{"id":7716,"date":"2022-03-27T21:22:36","date_gmt":"2022-03-27T20:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7716"},"modified":"2022-03-27T21:22:36","modified_gmt":"2022-03-27T20:22:36","slug":"wolverine-14-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7716","title":{"rendered":"Wolverine #14-19"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>WOLVERINE vol 7 #14-19<\/strong>
\nWriter: Benjamin Percy<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Adam Kubert (#14-16), Lan Medina (#17), Paco Diaz (#18), Javi Fernandez (#19)<\/strong>
\nInker: Adam Kubert (#14-16), Cam Smith (#17), Paco Diaz (#18), Javi Fernandez (#19)<\/strong>
\nColourist: Frank Martin (#14-16), Espen Grundetjern (#16), Java Tartaglia (#17-18), Dijjo Lima (#18), Matthew Wilson (#19)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Cory Petit<\/strong>
\nEditor: Mark Basso<\/strong><\/p>\n

I know. This review is\u00a0so<\/em> late that the trade paperback has been out for over a month. But still, it’s the last\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>late book on my review backlog, and better late than never. So.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Percy’s approach to his ongoing titles has always involved cutting back and forth between different story threads every few issues or so. It’s not so much a case of everything dovetailing together. It’s more a way of doing lengthy storylines without devoting 12 straight issues to them. In theory, at least, if you don’t like this one, there’ll be another one along in a minute. Here, we have two arcs from ongoing storylines plus a curious little final issue experiment – and yes, they are indeed different.<\/p>\n

I find Percy’s work a bit of a mixed bag. You certainly can’t accuse him of taking the line of least resistance. Both here and in\u00a0X-Force<\/em>, he’s not a writer given to replaying the hits – which is a bit ironic, considering that he’s just done\u00a0X Lives of Wolverine<\/em>, but we’ll come to that. He likes the organic tech, the big ideas like fiction-themed mind control, the new characters like Solem. That’s a big plus. On the other hand, not all of those ideas are winners, and the execution can be patchy. Still, it’s good when it all clicks, and it earns some goodwill from me, even if there’s other stuff that frustrates me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Issues #14-16 continue the Solem storyline. You’ll have noted from the credits above that these issues have an absolute torrent of artists working on them, but at least some consistency has been maintained within arcs. This one gets Adam Kubert, which is very much for the best. He really has done some great work on this book. Just look at the opening pages of issue #14, not just the establishing shot of the wrecked Marauder (though he really gives that some reality), but the sequence with the cup and ball trick. He’s great at selling the crazy pirate graveyard, and putting over Solem’s rogue persona. He really does synch up with the material.<\/p>\n

Solem himself remains a weird character. You can sort of see the idea at a high concept level. He’s the anti-Wolverine, with unbreakable skin instead on unbreakable claws, a lack of moral centre, a smirking charm, but in his own way equally untouchable. That’s perfectly solid as a concept for a Wolverine villain, and a different thing from Sabretooth as the dark Wolverine. But he’s a difficult character to get a handle on, since it’s far from clear what is going on below the surface with them.<\/p>\n

That ambiguity is at least partly intentional. We’re given an origin story with traditional tragic tropes, and both Wolverine and Sevyr Blackmore seem unsure quite what to make of the guy or how far to take anything he says at face value. On the other hand, Solem defies those tropes by persistently refusing to actually show any hidden depths. Maybe that’s the point; the anti-Wolverine is a relentlessly superficial character who doesn’t really have much going on beneath the surface, and lives for his own nihilist amusement, but there’s a limit to that character. And there’s a nagging feeling too that we’re being lectured about how awesomely cool this guy is, instead of being left to come to that conclusion for ourselves.<\/p>\n

What really doesn’t work is ending that arc by wheeling out Emma Frost to casually outmatch him. Sure, yes, he’s vulnerable to psychics… but you can’t do three issues pitching him as some sort of untouchable trickster god only to have him summarily outmatched by a regular, even if she’s a regular from another title. That doesn’t work, and it feels flat. I’m still kind of interested in where we’re going with Solem, but I’m not wholly sold on him.<\/p>\n

Issues #17-18 are entirely different, or at least, as different as you’re going to get with the same guy’s Wolverine stories. Instead of lunatic pirate coves and insane powers, we’re back to Jeff Bannister and the double-crossing Maverick, with scenes in diners, offices and motels. Bannister is probably the most rounded character Percy has introduced to the book, and really helps to ground the book in the real world – when that’s what the story wants to do, anyway.<\/p>\n

Visually, though, we’re dealing with two different artists in two issues. Lan Medina’s work is\u00a0fine<\/em>, but it does suffer by comparison when you read it right after Kubert’s issues. Medina’s art is relatively bland by comparison and feels like a fill-in. Diaz is crisper, and he gets to do a pretty good truck chase scene, something that’s notoriously not easy to pull off. It isn’t quite as distinctive as Kubert’s work, and it feels a bit bright at times, but it’s entirely solid.<\/p>\n

The main issue with this two-parter remains Percy’s take on Maverick, which doesn’t work for me. I suspect it’s more a case of missing the intended tone than misreading the character, since Percy has Wolverine argue that Maverick is not an enemy, merely a mercenary. The previous Maverick arc tried to set him up as having a personal connection with Wolverine that transcended his normal amorality. I get all that. And I can see that part of the angle is that it cuts both ways – Wolverine’s history with Maverick leads him to make excuses for someone who is acting as an unequivocal villain.<\/p>\n

But… if there’s meant to be complexity in Maverick’s personality then it’s not really coming across in the story. He just feels like a mercenary villain, if anything a mildly sadistic one. And that’s way off beam for any previous reading of the character; aside from the fact that Maverick had his own series for a while as a more-or-less hero, his whole function in Team X stories is to be the Nice One, or at least the relatively uncompromised one. The trouble here is that the story has to invoke Maverick’s history with Wolverine in order for it to carry weight, but that same history doesn’t fit with the way Maverick’s being written here, and it… doesn’t ultimately work.<\/p>\n

The series rounds off with issue #19, a strange little issue which follows up from that time Wolverine met a giant sea monster in\u00a0X-Force<\/em>. On its own terms, this is probably the most successful thing here, since it’s something of a declaration about how Percy sees the character. Wolverine is out on his own, detached from a society he doesn’t quite believe in, and standing alone against the existential horrors in order to protect everyone else from it. This is a fairly traditional take on how Wolverine sees his role – he’s already morally corrupted and he’s the one who’ll face the awful things so that other people don’t have to – but Percy and Javi Fernandez restate it effectively and with some lovely atmospheric, spacious artwork. It seems to be the core of how Percy sees the character in\u00a0X Lives<\/em> and\u00a0X Deaths<\/em> too, and it’s a perfectly solid reading.<\/p>\n

This is the thing about Percy’s\u00a0Wolverine<\/em> run – there’s plenty of interest here, and a lot to like, but it’s mixed in with prominent things that don’t quite hit the mark. It feels just a little bit off to me, and yet I keep finding things in it that hold my attention despite myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WOLVERINE vol 7 #14-19 Writer: Benjamin Percy Penciller: Adam Kubert (#14-16), Lan Medina (#17), Paco Diaz (#18), Javi Fernandez (#19) Inker: Adam Kubert (#14-16), Cam Smith (#17), Paco Diaz (#18), Javi Fernandez (#19) Colourist: Frank Martin (#14-16), Espen Grundetjern (#16), Java Tartaglia (#17-18), Dijjo Lima (#18), Matthew Wilson (#19) Letterer: Cory Petit Editor: Mark Basso […]<\/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-7716","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\/7716","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=7716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7718,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7716\/revisions\/7718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}