Comics / Comic Reviews / Marvel Comics

Wolverine: The Best There Is #3

By Colin Andersen
February 7, 2011 - 21:32

I'm not going to lie, I had next to no interest in this series. I know it's cool to hate on Wolverine these days, but Wolverine: The Best There Is seemed so amazingly unnecessary that I couldn't believe it.  I just didn't understand why it needed to exist. Nevertheless,  I decided to give it a shot on the off chance it might have something interesting for me. Three issues in,  this just hasn't been true enough to justify the price.
   The inherent problem of a character like Wolverine is that he is unkillable. As such, it's hard for the reader to not only relate to him but to even worry for his safety. Because of this,  writers often have to come up with some sort of contrived difficulty for him to overcome. And that's just what the reader is given here. I won't say who the character is to avoid spoilers but once again Wolverine must help the bad guys to save the life of an innocent. Luckily,  the

bad guys themselves are more interesting than this boring and cliche setup. Issue #3 officially introduces our new villain who I pleasantly surprised by as he has a somewhat new and interesting personality.  In the previous issues he really didn’t stand out much at all, but he really benefits from his increased screen time this issue. Even better is his ground of henchmen that I call “The Unkillables” and that’s also the perfect description for them. It makes sense that if you’re going to attempt to take on Wolverine that you would gather a bunch of followers that he wouldn’t just be able to kill. It’s actually fairly creative, but it does serve to highlight the ridiculous level that Marvel Comics’ characters with healing factors has gotten to. Other than that, the plot is pretty bland this issue and it is almost entirely exposition. In fact, Wolverine is relegated to little more than a supporting character in his own book here.
    Thankfully, Charlie Huston does a much better job of making his characters actually interesting this month In the last two issues, nearly every character fell flat for me. Honestly, I did not have high expectations for The Best There Is pre-launch, but even despite that I was still underwhelmed. Wolverine felt like a caricature of himself and the villains were uninteresting, but all of that exposition I mentioned isn’t wasted here. Though I wouldn’t say that these characters a well-developed, they at least have personality and no longer bore me and I’m looking forward to seeing more of them. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Wolverine as he feels almost nonexistent this month and most of when he is featured he’s drugged and boring. Huston needs to find the right balance of focus on his characters or this book won’t last long.
    As for the art, I’m torn. I loved Juan Jose Ryp’s artwork on what I read of Image’s Nancy in Hell because it really worked for that title. This one, however, I’m not so sure about. His gore seems strangely over-the-top and, while excessive gore is expected in this book (promised even), this isn’t a good thing. Ryp’s wounds just don’t look natural and seem like they were added after he drew the characters. Different people might feel differently about this, but it looked odd to me colorist Andres Mossa could be partly to blame for this. While his work isn’t necessarily bad, it can look just plain ugly at times, though I wouldn’t be surprised if this was intentional. It actually looks remarkably like Frank Quitely at times. I know many would take this as a compliment, but I don’t mean it as one as I’ve never been a fan of Quietly unnecessarily ugly artwork. You may like how Wolverine looks, but it’s a mixed bag for me. Some bags looks great and you really get the kind of grotesqueness Ryp was going for, but others are just hard to look at.
    What Wolverine: The Best There Is really needs is some consistency. I found the first issue almost painfully bland and boring and the second wasn’t much better, but this issue shows some potential...err...potential. If Huston can manage to devote a little more time to Wolverine without losing focus of his cast of interesting villains, then this series has a chance to survive and be entertaining. Without that and some more consistent art though, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be willing to devote time and money to this series.

Rating: 6 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12