{"id":7446,"date":"2021-12-26T21:17:25","date_gmt":"2021-12-26T21:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7446"},"modified":"2021-12-26T21:17:25","modified_gmt":"2021-12-26T21:17:25","slug":"wastelanders-wolverine-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7446","title":{"rendered":"Wastelanders: Wolverine #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>WASTELANDS: WOLVERINE #1<\/strong>
\nby Steven S DeKnight, Ibrahim Moustafa & Neeraj Menson<\/strong><\/p>\n

This came out on December 15, but I forgot about it.<\/p>\n

I forgot about it because, well, it’s one of a series of\u00a0Wastelanders<\/em> one-shots that shipped in December. And the others star Hawkeye, Dr Doom, Black Widow and Star-Lord, so even though\u00a0Wastelanders<\/em> is set in the world of “Old Man Logan”, I don’t regard them as X-books.<\/p>\n

Although, it’s the Wastelands, and with the best will in the world, I really couldn’t care less. I’ve never found the Wastelands interesting, and I have no interest in reading sequels there. The whole post-apocalyptic vibe does nothing for me and feels like it’s been run into the ground. And “…but with the Marvel Universe” isn’t the twist needed to bring it to life. Plus, Mark Millar’s original story was a one-last-mission number, which doesn’t lend itself to endless sequels anyway. Taking the character out of context for the\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em> series kind of worked, but just doing more Wastelands stuff… I don’t get it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Let’s be fair, though – this issue is absolutely fine. It’s entirely decent. It has a simple story it wants to tell, it hits the key beats, it gets out of there. And Moustafa’s art is really good. I like the western feel; I like the fact that the ghost town has present-day cars littering it, to stop it feeling too disconnected from the present. And there’s a rather nicely done fight scene with a guy in adamantium armour, though I’m not sure we’re ever given a coherent reason beyond coincidence for Logan to meet him at all.<\/p>\n

The story takes place shortly after “Old Man Logan”, and the hook is simple. Logan picked up the Hulk baby at the end of that story. He’s vacillating about whether he can trust the baby Hulk or whether the kid should just be quietly disposed of. But then they stumble into a fight with Banner himself, surviving as a severed head within a suit of armour, and the kid sides with Logan as his daddy. That’s … pretty much it.<\/p>\n

The armoured Banner is a neat visual – I like the fact that the head still transforms from Banner to Hulk, and appreciate that the story doesn’t actually hammer that point. That aside, though, this feels like a very solid, quality rendering of a story that didn’t particularly need told. Maybe there’s something in the other\u00a0Wastelanders<\/em> stories that depends on Banner showing up here, and I wouldn’t rule that out. But reading it in isolation, what we have is a very straightforward plot in which baby Bruce’s loyalty is in doubt, but he rejects Bruce and chooses Logan. Which is a perfectly sensible line to take if your aim is to tie up that loose end, and it’s done with enough skill and pacing to stop it feeling quite as obvious as it is when you boil it down to a couple of lines.<\/p>\n

Still, is it a story that really needed to be told? Millar obviously thought it went without saying that Logan would raise the kid as his own and, well, he was right, wasn’t he? So this feels like an issue spent, however skilfully, spelling out something that didn’t need to be said. It’s not a bad comic by any stretch of the imagination – what it does, it does really quite well. But it feels to me like a very unnecessary comic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASTELANDS: WOLVERINE #1 by Steven S DeKnight, Ibrahim Moustafa & Neeraj Menson This came out on December 15, but I forgot about it. I forgot about it because, well, it’s one of a series of\u00a0Wastelanders one-shots that shipped in December. And the others star Hawkeye, Dr Doom, Black Widow and Star-Lord, so even though\u00a0Wastelanders is […]<\/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-7446","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\/7446","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=7446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7448,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7446\/revisions\/7448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}