Wolverine #36-#40 - Mobile Edition

Marvel Comics
Wolverine #36-#40
By Al Kratina
March 23, 2006 - 19:58

Marvel Comics
Writer(s): Daniel Way
Penciller(s): Javier Saltares
Cover Artist(s): Joe Quesada (#36), Kaare Andrews (#37-#40)

Cover artist Joe Quesada does his best Sam Keith impression

This past summer, Marvel dropped a bombshell on readers with the massive House of M event. The bombshell was, of course, that we were once again expected to take out a second mortgage in order to afford a poorly conceived, interconnected mess of story that would unravel like an old carpet after a few months and end abruptly. Hyped as an event that would revamp the Marvel Universe in the same way thatCrisis On Infinite Earths changed DC, the net result of House of M was that all the lame mutants without significant fan bases lost their powers. Also, Wolverine regained his memory, and I flashed back to the nightmare '90s era of over-priced crossovers, lenticular covers, and Wizard ½ ashkans.

The saga of Wolverine’s early years has been canonized in the aptly titled Origin miniseries, but the last five issues of the Wolverine monthly have answered some more questions regarding Logan’s brainwashing. Of course, writer Daniel Way has answered those questions with more questions, but that’s par for the course when dealing with Marvel’s most deliberately enigmatic character. In Origins & Endings, Wolverine surfaces in Japan, where he attacks the Silver Samurai in order to gain information. Why he does this is unclear, but it leads to an involved and somewhat cryptic revelation involving The Winter Soldier, a pregnant woman named Itsu, and some variety of ninja summer camp. That the story is confusing is not surprising; in the thirty-odd years of his history, writers have made Wolverine a samurai, a Civil War general, a founding member of the Supremes, the inventor of the internet, and the original inspiration for Hamlet’s Ophelia, so it’s not like I was expecting a clear-cut chronology. But, as a reader, I’m getting a little fed up with the character’s labyrinthine history and fragmented past.

Writer Daniel Way plots an interesting story in the series, but he doesn’t tell it particularly well. He relies heavily on Wolverine’s interior monologue as a narrative device, despite the obvious contradiction that if you’re trying to keep the reader in the dark, perhaps telling the story from the point of view of the person who has all the answers is the wrong decision. The dialogue feels a little stilted and expository, and many of the issues’ cliff-hanger endings seem a little forced, like 1940s G-Menserials. The plot points that structure the narrative are interesting, but the path that leads between them is uninspired.

The art, by Javier Saltares and veteran Wolverine artist Mark Texiera, is also hit and miss. In many of the issues, it’s of an overly shaded, sketchy variety that fits the dark mood of the book well, though I'm not particularly fond of the style. However, the last issue seems to be done in a sort of pseudo-painted style at odds with the rest of the series. It’s a little distracting, and while it may have served a purpose in the flash-back scenes, it’s carried on throughout the entire book, as if Saltares ran out of India Ink and had to borrow his kid’s Tempra paint. All in all, while the five issues in this story arc will prove to be essential to Wolverine fans, especially those interested in picking up next month's ongoing Origins monthly title, it’s certainly nowhere near as good as it could have been. After all these years, I think we can all agree that Wolverine deserves better.