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.

Reading Comics #80 "Essential Wolverine Vol. 2 #2"

Continuing my reading of Essential Wolverine Vol. 2, collecting comics originally published in 1990-1991, we now reach:

WOLVERINE #s 31-33 (Marvel)

These issues mark the debut of writer Larry Hama and artist Marc Silvestri in the series.  A markedly different tone from the Jo Duffy stories that precede it though in the same Madripoor setting, as Hama focuses more on action, and the future Image co-founder Silvestri adds a more dynamic style.

The latter, perhaps not so surprising, as that's what the Image revolution was all about, putting art first, which perhaps wasn't so surprising, since the Image founders were all artists.  The funny thing is that Silvestri's Wolverine looks a lot like Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon.  Perhaps this is something of a coincidence, since Larsen created Dragon well before these comics, but now that I start thinking about it, the connection does go pretty deep.  Since Dragon is big and green and sometimes has She-Dragon around, I always made the natural association with the Incredible Hulk.  But the similarities with Wolverine could not be more glaring.  If you know anything about Savage Dragon, you know that he has the same healing factor as Wolverine, a fact that Larsen has exploited in some very deliberate ways over the years.

If I go on about Savage Dragon in this update, it's because the storytelling is perhaps not terribly inspired.  Perhaps not coincidentally, Wolverine's healing factor plays a huge role in these issues.  This version of the character has some pretty definite limits, though Hama doesn't seem particularly constrained by them.  He seems more interested in his drugs-are-bad message, which is a fine message except it's directed more at the cliche villains pushing the drugs than actually talking about the drugs themselves, which Hama may inadvertently glamorize.  There is a renewed Japanese link to Hama's Wolverine, but nothing too inspired.

It, ah, may or may not be worth noting at this point that Hama and Silvestri are responsible for nearly every remaining issue in the collection.

Reading Comics #79 "Essential Wolverine Vol. 2 #1"

Regular readers will remember the series of reports I did on Essential Classic X-Men Vol. 2.  As it happens I get to revisit that, because the large batch of comics I covered in the Quarter Bin "Brother's Blitz" columns also included Essential Wolverine Vol. 2, and so I'll be doing exactly that again, giving my thoughts as I read through the collection.

Starting out we have in the first reading:

WOLVERINE #s 24-30 (Marvel)

All comics in this collection were originally published between 1990 and 1991.  As we begin, he is apparently on a leave of absence from the X-Men, believed dead and living in Madripoor, a small island nation off the coast of Asia.  The first issue is written by Peter David and is pretty storybook in its examination of the inhabitants of this country, the typical assassins of a superhero (or crime) story mixed with street urchins.  Comics legend Gene Colan provides the art.

The other six issues from this reading are written by Jo Duffy, notably a woman working on one of the most masculine characters in comics.  Art varies from John Buscema to Klaus Janson to Barry Kitson.  Though only the final four issues comprise the "Lazarus Project" arc, it's all essentially a connected narrative concerning the life Wolverine has made in the tiny country under the assumed identity of Patch (so-named because he wears a patch over one eye).

While there's plenty of story happening around him, the issues are notable in that they're related to the reader via a running monologue from Wolverine, the kind of caption narration that has fallen out of favor with most creators.  I happen to love this kind of comic book storytelling.  I like when creators are confident enough to show as well as tell.  Most amateur writers have it drilled into them that telling is somehow a sin of the craft.

In this particular show, it's very reminiscent of the kind of movies Hollywood was making at the time, still influenced by the Vietnam and Cold Wars, what gave us John Rambo.  Wolverine in this version is Rambo via Clint Eastwood (no chairs involved).

What's funny is that Wolverine could have a comic like this at perhaps the height of X-Men popularity (at least in the comics), that is nothing at all like you'd expect from a character known, as I've said, to be about as manly and savage as you can get.  It was a different time.  It was before Image.  It was perhaps the last time Marvel could truly be itself and get away with it.  And so we end up with a Wolverine who sits around drinking tea and gambling and basically doing everything he can to stay out of trouble.  In this version of the character, he's very similar to the Bruce-Banner-on-the-run as seen in the old Hulk TV series and in some of his recent movie experiences (or even where Wolverine himself in when we first meet him in the movies).

It's not even the classic Wolverine-in-Japan stories.  Some of that is touched on, though, and it actually seems the most extraneous element of Duffy's stories.  I'll admit to some skepticism early in the reading.  This isn't the Wolverine I expected.  But it's a Wolverine I started to love.

I don't read a lot of Marvel comics, and I don't read a lot of Wolverine comics.  I enjoyed the "Old Man Logan" arc, and Marc Guggenheim had some interesting thoughts about why Wolverine can't die, and perhaps more recently Jeph Loeb seems to have done some interesting things concerning Sabretooth (those are some stories I will read at some point).

We'll see how the rest of the collection goes.