Review by Frank Plowright

While Wolverine is obviously a fictional character, there was something distasteful about Marvel touting his forthcoming ‘death’ for so many months. That coupled with the incomprehensibility of Tomorrow Never Learns hardly raises hopes of this being a classic collection. Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news…

The good news is that this is very slightly better than the previous volume for the most part, but the bad news is it still won’t make sense to anyone without a deep knowledge of X-Men history and associated locations. Jason Latour doesn’t actually explain Wolverine knows he’s dying. We have to pick that up from the volume title and the occasional comment, nor does he explain how Wolverine and Storm can spent a year together somewhere yet time doesn’t pass in the real world, or why Fantomex is so depressed. And once again, we have momentary glimpses of assorted young mutants and their problems before they’re forgotten.

Perhaps the art will provide a seductive gloss, hiding the plot deficiencies. Well, don’t get your hopes up. Some excellent artists contribute, but only a couple of pages at a time to eulogy chapters after Wolverine’s dead, the how and why not explained here. The sample art is from Jorge Fornés and it’s ugly, but to damn with faint praise, Fornés is the only artist to draw 23 pages on his own, and he does it twice.

What Latour is good at is dialogue. Over and again he’ll give people distinctive voices, the standout being Melita Garner, Logan’s former girlfriend, who’s working on a book about him even before she knows he’s ill. She’s the glue stitching Latour’s disjointed story together, and she’s accompanied by an excellently written Spider-Man. The problem here is that the star turns aren’t Wolverine or X-Men.

Frank Tieri only writes the final chapter, but it’s textbook on how things should be done, in theory at least. We’re introduced to the characters, shown what they’re feeling and why, and what they can do. Years after the continuity, the kids running the Hellfire Club are going to be a mystery, but they don’t play a large part in a confrontation between Quentin Quire and Storm. It’s a slim plot stretched too far, but it works, while so much else here doesn’t.

All things considered, if you’re really keen on the idea of Wolverine running a school for mutants, pick up the Jason Aaron series instead.