Comics I Read: Catching Up #14
Wolverine Weapon X 6-9: We’ve seen the “main character in a mental hospital” story before, but Jason Aaron is a good enough writer to make it interesting anyway, and Yanick Paquette’s pencils give it almost a Vertigo book feel. The dialogue has just the right amount of horror movie crazy (“He’s…he’s got chainsaws for hands.” “I know, isn’t he just amazing?”), but still lets us be sympathetic to Logan. Not what I’d want every month necessarily, but it’s way different than the first arc which shows that this book will have a good range of story types, and the ending has an interesting connection to Wolverine’s “Weapon X” past.
Wolverine Origins 40-43: As much as I’m not thrilled with the whole Romulus idea, I do like that he was able to beat Logan easily and that Logan has to resort to unconventional thinking to get rid of him. The Logan-Banner-Skaar relationship is fun (Banner: “My son’s problems could potentially destroy the planet.” Logan: “Well, ya got me there…”), and the other allies Wolverine comes up with are unlikely but interesting. A pair of them, whose names I won’t give away, have some of the best scenes they’ve had in years. These issues are a vast improvement over the previous couple of arcs, which I was mostly bored by.
I also read the 2009 What If? specials, and didn’t really care for any of them. The issues had more pages this year, which was a good idea, but instead of doing book-length stories they split them up into 2 “serious” stories and a humor section. Except for the Daredevil story none of the stories are long enough – and the DD story is incomprehensible even with the extra pages -- so they have the feel of “this happened, then this happened” instead of being organic and believable. The Spider-Man “House of M” issue is the best of the lot because of Sean McKeever but not by much. (And the less said about the “humor” sections, the better.)
Wolverine: Weapon X is quickly proving itself to be one of my favorite books of the year. I'm not a particularly huge Wolverine fan--I love him in an ensemble setting, but tend to get bored reading about his solo adventures--so I'm really surprised to be saying this, but Jason Aaron has made this a great book. It's a shame that the sales don't really reflect that. On the strength of his Marvel work--in particular, his Dark Reign: The List special--I'm going to be giving Scalped another chance.
ReplyDeleteI have similar sentiments about Rick Remender's Punisher run, actually--I have never in my life cared for the Punisher, but this run was one of my favorite new books in 2009, and continues strong with Franken-Castle. Having art by Tony Moore certainly doesn't hurt.