Review by Frank Plowright

Weapon X was the covert centre for distressing scientific experimentation from which Wolverine emerged without a memory and an adamantium skeleton. He’s maintained a hatred for anyone associated with it ever since. Therefore the idea that the organisation is being revived and wants him onboard generates an emphatic refusal.

Frank Tieri tells a long and complex tale over three different titles, and gathering the relevant chapters into one package leads, with one massive blip, to a far more coherent appreciation of the scope and ambition. He begins with Wolverine seeing a news report with camera footage showing him murdering a senator. Did he really do it? Cleverly, what becomes the bigger picture emerges as Wolverine is hunted down, with Sean Chen excellent on art. Weapon X is back, it has a new director, and among its agents is Sabretooth, who’s then sent to recruit Deadpool. Although Tieri can slip sly jokes into other places, Deadpool’s hilarious appearance is the only out and out humour, yet takes a tragic turn with Georges Jeanty handling both aspects well.

Weapon X was then given its own series, with a core plot unfolding over paperbacks The Draft and The Underground. With an ever improving Jeanty as primary artist (sample art left). The deceit, deception and manipulation were committed to page-turning sequences building to a form of climax as Cable and allies became aware of what Weapon X is doing. However, the second half of the ongoing series abandoned the ongoing plots and turned elsewhere. Speculation as to why isn’t difficult to locate online. Those fourteen issues, though, have never previously been available in a collection.

Tieri might have been forced to diverge from his intended plot, but what’s supplied instead is also very readable, beginning with a shock revelation about a Weapon X staff member whose behaviour has been strange. There’s a reason for that. The Weapon X programme has also drawn the attention of the X-Men and the more militant Gene Nation, and Tieri gradually reintroduces the former cast until only Cable is missing. Wolverine now also plays a part.

The work doesn’t suffer as much as it might from the curse rotating artists after Jeanty because they all have similar, clean styles. The first exception is Jean Paul Leon, who works on an excellent standalone tale set during World War II, while Tom Mandrake’s looser art closes the Weapon X series. Tieri reveals a lot of history about Weapon X, all interesting, and then sets Sabretooth loose.

What was released in paperback as Weapon X: Days of Future Now finally concluded the story Tieri intended beforehand, and it reads far better prefaced by everything here than it did as a standalone graphic novel. The other main fault remains, however. Tieri tries to compress too much into not enough space, leaving plenty of scenes just told in passing. It’s an ambitious work, though, tying everything about the Weapon X programme into the future paraded in classic X-Men story ‘Days of Future Past’. Bart Sears and Andy Smith continue the curse of the rotating artists, although neither disappoints.

Weapon X: The Return closes with a Deadpool reprise only just about connected with anything that’s gone before, but it does let Tieri finally write a significant Wolverine foe he’s previously missed.

This is a really good collection with very few dips, but expensive.