“Wolverine’s Revenge”

Writer: Jason Aaron
Penciller: Renato Guedes
Inker: Jose Wilson Magalhaes
Letterer: Cory Petit
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Editor: Jeanine Schaefer

Jason Aaron clearly has long term plans for this book, considering he’s spent the better part of the year setting up the big reveal in the last issue, which isn’t even the end of the story.  Having been banished to Hell by the Red Right Hand and spent nine issues getting out again, Wolverine finally gets to confront them.  And what happens in the first four chapters can basically be summed as follows: Wolverine fights and kills a Mongrel, while one of the Red Right Hand has an extended flashback about why he hates Wolverine.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Which, after a while, got a bit wearing.  So I was interested to see whether it would read any better in a single sitting.  And it does.  It still doesn’t really hit everything it was going for, but it’s certainly a better read in one go.

This is not to say that Aaron is “writing for the trade” or some such thing.  On the contrary, this is a story which was clearly conceived as five chapters.  In fact, the conflation of two Mongrels into chapter 3 makes me wonder whether somebody had second thoughts about the length of the arc and decided to knock an issue off it.  It’s also fair to note that these five issues actually shipped over the course of three months, which should have helped.

But Aaron has chosen a deliberately repetitive structure for this storyline, and when you read it in five chapters weeks apart, that ends up overpowering everything else.  Read it in one go, and there’s actually a much greater sense of progression.  The flashbacks are coming closer to the present day.  The explanation to the new inductee about the RRH’s plans for revenge gets more developed in each issue.  The Mongrels are getting more and more like Wolverine himself.  It’s just that these things only really leap out when you read the chapters together; read separately, it’s the repetition that dominates.

The storyline depends for variation on two things – each chapter has a different Mongrel, and a different flashback.  Here’s where we hit problems, even in a single reading.

The flashback stories are hit and miss at best.  Three of them are basically variations on “Wolverine killed my loved one and I’m very angry about it.”  I presume Aaron doesn’t really want us to sympathise with the RRH members until we hit the kid in the last issue, but that leaves him to do character pieces about characters who aren’t truly allowed to be multi-dimensional.  There just isn’t enough depth in most of these guys to justify such an extended flashback.

Chapter one has the RRH’s unnamed founder reminiscing about Wolverine’s encounter with his father in a bitter strike from 80 years ago.  It’s presumably meant to be the Harlan Coal Strike of 1931, though the dialogue doesn’t specify this, perhaps because it would tie the RRH founder too explicitly to an actual person.  (If anyone knows who the old woman is meant to be, let me know, because I get the impression we’re meant to recognise her.)  At any rate, since there’s never the slightest ambiguity about where our sympathies should lie, it ends up being a story about a kid who’s delusional about his father’s virtues and goes on to become dominated by a single-minded obsession.

Chapter two is basically the same thing, but with Wolverine in his black ops period, and the victim being a woman with the misfortune to be related to two similarly shady types.  Chapter three has a lunatic who irrationally blames Wolverine for the death of his wife in circumstances for which he can’t really be blamed at all.  Chapter four is the best, since it’s got the beleaguered sister of all those ninjas Wolverine keeps slicing up, and it’s got some rather fun ideas about everyday life among the cannon-fodder classes.  And with chapter five, we’re back to embittered child, except this time the mother’s not a villain, just one of the throwaway SHIELD personnel who died in “Enemy of the State”.

With the possible exception of chapter four, there isn’t really enough variation in here to make them interesting.  It’s an awful lot of work just to set up the premise that characters who get casually killed sometimes have relatives who are very angry about it and become obsessed, and it’s done with such broad strokes that I don’t feel it says anything much deeper than that.

As for the Mongrels themselves, while they do grow closer to Wolverine as the arc goes on – starting with the most ridiculous of the bunch, and building towards Gunhawk, who is at least allowed a bit of dignity – there’s not much in the personalities to distinguish the first four.  Obviously on a second reading you’ve got the knowledge that they’ve been set up to fail and to look ridiculous, but beyond that, there’s not much to be gleaned from a second reading.  They never really explain why they’re fighting for the RRH beyond having been lied to in some unspecified way (with the possible exception of Gunhawk, who does seem to know what’s going on, but for some reason goes ahead anyway – I would actually be interested in seeing a story with more on him).

Now, one obvious direction for the book to take would be for Wolverine to go off and investigate the Mongrels’ backgrounds, so it’s entirely possible that Aaron is deliberately holding off on all the stuff that would make them into full blown characters.  After all, the big reveal in the final issue depends on the idea that until now we’re not supposed to have taken their deaths particularly seriously, just as Wolverine doesn’t.  In theory, it’s a strong idea – it’s a shocking moment which ought to make the hero (and the readers) think again about the casual body count.

But there’s a balance.  Perhaps in an attempt to preserve the surprise, the story backs away from giving the villains any sort of nuance, even though it’s relying on them to provide variation in the first four chapters.  And if you try too hard to make the Mongrels seem inconsequential, you inevitably run up against the reader asking: well, why am I reading about them for four straight issues, then?  You could dodge that question if the fight scenes were spectacular eye candy in their own right, but they’re nothing exceptional in that department.

I do like the big picture of where Aaron’s going with this title, and the twist in this story is a nice idea in principle – particularly since I do have faith that Aaron’s going to see it through rather than just move on to something else.  And yes, you do need the build-up if the finish is going to mean anything.  But that build-up still needs to work in its own right, and even on a second reading, I don’t think this does.