Wolverines is turning out to be one of the oddest, most haphazard X-books in quite some time, seemingly for reasons both intentional and otherwise.  This second volume takes us up to issue #10 – halfway through the run, as the whole thing is wrapping up in May before Secret Wars.  And quite where it’s all heading at this stage is anybody’s guess.

The first arc set up a relatively focussed story.  The Paradise guys wanted to get their hands on Wolverine’s body in order to (somehow) derive a cure for their condition; the rest of the cast were tagging along in order to be released from their post-hypnotic control words.  So this sets up a series about people chasing the Wolverine statue as a macguffin, right?

Wrong, apparently.  Issue #6 concludes the cast’s attempt to raid the fortress of Mr Sinister by having the X-Men show up and retrieve Wolverine’s body themselves.  Most of the Paradise guys disappear from the story at this point – Endo got captured during the attack, and Neuro and Skel…

*reads issue #6 again*

…um, Neuro and Skel…

*reads issue #6 again, just to be sure*

…um.  Do you know, I’ve no idea what happened with them?  They’re right there with Shogun and Fantomelle on page 17 of issue #6 (digital numbering).  Then none of them are seen again for the rest of the issue.  And then in issue #7, Shogun is back on Mystique’s ship, and apparently Neuro and Skel are still with Sinister, but I really have no clue how they got separated, or how Fantomelle got out, and I don’t think it’s meant to be a mystery.  On top of that, writer Ray Fawkes ends issue #6 with a cliffhanger of Mystique turning into a giant to yell at the rest of the cast, which co-writer Charles Soule quickly brushes aside at the start of issue #7 as if he has no idea what the hell it was meant to be setting up.  Reading these two issues in particular, there is a worrying impression of writers who aren’t on the same page and an editor who is asleep at the wheel.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Shogun and Junk are now heavily outnumbered by the guys they tried to press into service and pretty much give up on trying to exercise any sort of authority over them, leaving Mystique to seize the lead.  Since Mystique is entirely concerned with her own agenda of bringing back Destiny (and she manipulates Shogun into freeing her from her control words anyway), this leads the plot off in an entirely unrelated direction.  Nobody seems interested in going after the Wolverine statue again, and the series doesn’t check in on the X-Men or with Sinister.

Instead, issue #7 meanders off in other directions, and the focus of issues #8-10 is the arrival on the scene of Fang, of all people.  Yes, the one from the Imperial Guard.  The guy whose costume Wolverine stole for a few issues in the mid-1980s.  Fang is apparently visiting Earth for his annual drinking session with his good buddy Wolverine, is most put out to learn that Wolverine is dead, and decides that one of the book’s cast must be responsible, or at least that he should honour Wolverine’s death by making their lives a misery.  After all, X-23 aside, they’re all Wolverine villains.  Fang then starts dragging cast members away one at a time to give them a spotlight issue in which he torments them in tribute to his dead friend.  (He does make clear that X-23 will be the exception.)

So we get an issue of Daken being forced to fight a dimwitted Frost Giant after Fang tells the Giant that Daken is its deadbeat father.  The idea is apparently to get Daken to fight a raving moron with daddy issues as a mockery of Daken’s own core concept.  Sabretooth gets a rather stranger and more elaborate scenario in which he’s dragged across the galaxy to confront a race of genocidal torturers who like to believe that they’ve reformed.  And up to a point they have – they’ve found religion, and now they kill people painlessly.  Obviously this is some sort of attempt to test the idea of a reformed Sabretooth, but it’s only partially successful because Sabretooth’s change of heart wasn’t organic.  It happened because he got zapped by magic in Axis.  And since it wasn’t a genuine or meaningful character development in the first place (even within the logic of the story), there’s no dramatic mileage in challenging it.

This is a strange, strange series.  Fang at least serves one important role, by being the character who actually gives a toss about Wolverine; at this stage, pretty much every other member of the cast appears to have lost interest in him altogether.  Of course, while this book is taking Wolverine‘s place on the schedules, it isn’t officially Wolverine, and it’s hard to complain too much if it’s more interested in its own cast.  But his absence hangs over the series in a very odd way; not only is he not in the story, but the characters would be wandering off to do their own thing entirely if it wasn’t for Fang intruding on the plot to drag them back to Wolverine.

Presumably this is a deliberate choice, but I’m far from clear as to why.   Of course, there’s long been a running joke that Wolverine is forever wheeling out longstanding friends you’ve never heard of, so casting Fang in that role makes a sort of sense.  Rather more curious is the fact that Fang – who was the Imperial Guard’s version of Timber Wolf – has suddenly been massively powered up to an insane level, winding up somewhere between Lobo and the Beyonder.  It’s genuinely hard to tell whether this is a plot point, an astonishing continuity error, or an intentional retcon which the book is trying to brazen out.  It’s baffling, whatever it is.

The collected editions are also starting to look  weird.  The first volume ends on a cliffhanger, which led me to suggest that it was a deliberate strategy to pace the more-or-less-monthly trades as a serial.  But with the wild lurch in plot in this volume, it’s starting to look more as if Soule and Fawkes have structured the book in six-issue arcs, yet it’s getting collected in multiples of five regardless.

All of this having been said, there is quite a bit to enjoy in these issues, if you turn your attention to the characters rather than the plot.  The idea that the Paradise characters are out of their depth dealing with the likes of Mystique, let alone Sinister, and that their initial advantage evaporates pretty quickly, comes across quite nicely.  Neuro in particular works as a confident would-be schemer who isn’t quite as good as he thinks he is.  And it’s a good Mystique story, grounding her in her love for Destiny and making her a lot more human than she’s seemed in a while.  At the same time, she’s convincing as someone who can outwit all these people and take control of the situation even when she starts off with no apparent leverage.

There’s an interesting subplot with Shogun starting a relationship with Deathstrike, apparently unaware that Ogun can talk to her when he’s asleep.  Daken’s spotlight issue gives him some effective audience sympathy because Fang is being so gratuitously excessive towards him.  The religiously enlightened murderers in Sabretooth’s issue are a fun idea, as is the fact that they come from such a wimpy section of the galaxy that they don’t even have to be particularly powerful or effective to pose an existential threat to everyone else.  Fantomelle gets to do another of her comedy thefts, ineptly attempting a flirt-and-divert strategy despite being straight out of a cloning facility and thus having no experience of flirting.  (“That is an amazing towel.  Where do you get a towel like that?”)

And there’s some decent art on an issue by issue basis, though it’s fair to say that the book lacks a visual identity – when you go from the jagged Juan Doe to the delicate Peter Nguyen to the painted colours of Jonathan Marks in three weeks, the shifts of style are very noticeable.  The more episodic structure of the Fang issues helps there, of course, but it’s not as if there’s any particular sense that the artists have been matched up with particular series.

But I’m confused by this book – it combines genuinely good character moments, frequently strong art, and concepts that seem to be intentionally crazy, but also has a meandering and diffuse plot, a strange use of characters, and some acute problems of incoherence.   Perhaps all of this will be brought together in the end in a way that makes sense.  There are intriguing elements in here, alongside seemingly inexplicable oddities, and it’s looking less and less like it will amount to a workable whole.