Review: Wolverine: Wolverine's Revenge

As far as story mechanics go, writer Jason Aaron rather beggars belief with the planning he attributes to the antagonists of this collection, The Red Right Hand. This is the same group that sent Wolverine's soul to hell and filled his body with demons that then set about trying to kill off all of Wolvie's loved ones in the previous two volumes (Wolverine Goes To Hell and Wolverines Vs. The X-Men), but as bad as that fate might seem, it wasn't even the Red Right Hand's endgame. Apparently they—or at least their leader—knew Wolverine would escape from hell and reclaim his body, which is why they've engineered this particularly insidious revenge against the character. The whole literally sending him to literal hell was just the means to the end of getting him good and pissed off enough to come at them.

The title is somewhat subversive, then. While Wolverine is hunting these people and is hunting them down seeking his righteous vengeance, they are busy enacting their real plan, and his revenge fizzles, as they get theirs during what should be our hero's moment of triumph.

The structure is fairly repetetive, with each of the first five issues collected here (drawn by pencil artist Renato Guedes and inker Jose Wilson Magalhaes) featuring Wolverine entering a room to battle a member of the weird-ass group The Mongerels to the death (Like Cannonfoot, the gorilla-looking guy who kicks rocks super-hard at his opponents using special, rock-throwing shoes), while a member of the Red Right Hand flashbacks to their experiences with Wolverine, and which of their loved ones he killed (The group isn't really one of supervillains so much as ordinary civilian types who have a reason to want revenge against Wolverine, who killed one or more of their loved ones—sometimes because they were bad guys, sometimes because he was mind-controlled or whatever).

When Wolvie's killed the last of the Mongerels and entered the room where all the members of the Red Right Hand await him, he gets a triple-whammy of emotional assaults, one rather prosaic one that barely effects him, another that frustrates him in a coitus interruptus kinda way, if we view Wolverine stabbing people with his fist-knives as a form of coitus for the character and another particularly tragic and Shakespearean (or at least Greek tragic) existential gut-punch to the invincible hero's psyche.

Props to Aaron, then. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief regarding the whole counting on Wolverine to beat up the devil himself in hell aspect of the plan, but the final stages are truly creatively evil and, to some degree, unexpected.

It sends Wolverine on a sort of self-destructive spiral during the last two issues collected herein, which Goran Sudzuka illustrates, in a flatter, sparser but ultimately more emotive and comic book-y style than that of Guedes.

Wolvie completes a few tasks of repentance, completely withdraws from girlfriend Melita and the two superhero teams he runs with, and resorts to two extremely unusual coping methods. The first is unusual for him, at leas to my limited Wolverine knowledge: He keeps climbing a mountain and then jumping off the top of it: His healing factor won't let him actually die in this manner, but his brain dies for a few moments each time, giving him complete, death-like peace. And then he starts over.

The second method is only unusual for people who aren't Wolverine: He grows a beard, takes off all his clothes and runs with a wolf pack for a while, until some evil-ass humans remind him he can do some good in the world, and Melita manages to hunt him down...after interviewing all of Wolvie's peers in the superhero community (This last chapter of the trade nicely echoes the ".1" issue in the previous collection, in which Melita tries to throw a surprise party for Wolverine, and invites all the X-Men and Avengers).

(As usual, Namor knows the truest measure of a man)

Best of all, this gives Sudzuka the opportunity to draw a large chunk of the Marvel Universe, and given his skills, that's certainly a welcome opportunity to see him taking advantage of.

Curiously, this story really reads like an end not only to this cycle of stories (Goes To Hell, Vs. The X-Men and Wolverine's Revenge), but like Aaron's final words on the character. The series would keep going for several more story arcs, though, including the previously reviewed Goodbye, China Town and Back In Japan.

Jae Lee provided the cover images for all of the issues that are contained in this collection, and while they are generally nice cover illustrations with a high degree of theatricality, I was quite amused by the cover of Wolverine #15, which seems to indicate that Lee has never in his life seen a picture of a wolf, but was just going by second-hand descriptions from people who have seen wolves:

Review: Wolverine: Wolverine Goes To Hell

Despite how exactly the title of this collection describes the premise of the story within, it seemed to be missing rather large chunks of likely valuable information: I felt like I walked in on a movie already in progress, and or that pages were removed from the book almost at random.

Naturally, there were no volume numbers on the spine to indicate when this book should be read in relation to any other Wolverine comics so that it might make more sense, despite the fact that it stars Wolverine and is written by Jason Aaron who, at the time this originally came out, had been writing Wolverine for years (The fine print says these comics came from Wolverine #1-#5 though, so I guess this is technically the start of a new series, or just the renumbering and retitling of Aaron's ongoing Wolverine: Weapon X title).

Part of that may have to do with the way Aaron chose to tell the story, beginning with a scene from a special (Wolverine: Road to Hell) in which a naked Wolverine is falling down to hell like Alice falling to Wonderland, then flashing back to a point before that and the action on Earth, never dramatizing why or how exactly Wolverine's soul was sent to hell or why his possessed-by-demons body is still on earth, except in explanations delivered later in the game.

And part of it may have to do with the way I'm reading this story—in collected form—rather than the way it was originally published in serial form. Apparently, the original issues it appeared in contained back-up stories, so they would lead with a chapter of "Wolverine Goes To Hell" by Aaron and pencil artist Renato Guedes, and then there would be a shorter chapter of a back-up story entitled "Scorched Earth" by Aaron and a variety of quirkier, more stylized artists (Jason Latour, Steven Sanders, Michael Gaydos, Jamie McKelvie, etc) following Wolvie's possessed body on Earth. The two occur simultaneously, and the former refers at points to the latter, although someone reading the collection won't understand the references until the whole book is read. (One unfortunate side-effect of this collection strategy is that, unfortunately, if you're not aware of the back-up material, "Goes To Hell" seems to end quite suddenly, with a good 30 story pages left in the collection (which also includes a variant cover gallery, some design sketches and an 11-page "All-New Wolverine Saga" feature, in which Wolverine recaps his adventures in prose, while illustrations pulled from the comics those adventures occurred in liberally stud the paragraphs.

At any rate, in this story entitled "Wolverine Goes to Hell," Wolverine goes to hell; we eventually learn that he gets there via a trap involving a cabal of civilians who seem to really, really hate hm, a black magic ritual of some kind, and Mystique masquerading as his girlfriend Melita serving as bait.

While Wolvie's in hell, someone that speaks in yellow speech bubbles and refers to itself in the plural is in control of his body; he/she/it dress him up funny, change clothes a lot, and go about attacking and killing his friends and loved ones (In addition to Wolverine claws, the soul-less, possessed Wolvie body has Dark Side of the Force powers like air-choking and the ability to, like, summon insects and stuff like that).

Most of the loved one hunting occurs in the back-ups, but he also fights some X-Men (mostly Colossus) and two Ghost Riders and The Son of Satan, who Mystique has gathered together, apparently regretting her role in all this.

Wolverine's time in hell is...well, it's kinda weird. The devil isn't really ever referred to as the devil or Satan or Lucifer, and he doesn't look like any Marvel devils like Mephisto or Satannish. Rather, he's a kind of generic looking horror movie demon, with horns the size of Legend's Tim Curry, a mouth full of fangs and tusks, and purple skin, plus the traditional cloven hooves, batwings and a tail.

He's intent on "breaking" wolverine, who is intent on not being broken, and the punishment the devil has for Wolverine consists mainly of having Wolverine fight a bunch of dudes. He does so without the benefit of his healing factor (but he can't die, so he still kinda sorta has a healing factor, right?) or his adamantium, but isn't that also basically Wolverine's every waking day and, I imagine, his purgatory and his heaven? Fighting a bunch of ninjas, thugs and evil mutants, including one's he's killed before?

The devil has the most luck torturing Wolvie by having his old love Mariko flail him until he screams, which takes 12 blows depicted in 15 grueling panels.

I don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that Wolverine eventually escapes hell, thanks to some unlikely assistance from two unexpected allies in hell and a plan that seems so familiar I know I've seen it before, but I'll be damned if I can remember which movie or comic I've seen it in know, and an exorcism performed by Mystique and her leather boys up on earth.

Of all of the Wolverine material of Aaron's I've read, this was by far the worst. Not only is it not funny—there aren't many, or any, really, opportunities for humor—even dark humor—in the scenarios being set up here, but the big, huge, epic mythological scale and setting of the story seems brief, small and unimaginative. The hell Aaron gives us here is a pretty generic one, and so far removed from the other visions of hell other Marvel comics have shown us over the decades that it seems a poor replacement for them.

Check this out:

A full page of Aaron conjuring highly imaginative imagery of a horrible hellscape and its denizens, but we don't get to see any of it drawn, nor did we see Wolverine see any of these things he's now narrating that he saw. The actual hell in the comic book is just one big room full of standard, generic demons and devils.

It's disappointing, and that's all on Aaron: So much of his Wolverine material to date has been so great, that a merely decent story like this seems terrible by comparison.

Guedes isn't my favorite of Aaron's Wolverine collaborators—I prefer Garney—but he does a pretty find job. The demons are generic, but they're well-drawn generic, and his human characters are all rather finely detailed. I dug how he rendered Damion Hellstrom, as someone who looks like he should be hanging out with skull-faced bikers from hell, even if he's not rocking his original design (and my favorite look of his).

Melita's clothes seem to have a hard time staying on, though.

The artwork in the back-ups is mostly much more interesting, but it also comes in shorter bursts, and as much as I enjoyed, say, Latour's artwork, I don't think it would have worked quite as well in the main story.

Review: Wolverine: Goodbye, Chinatown

Last night I talked a little bit about how difficult it can be to catch up on some series in trade when the publisher publishes particular stories in multiple titles, collects them under different names or does something weird with the number, like having two consecutive collections of Batman Inc both labeled "Volume 1."

Here's another series I've had trouble following: Writer Jason Aaron's Wolverine comics. He wrote an arc of a comic called Wolverine (Collected as Wolverine: Get Mystique. Then he got his own Wolverine series, a new book entitled Wolverine: Weapon X. That lasted 16 issues, and I want to say it generated about three trade collections. Then, after Weapon X was canceled, he wrote a brand-new volume of a series simply entitled Wolverine.

Figuring out what titles Jason Aaron wrote and what order to read them in can be a bit tricky; certainly more tricky than figuring out the reading order of, say, Eiichiro Oda's One Piece, which are all entitled One Piece and assigned volume numbers on the spine. I was trying to read Aaron's Wolverine comics in trade for a while, but eventually gave up, occasionally coming across one in a library and picking it up if it looks unfamiliar to me.

Like Wolverine: Goodbye, Chinatown, the small print of which tells me includes issues #17-#20 of the rebooted Wolverine series which, come to think of it, was just recently rebooted again.

As difficult as it may be to figure these books out—despite this being part of a run of story arcs written by Jason Aaron and despite the fact that it continues sub-plots from previous issues and leaves other unresolved for future issues, there is no volume number—I enjoyed this. Like most of the Wolverine comics by Aaron I've read, like most of the Marvel comics by Aaron I've read, it was fast-paced, quick-witted, snappily-dialogued and plotted on the ridiculous side, with Wolverine playing straight man to the lunatic world of the Marvel Universe.

It probably didn't hurt any that the title story, which accounts for three-fourths of the contents of this book, prominently featured characters and concepts familiar from Jeff Parker's Agents of Atlas comics.

Here's where I really started enjoying the trade:

That's the second panel on the very first page.

Wolvie is preparing to leave San Francisco, where he and the other X-Men have been based for a few years, to head back East and found a school (So this takes place after the events of Schism, but before the launch of Aaron's Wolverine and The X-Men series), and wants to bid farewell to his girlfriend and collect the money he has saved up.

But that money has been stolen, and to get it back he has to live up to his responsibilities as The Black Dragon, the secret kingpin of the Chinatown underworld ("Did I forget to mention that I'm secretly the kingpin of the Chinatown underworld?"), and that means investigating the kung fu crime wave that the local turf war has engendered.

Wolverine, a vaguely <a href = "http://indianajones.wikia.com/wiki/Short_Round">Short Round</a>-like kid and a white eyebrow master follow a trail that leads them to a dragon-carved tunnel that leads from San Francisco to China, The Jade Claw and a particularly silly section of Wolverine's rather silly rogue's gallery. Wolvie and his friend's aren't the only ones in the literal underworld beneath the figurative underworld though; Gorilla Man (seen most prominently in Parker's various Agents of Atlas comics) and Fat Cobra (from Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction and David Aja's Immortal Iron Fist run) are also knocking around and ally themselves with Wolvie (Gorilla Man does so only after the traditional Marvel fight and then team-up ritual).

It is, like so much of Aaron's Marvel writing, pretty insane, but it's also a lot of fun and very funny. Gorilla Man may be one of the last characters one would think to pair Wolverine up with, but Aaron finds an awful lot of similarities between the two so that they play off one another nicely, and artist Ron Garney even hammers those parallels home in his posing of the two hairy, teeth-gritting brawlers.

Garney's work is, as always, superb, and he does a pretty incredible job of marrying the wildly different characters and concepts—created in different eras by different artists—into something seemingly seamless. Chinese dragons, guy from '70s kung fu movie, Wolverine, a talking gorilla in a pair of pants and a white button-down shirt, Razorfist—all appear in the space of three panels, and all look perfectly natural doing so.

Garney doesn't draw the one issue that appears in this trade that isn't part of the title story. That's drawn by Renato Guedes, and finds Wolverine in New York City just in time to catch a whiff (literally; he smells it) of a meeting between a Japanese yakuza boss and Wilson "The Kingpin" Fisk, a meeting interrupted by some amusingly weird bounty hunter characters that apparently appeared in another Wolverine story I haven't run across yet (And who reminded me of the two guys who look sorta like Yosemite Sam in the old Looney Tunes short Along Came Daffy; it's watchable here, for the time being).

Guedes' art is fine, but it's so different from Garney's that it takes some getting used to, and is sort of a shock to see. His Wolvie is shorter, hairier and uglier, his hair more clown-like. There's a great deal more detail and texture to all of his art, so the more realistic style clashes with the flatter, more abstracted, more comic book-y look of Garney's art.

This particular story is a little straighter to, as it's more plot-driven and involves more familiar plot elements for Wolverine comics...and modern Marvel comics in general.