Reading Comics #81 "Essential Wolverine Vol. 2 #3"

My concluding look at Essential Wolverine Vol. 2 encompasses the following issues from the collection:

WOLVERINE #s 34-47 (Marvel)

They were published between 1990 and 1991.  A good chunk of the collection, obviously, and like the last installment mostly featuring the talents of writer Larry Hama (best known for his work with G.I. Joe) and Marc Silvestri (co-founder of Image, founder of Top Cow).

As I expected, Hama quickly ditched both the introspective, nuanced approach of predecessor Jo Duffy as well as the Madripoor setting, relocating Wolverine to Canada and a more traditional problem in the supervillain Lady Deathstrike, whose presence dominates the rest of the collection as well as appearances by Alpha Flight's Puck, Sabretooth, Jubilee, and others.  Jubilee might be viewed as an updated attempt from some of the earlier issues to tie Wolverine back in with the X-Men without bringing in the big guns (though Storm visits) but thanks to Generation X and her presence in the animated series from that era, she remains far more identifiable than any New Mutant characters.

Sabretooth becomes the subject of a fairly nebulous attempt to start explaining more of Wolverine's origins when he claims that he's Logan's father.  For anyone who knows what Marvel eventually revealed about those origins (in a story called, appropriately enough, Origin), this may seem fairly ironic, and is another piece of stark contrast to what writers used to think about what lay in the character's past and what it actually became.  I'm not making up this next bit of trivia from an even earlier version: Wolverine at one point was slated to be revealed to be a mutated wolverine.  No kidding.

Hama does not prove to be the most inspired writer.  He immediately starts to make Wolverine more folksy, as if he suddenly became Dan Rather (just imagine...!), which becomes annoying when all the g's go missing, even in the interior monologue captions, a practice Peter David notably does not continue in a fill-in issue.

When Silvestri disappears in #s 44 and 47, it's a bigger tragedy, though.  His fill-ins aren't nearly as dynamic, making it obvious all over again how the extreme talent of the Image creators affected the standards of comic book art, both in good and not-so-good ways.

Wolverine's costume makes a more regular comeback in these issues as well.  Since this is a black-and-white collection, I have to take the cover image as proof that it's the yellow and brown variant, though I guess there are differences enough with the yellow and blue one he might also have sported that there ought to be no mystery about that.

I won't go into detail about the stories in the collection, mostly because the stories are not really worth remembering.  To give one example, for some reason Hama is fascinated with androids (Silvestri, meanwhile, would later create Cyberforce, perhaps by coincidence), though his choice of subjects is questionable, if not in the so-called substitute Wolverine meant to draw the real one out (but sticking around long past that goal) and Elsie Dee, who is a little girl who talks like Kripke from The Big Bang Theory (and is far less endearing).  And as I suggested earlier, Lady Deathstrike sticks around for ages.  Well, at least she got that appearance in X2: X-Men United, played by Kelly Hu, making up for whatever she lacks here.

On the whole, not the least because it features more modern storytelling, my experience with Essential Wolverine Vol. 2  was better than Essential X-Men Vol. 2.  At some point I would got one of these Essential volumes and it won't be the second one.  You know, probably.