Last week I reviewed a couple of completed storylines instead of doing the capsules, so we’ve got a couple of weeks’ worth of X-books to cover here – I’ll leave the miscellany of other books for another post.  This fortnight’s theme: Wolverine.  Loads of him.

Daken: Dark Wolverine #5 – The title may say this is “Empire Act 2, part 2 of 3”, but it actually seems to be the start of a new story.  Last issue, Daken dropped by to visit the Fantastic Four, tie up a dangling subplot and pick up a new weapon; this time, he’s off to Madripoor to say hi to Tyger Tiger, a character we haven’t seen in years.  It’s a strange book, this, and I honestly can’t make up my mind whether it’s being subtle, or whether it’s just a bit of a mess.  Sometimes Daken seems to be written as a one dimensional psycho.  At other points, as in this issue, we’re being invited to speculate on what he’s really up to and how much of his stated motivations are true.  (The book has wisely disposed with his first person narration.)  It’s obvious enough why the writers would want Daken to be in Madripoor; it’s a location strongly associated with Wolverine, so it keeps Daken in his father’s shadow without them actually having to interact.  But why is Daken there?  He says he’s there to start a new life with a new identity, but he’s also the one who’s chosen to go Madripoor, who dresses in a modified Wolverine costume, and who keeps bringing up Wolverine.

So what do Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu have in mind here?  There’s clearly more to it than Daken’s stated reasons.  But there are broadly two possibilities.  One is that it’s a hamfisted piece of psychology, where Daken’s genuinely trying to escape his father’s shadow but subconsciously keeps drifting back into Wolverine’s orbit – and if that’s the idea, it’s rather lousy.  The other is that Daken has some fiendishly clever scheme to manipulate people by taking advantage of that perception to mask some other plan, and if that’s where they’re going, it’s potentially more interesting.

Way and Liu clearly have a story they want to tell with this character.  They’re doing quite well at building the mystery of what Daken’s actually up to (and I really like the clear storytelling in Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art).  The tension here, though, is ultimately about whether Daken has any hidden depths or not.  And the book’s rather uneven when it comes to selling that idea.  It’s the issues where he has the depth of a plank that leave me with reservations the rest of the time.  If I put that out of my mind, though, this is a perfectly good issue.

Deadpool & Cable #26 – Er… why?

A brief reminder.  Cable & Deadpool ran for fifty issues before getting axed to make way for separate Cable and Deadpool books in 2008.  The Cable book ran for 24 issues and was cancelled when it completed its story by dovetailing into the “Second Coming” crossover, where Cable died.  Tacked onto the end was Deadpool & Cable #25, which was a sort of epilogue to Cable & Deadpool doubling as a prequel to Cable.  That was in April last year.

And now we’ve got this… a second one-shot in which Deadpool mourns the death of Cable, which was, what, six months ago?  Cable’s not in it, save for brief flashbacks, but it picks up on a dangling subplot from C&D by having Deadpool head off to Rumekistan to try, in his typically chaotic way, to bring about the happy nation that Cable wanted to achieve.  The result is a bit of a mess.  It wants to be an anarchic Deadpool comedy story; it also wants to be a sincere tribute to Cable as a fallen character and to the former partnership.  It shifts between those two modes with the grace of a jackknifing tank,  and ultimately doesn’t really work on either level.  Readers with more tolerance for Deadpool at his most babbling might get more out of it.

Wolverine #5.1 – Ah, our first Point One issue.  This is Marvel’s latest big idea to try and create jumping on points for ongoing titles.  The previous strategy was to relaunch books from issue #1, but they’ve run that one into the ground, and besides, you can only do it so often.  Hence, the Point One books – extra issues which are supposed to be ideal jumping on points, with self-contained stories that should also lead in to upcoming events.  As long as they stick to this, it’s a good idea – though some upcoming Point One books look suspiciously like fill-ins.  Curiously, there’s no prominent logo on this issue to draw attention to the fact that it’s a Point One book; unless you’re looking at the issue number, you’d never know.  And even I’m not enough of a nerd to look at the issue number when I browse the shelves.  Opportunity missed there, surely.

Regardless, this is by regular writer Jason Aaron, and guest artist Jefte Palo, and it’s a very good issue.  Melita Garner has organised a birthday party and invited all Wolverine’s friends.  And of course, Wolverine gets completely sidetracked by hunting some psychos in the woods.  It’s a simple idea, but Aaron sells it nicely, and the two backwoods serial killers provide some nicely creative moments.  Aaron’s strength as a Wolverine writer is his ability to write scenes that are absurdly over the top without undercutting the characters, and this issue is a great illustration of that.  Lovely art from Palo, good introduction of two new villains, strong central idea, good comedy, nice character moment at the climax – it’s a textbook example of how to do one of these issues.

Wolverine #1000 – Again, for those who may not have been keeping track: a while back, Marvel did an anthology book called Deadpool #900, which was a joke, the idea being to make fun of Marvel’s inane renumbering stunts.  That works when you do it with Deadpool because he’s Marvel’s equivalent of Ambush Bug.  Then they started doing randomly-numbered anthologies with other characters.  And that just suggested that somebody was too dumb to get the joke.  And boy, it does nothing to command confidence in the quality levels of these books.

What you get in this issue is four Wolverine stories… oh no, sorry, five stories, because one of them is inexplicably missing from the contents page.  Two of them are full length.  Three of them aren’t.  It’s five dollars, which actually isn’t bad value in terms of page count.  But are they any good?  On the whole, not really, no.

The high point is “Adamantium Claws” by Sarah Cross and Joao Lemos, which is a sweet little short about a Wolverine fan meeting her idol and generally being inspired by him.  The art’s lovely, and while the moral’s familiar, it’s nicely done.  Jimmy Palmiotti and Rafa Garres turn in a full-length story with Wolverine and a family of werewolves, which isn’t earth-shattering, but hangs together as a solid enough story with 70s-horror influences.  Beyond that, though, it’s decent art attached to flimsy plots.  “Last Ride of the Devil’s Brigade” is Wolverine in World War II storming a Nazi laboratory, and it’s just sort of a string of events in a row.  “Last Men Standing” is Wolverine inspiring soldiers in wartime.  And “Development Hell” – the one that doesn’t even make the contents page – is a Mojoverse gag that doesn’t even really bother with a plot.  (It’s also curious that the editors have chosen to commission two different stories with werewolves and two different stories set in wartime; you’d think they’d avoid the overlap in a five-story anthology.)

Read the Cross/Lemos story if you can; the rest isn’t offensive, but with so much Wolverine material out there, it’s hard to see why you’d choose this one.

Wolverine: The Best There Is #3 – Then again…

In all fairness, the book is getting better.  There’s a half decent central idea with the villain: he’s a plague carrier, long term exposure isn’t very good for anyone (hence recruiting random immortals as henchmen), and cutting him open would be a really bad idea.  As a plot device, that’s a decent starting point for a Wolverine villain.  And three issues in, some sort of plot objective is belatedly lurching into view, which is nice.

On the other hand… said villain isn’t especially interesting on any other level, and having him give a little “I’m evil and I know it” speech is not much of a hook to change that.  The book still isn’t getting much use out of the “unkillable” henchmen, who seem to have been hammered into this story solely on the basis of their powers, without much thought as to whether they have any logical motivation for being here.  And while the book’s lighter on the gross-out stunts this issue, that’s largely to make room for the exposition.  Yes, in this issue, the villain explains the plot to Wolverine… for fourteen straight pages.

I read things like this so you don’t have to.

X-Factor #215 – Another single issue story, this time with Madrox and Layla.  After a lengthy excursion to Las Vegas, and last issue’s departure into the surreal, this is Peter David bringing the book back to its quasi-noir roots.  The case is a murder with vampires involved and it’s fairly standard stuff for this book, but Peter David writes it well, and gets plenty of mileage out of Madrox’s ability to be in different places (with different personalities) at the same time.  The real focus of the issue is on Madrox and Layla’s relationship, though, as the book comes back to the question of how much free will she actually has and just how annoying her behaviour really is.  The basic premise of Layla’s character – that she knows what’s going to happen in advance and either can’t or won’t tell people except cryptically – is very difficult to pull off without smothering her personality entirely or allowing her to degenerate into a string of plot devices, and David’s done a great job of avoiding those pitfalls, with a slow build from gimmickry into a character who knows she’s on rails and seems resigned to there not being any way out.  There’s a nice symmetry between Layla as the character with only one option and Madrox as the character who can pursue every option at once but can’t find any meaning in doing so.  While the particular story in this issue isn’t a stand-out, the broader plot remains intriguing.