Three down, one to go. \u00a0And if you’re going to do four parallel lead-in stories, each drawing on a different aspect of Wolverine, then somewhere along the line you’re going to need a story about beclawed people doing violent things. \u00a0Of course, even if you can’t use Wolverine himself, the Marvel Universe has no shortage of other characters who are, shall we say, Wolverine-adjacent.<\/p>\n
Mariko Tamaki and Butch Guice are the creative team tackling this remit in\u00a0Claws of a Killer<\/em>. \u00a0Lady Deathstrike has found out about Wolverine’s return through her contacts with the Reavers, and enlists Sabretooth and Daken to look into it. \u00a0The idea seems to be that all three were meant to have devoted their lives to getting revenge on Wolverine, and his death screwed that up. \u00a0So they need to get their chance now, before anyone else does.<\/p>\n By “using the data from military satellites”, Lady Deathstrike has tracked an “adamantium signature similar to Logan’s” – and, hold on, sorry, but\u00a0what<\/em>? \u00a0Since when can you do that? \u00a0I’ve never really liked the idea that you can track mutants by some sort of bio signature, but that’s mainly because it has to be ignored in order for so many plots to work. \u00a0At least it feels like something that makes a vague sort of pseudo-sense. \u00a0But an “adamantium signature”? \u00a0It’s a lump of metal. \u00a0What the hell is it giving off that you could possibly track from space? \u00a0And comes to think of it, if Logan\u00a0does<\/em> have an “adamantium signature” and you can search for it from space, how come it’s such a hassle to find him?<\/p>\n Yeah, that one really doesn’t work at all.<\/p>\n But never mind. \u00a0By using the data from military satellites to find out where the plot needs her to be, Lady Deathstrike leads Sabretooth and Daken to the small town of Maybelle, Arizona. \u00a0A few days earlier, Soteira – the company that also showed up at the end of Charles Soule’s miniseries – did an experiment here that killed all the locals and turned them into zombies. \u00a0They also have a “kill team” of soldiers still wandering around the place, and a big mysterious thingummy that’s green and glowing.<\/p>\n So it’s a zombie story. \u00a0And where atmosphere is concerned, it all goes well enough. \u00a0Tamaki gives her three characters distinct voices (I’ll come back to how well they tally with other versions of the characters, but they’re distinct). \u00a0Guice has always been a great artist, and this place certainly feels like a modern ghost town. \u00a0There’s some grit and credibility to a story that could easily have felt silly. \u00a0The book commits to playing it straight instead of going tongue in cheek, and it pulls that off. \u00a0That side of things is all fine.<\/p>\n On the other hand, all three leads are played as straight villains; Daken’s perhaps marginally more equivocal than the others but he’s clearly a bad guy nonetheless. \u00a0Mind you, Daken’s been written inconsistently across a number of titles of late – reconcile his depictions in\u00a0Iceman<\/em> and\u00a0All-New Wolverine<\/em> and win a prize – so you’ve kind of got to pick one and run with it. \u00a0But Sabretooth and Deathstrike are currently on a team with a version of Logan who they didn’t feel the urge to kill at all costs, and that feels just weird. \u00a0This all plays like a parallel universe where\u00a0Weapon X\u00a0<\/em>isn’t happening. \u00a0I’m not sure I buy semi-inverted Sabretooth wanting to hunt down and kill Logan at all, though I maybe buy that he\u00a0thinks<\/em> he wants to. \u00a0I really don’t believe that Deathstrike could feel this strongly about him, yet be able to work with Old Man Logan.<\/p>\n Mainly, though, the book runs into the problem that there’s nobody here to root for. \u00a0It’s a story about three awful people stumbling upon other awful people, and frankly, who cares about any of them? \u00a0You could have brought in Laura, or even played Daken differently, for a bit of light and shade here. \u00a0I get, tonally, why you wouldn’t want to do that. \u00a0Regardless, the result is something that might work as a sub-plot in a “Hunt for Wolverine” storyline, but drags when presented as a four-issue mini. \u00a0At this length, the book’s best quality, its strong sense of tone, starts to become a liability: four issues, one note.<\/p>\n There are some slightly silly plot twists in the final act, as it turns out that the blank-acting Soteira killteam randomly include revived versions of Lady Deathstrike’s father and Sabretooth’s son. \u00a0(Yes, Graydon Creed is back.) \u00a0None of this gets explained, or even close, so it’s best seen as a teaser for the main event; and on those terms it sells it quite well. \u00a0The end of the final issue is, um, enigmatic, as it builds to a giant explosion from which everyone inexplicably seems to escape just fine. \u00a0It’s obviously a choice, and I guess it contributes to a sense of unease, but it does nothing to make the series satisfying as a mini in its own right.<\/p>\n This would have made a strong two-parter, presented mainly as a lead-in rather than a story in its own right. \u00a0At four issues it struggles to convert that into a satisfying mini, and ultimately doesn’t succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three down, one to go. \u00a0And if you’re going to do four parallel lead-in stories, each drawing on a different aspect of Wolverine, then somewhere along the line you’re going to need a story about beclawed people doing violent things. \u00a0Of course, even if you can’t use Wolverine himself, the Marvel Universe has no shortage […]<\/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-4266","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\/4266","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=4266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4267,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4266\/revisions\/4267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}