{"id":4505,"date":"2019-02-22T21:44:38","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T21:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4505"},"modified":"2019-02-22T21:44:38","modified_gmt":"2019-02-22T21:44:38","slug":"return-of-wolverine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4505","title":{"rendered":"Return of Wolverine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return of Wolverine<\/em> is a comic that exists to get a thing from A to B. \u00a0We all know that. \u00a0And everyone involved knows we all know that. \u00a0So what to do on the pages?<\/p>\n

Charles Soule is a writer unusually willing to take on this sort of horrendous assignment – he was the one who killed off Wolverine in the first place, after all, not to mention the writer who tried his best to deliver on Marvel’s Inhumans fetish. \u00a0He can be very good when he’s writing something like Daredevil<\/em> that doesn’t come with a ton of baggage attached. \u00a0On something like this, well, at least he tends to bring something wilfully eccentric to the exercise.<\/p>\n

The obvious thing to do here, I guess, would be to try and lend it some weight by building around something or other from Wolverine’s past, and trying to make it part of a wider saga. \u00a0Instead, Soule goes in completely the opposite direction, giving us a completely new villain whose interest in Wolverine is almost incidental. \u00a0If you were wondering what those four lead-in miniseries had to do with any of this… well, they do introduce plot elements that crop up again here, but to be honest, they’re skippable as far as this story goes.<\/p>\n

Wolverine wakes up as an amnesiac and finds a scientist who’s just been killed off by Soteira’s kill team. \u00a0Rather unclear about what’s actually going on, he sets off to stop Soteira and winds up tagging along with a woman whose son has been abducted by them. \u00a0What follows is vaguely surreal – the Soteira soldiers randomly include dead villains, there’s a running theme of Logan deciding which parts of his personality to release from their mental cages to re-form his mind, and there’s a whole eerily perfect Soteira town. \u00a0In amongst all this, the actual X-Men show up for an issue to try and retrieve Wolverine, only to be driven away when he doesn’t recognise them yet.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Soteira’s top baddie Persephone has the power to bring dead people back to pseudo-life, and pretty much everyone in the series other than the X-Men is actually a corpse under her control. \u00a0The city is her idea of perfection because it doesn’t have all the messiness of people trying to live individual lives. \u00a0Her grand plan is to kill everyone on Earth and then rebuild a more efficient society under the control of herself and a bunch of geniuses on an orbiting space platform. \u00a0So naturally Wolverine stops that.<\/p>\n

And, er, that’s pretty much it. \u00a0The assigned task of bringing Wolverine back to life is already done before issue #1. \u00a0It carries itself through five issues not so much on the strength of content as on a general tone of off-kilter oddity. \u00a0The art was originally meant to be by Steve McNiven, who winds up only doing the first and last issues; in the event the middle three issues are done by Declan Shalvey, who’s perfectly fine but whose style doesn’t have quite the same precision, making for an obvious join. \u00a0(There’s also a glaring costume discontinuity between issues #4 and #5.) \u00a0Still, he brings something of the glassy-eyed stare to Soteira’s city.<\/p>\n

But while it’s largely successful in terms of tone, Return of Wolverine<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0a mystifying comic in most other ways. \u00a0There’s the whole thing about Wolverine now having the power to heat up his claws, which doesn’t seem to connect to the rest of the story at all – I guess it’s just a Soteira’s upgrade, but why? \u00a0It’s trying too hard on something which ought to be simple. \u00a0I can’t help noticing that it hasn’t been mentioned in any other book where Wolverine has turned up since his return, so something tells me it might be quietly forgotten about.<\/p>\n

There are some weird choices in terms of Soteira’s reanimated henchmen, who of course ought to be dead. \u00a0Daken makes sense, because he was killed in one of the lead-in minis, but Omega Red is a weird choice. \u00a0After all, Omega Red was a lead character in Weapon X<\/em> at the same time as this series was coming out. \u00a0I don’t think it’s an outright error – I think he’s meant to be the doppelganger from the Omega Clan in Rick Remender’s\u00a0Uncanny X-Force<\/em>, who was killed at the end of the story – but that’s pretty obscure, and surely more likely to confuse readers than anything else.<\/p>\n

Most of all, though, this isn’t really a Wolverine story. \u00a0Yes, it explains his return, but on a fairly basic plot level: she tried bringing him back as a henchman and that apparently kickstarted his healing powers to bring him back for real. \u00a0It’s the sort of explanation that can be quietly shelved and never spoken of again. \u00a0I guess it plays into a theme of Logan against distant amoral science types, but Persephone’s a bit too weird for that.<\/p>\n

When all is said and done, it mainly just feels like what it is: an exercise in getting from A to B while being mildly diverting in the process. \u00a0It’s quirky, but there’s not much to satisfy beneath the surface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return of Wolverine is a comic that exists to get a thing from A to B. \u00a0We all know that. \u00a0And everyone involved knows we all know that. \u00a0So what to do on the pages? Charles Soule is a writer unusually willing to take on this sort of horrendous assignment – he was the one […]<\/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-4505","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\/4505","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=4505"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4507,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4505\/revisions\/4507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}