Review by Karl Verhoven
Although marketed as integral to the whole extended ‘death’ of Wolverine, the great majority of this content is only vaguely connected, picking up after Wolverine’s demise by repackaging all four volumes of the frankly space-filling Wolverines series. Also featured are a few eulogy chapters.
Jason Latour has writer Melissa Garner tour the X-Men universe to meet people associated with Wolverine and hear their memories of him. For the second part she’s accompanied by Spider-Man. No-one has anything out of the ordinary to say, but with over a dozen artists illustrating a few pages at a time there’s something here for everyone. Marguerite Bennett and Chris Claremont have more space for Nightcrawler to consider what Wolverine meant to him, and that’s more effective, offering humanity and compassion along with some nice art from Todd Nauck.
As noted, though, the remainder of the book concerns Wolverines, a series that never convinced under Charles Soule and Ray Fawkes alternating on chapters in the company of a bewildering array of artists. The plot is prompted by the nefarious Weapon X project in which Wolverine was genetically modified, and the revelation that work has never stopped. Several comatose mutants were revived during Death of Wolverine, but in order to survive they need a version of Wolverine’s healing factor. This may be sourced via Wolverine’s corpse, but as displayed on the collection’s cover, that’s been encased in impenetrable adamantium and it’s abducted by Mr. Sinister in the opening chapter.
The new characters aren’t a team in the conventional sense, only united by their needs, and in order to get what they require they’ve abducted a bunch of very dangerous people associated with Wolverine. In a good piece of plotting, compliance of dangerous loners Daken, Lady Deathstrike, Mystique, Sabretooth and X-23 is maintained by a control word that can kill them.
Soule and Fawkes never give the new characters enough personality to make readers care about them, and at their worst the dialogue is excruciating. At one point newcomer Skel tells Lady Deathstrike, a feared assassin lest we forget, “You’re gorgeous, even with the claws”. Their plotting is better than their dialogue, and problems are never dragged on too long, meaning the middle section is the strongest in supplying excitement and tension.
Or it would be if not for the consistently mediocre art. The sample spread offers Juan Doe and Ariela Kristantina, who with Ario Anindito and Jonathan Marks all draw three chapters. Anindito is good, Marks improves with each new set of pages, but after an acceptable start Doe’s work deteriorates and Kristantina supplies the layouts without the foundation techniques. The best of the art is by Nick Bradshaw on the opening chapter, but without a filter when it comes to acceptable violence. The whole project seems a tryout for new artists, and a feeling of being conned is underlined when the ending proves nothing more than the set-up for another story.
In paperback the Wolverines series can be found as Dancing With the Devil, Claw, Blade and Fang, The Living and the Dead, and Destiny, and if you’re at all intrigued, they’re a cheaper bet than this hardcover.
