Written by Daniel Way
Pencils by Steve Dillon
Cover by Joe Quesada
This is billed as the end of the first arc of the new series, but it’s really the second half of Daniel Way’s ‘Origins & Endings’ story arc that was started in Wolverine proper. That first half was noticeably bad—it certainly was underselling a Wolverine story arc that had such hyped proportions. The standard Wolverine saw a marked increase in sales once Way brought his story here and this can no doubt be attributed to the fact that this is bad writing that’s cryptic to the point of confusion and decompressed to the point of boredom.
Way’s really showed Logan to be an evil guy with the many flashbacks—an interesting idea since he did used to run with Sabertooth willingly. He was the operative that made Nuke into a killing machine, which is just part of the cycle of manipulation because Sabertooth, as it turns out, is responsible for doing the same kind of thing to Logan. This isn’t horrible in itself but it’s all explained through random flashbacks interspersed throughout all the fighting. This arc has been full of flashbacks with the characters standing around in the present explaining the past to the reader for most of the story. Way tends to do this too much with his Wolverine stories and it gets really, really boring.
In a weird twist of fate, Logan’s dead son (the one killed unborn in Origins & Endings) is really alive, or at least Emma Frost seems to think so because she had a ‘vision’. Now when the hell did Emma get plot convenient fortune telling powers? Giving Logan a son seems like one of the worst possible ideas imaginable. The kid’s got to be an adult by now and we’re told he hates Logan, wanting to kill him. So you can imagine where this story will go when Logan finds him—he’ll try to save his son, only for the son to die tragically somehow right after he realizes his mistake blah, blah, bored.
Behind it all is yet another enigmatic figure who’s been pulling the strings in some broad conspiracy that is ill-defined and seems to have no end goal beyond being evil. Thrown into the mix is the retcon that now Silver Fox did in fact die, even though she’s been alive since Larry Hama re-wrote her into continuity by claiming that the memory of her death was an implant. So what the hell is going on exactly? Is Way just ignoring this or what?
Fortunately, Logan gives up the sword, which was always going to be redundant for a character with claws. Yet didn’t we spend a whole ‘Origins & Endings’ trying to get this special sword and now we’re giving it up without ever having given it a purpose? To make matters worse, Logan designates the sword as the only thing to be able to kill him for good. That sort of puts his character on a ridiculous level of invincibility, something he certainly could have done without.
This whole plotline has been boring the hell out of me. I don’t care about Logan’s kid or hearing ever more stories about his tragic past full of dead lovers. What he needs is a good cleaning up of his cluttered continuity. Way is deciding to go in the opposite direction by creating more mysterious figures, manipulators, and samurai legends for Logan to be involved in.
Rating - 4
