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Review: Dark Wolverine #85

Cut through this padding with an adamantium claw.

No Caption Provided
Wolverine and Dakan discuss the ways they're double crossing each other as Romulus pays a visit.
 
THE GOOD
Stephen Segovia is an excellent artist, with a great European style to his curves. The line work just flows smoothly throughout - - it's a shame he didn't have better material to work with. Way and Liu write some tight, sparse dialogue, even though it's lot more minimalistic than it ought to be.

THE BAD
Something I was going to point as being off-putting about this book was the number of strange, kind of inappropriate low angle panels of characters' faces, practically looking up their noses.  I was going to blame Segovia for it until I realized that it was probably a case of him trying to find ways to make long talking head scenes visually interesting, because this issue is full of talking heads. Seriously, there's even a double-page splash of Wolverine talking at a coffee table. Sure, it's well-drawn, but that's almost example of self-parody. This wasn't an issue of decompression - - this book is just padded.  Also, I haven't been keeping up with Dark Wolverine, so I don't know when Romulus was introduced or who designed him, but the splash page revealing him had to be one of the most unintentionally goofy images I've seen in a while. His "claw gloves" are laughably impractical and his whole get-up makes him look like Sabretooth redesigned to look "extreme" in the worst 90's comics.

THE VERDICT
This is an example of good writers and a good artist whose talents are dulled by padding. This storyline is supposed to be four issues long, but if the pacing continues like this, I think it's only going to be about an issue and half of plot. It could be enjoyable if the decompression were used to show some breathtaking "money" splashes, but instead we get double spreads of... Wolverine talking at a table. And I'll say again how silly Romulus is.   

2/5