Hey, remember this book?  I reviewed the first issue and then decided I might as well wait for the trade.  And here it is.

The Max imprint is a funny thing.  It consists of adult-rated stories with established characters, usually taking place in their own little continuity.  Judged as an answer to DC’s Vertigo imprint, it’s a bit of a disaster.  But it’s clearly not intended as an answer to Vertigo.  Max books, in the marketing at least, are defined more by their violent content than by any sort of artistic aspiration.

What’s more, something along very similar lines was tried with Wolverine very recently, in the series Wolverine: The Best There Is.  Although this wasn’t a Max book, it had the same “explicit content” warning label, and showed every sign of having started life as a candidate for the line.  And it was terrible.  It had plainly started off by trying to figure out how it could justify as many gross-out sequences as it could, and then worked back from there.  That is not a good approach to writing a story.

So it turns out to be a pleasant surprise that Wolverine Max sets its sights rather higher.

Not, admittedly, that you would know it from the packaging, with the “Permanent Rage” subtitle, a back cover blurb pushing that it’s a “no-holds-barred Max series”, and a frontispiece where the credits appear over the backdrop of art taken from a very brief and entirely unrepresentative scene set in a strip club.  In short, whoever put this package together clearly thinks that the selling point is adult content and is very keen to stress that point as heavily as possible.

But Jason Starr is trying to do something a bit more interesting than that.  For him, the Max imprint has two main advantages.  First, it’s out of continuity, which means he can strip away all of the clutter that Wolverine’s accumulated over the years, and get back to the core elements of the character.  For him, that appears to be a man with a mysterious past (even to himself) and a deep-rooted conflict between his violent impulses and his moral standards – in other words, the basic elements that worked so well in the 1980s.  That alone gives you a clearly recognisable, and even quite traditional, version of Wolverine, despite the jettisoning of all history; and a number of other common features of Wolverine stories are also present, like Japan as a setting and Sabretooth as a nemesis.

Second, because it’s a Max story, the violence can be really violent.  And it is.  But the impression is that Starr isn’t doing this simply to justify the rating, but rather because he wants to sell the idea that Wolverine’s darker impulses are genuinely horrific.  It’s extreme violence, but in short, controlled bursts to make a point.

Within that framework, the plot is actually fairly traditional.  Wolverine starts off the series as the amnesiac sole survivor of an airplane bombing, on the run from the authorities who figure he must be somehow responsible, and trying to work out who he is and what he was doing on the plane in the first place.  Bits of his memory return over the course of the series, enough to establish that this version of Wolverine deviates pretty substantially from the regular version of the character – he seems to have cover identities all over the place, none of which he remembers setting up.  And of course, since he has no memory of any of this, there’s also the possibility that he might have blown up the plane himself.  Roland Boschi draws these parts of the story, in a style that varies from starkly shadowed to a bit conventional.

Intercut with all this are a series of dream/flashback sequences, illustrated in the first issue by Connor Willumsen, and subsequently by Felix Ruiz.  That change of artists is unfortunate.  Both are fine in their own way, but Willumsen’s weird exaggerations and unusual shading provide a more effective contrast with the main story than Ruiz’s art, which by the end of the series has turned into something not dissimilar to Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s work on Astonishing X-Men – it’s perfectly good art, but it doesn’t set up the same tension.

Starr’s most radical alterations are reserved for Sabretooth.  Obviously there are no costumes here (though there are passing mentions that Wolverine’s known as a vigilante under that name).  In the days when Wolverine’s inner conflict was central to the character, Sabretooth’s role was to exemplify what Wolverine would be like if he succumbed to his violent urges.  This Sabretooth serves the same role, but he isn’t the familiar heavy handed thug; he’s an articulate, even vaguely charming figure.  He sees himself as a man who has come to terms with his nature and embraced it, and thinks Wolverine should do the same.  Perhaps this is just Sabretooth repositioned as a more modern psychopath, but that’s still something you can’t do in the regular Marvel Universe because his character is too well established.  Crucially, he doesn’t just represent a version of Wolverine who gave in to his violent urges; he represents a version that made a positive choice to be true to his nature, something that’s also a better echo for modern self-help mantras.

Considering its unpromising remit, Wolverine Max turns out to be a surprisingly decent comic.  The Max trappings are all there, but deployed in service of a pared-back reboot of Wolverine that’s genuinely interested in some of the character’s classic themes.