climax of the\u00a0Marvel Legacy one-shot. \u00a0And that was last September. Now, over six months later, Marvel finally gets around to the follow-up. \u00a0Yes, I gather there’s been some “where’s Wolverine” pages at the back of various comics, but they don’t make it into any of the digital editions, presumably because […]<\/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-4128","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\/4128","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=4128"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4129,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4128\/revisions\/4129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}