Wolverine #71

Before I begin, I would just like to say: FIRST REVIEW! This is my first review on ComicVine, so don't berate me too much for any amateurish-ness (pretty sure I just made that word up...)

Now that that is out of the way...

I had the benefit of being able to buy the entirety of the Old Man Logan arc so far over the weekend, so I read it all in onw sitting. I think this might have been a bad way to do it. For me, it seemed like the story just whizzed by. The story was pretty good; very Millarish. It had a lot of whacked-out ideas like the Hulk Family and Spider-Bitch (was she ever actually called that? Millar was calling her that in Wizard), but they didn't really seem to tell the story of Old Man Logan. However, at the end of this issue, I got the feeling that things were going to pick up, and it was going to be Wolverine's Dark Knight Returns, as promised my Millar.

One of the things that I really liked about this issue in particular was the very last page. Whenever something big happens at the end of an issue of anything, you always find yourself thinking, 'How are they going to get out of that one?'. But Hawkeye was shot. In the head. There is practically no way of getting out of that one, and I don't think Millar is going to go for any cloning or time-travel thing to bring him back. It felt so wrong to find the second biggest character in the series get killed, but that was the point: that this is the real world. Hawkeye served his purpose, he got Wolverine to New Babylon. And now Wolverine is, hopefully,  going to get back into the action and F&@% some S&@% up! 

Another cool idea was why Wolverine became a pacifist. Essentially, because he had that violent and animalistic side to him, that he would just lose control of, the villains were able to use him to kill the X-Men. He realized this and decided never to succumb to that urge again. Or at least that's how I think of it. It was a bit creepy that he should marry a woman (a redhead too!) that looked like she was 40 years younger than him (but it would really be , like 125 or so. yikes!)

Steve McNiven's art is fantastic, as always. There isn't much that hasn't been said already. He's one of the best in the business, in my opinion. I'm going to give the story so far a 4 out of 5. Most of it has been  just a buddy/road trip story, which is good, but not the next DKR. I also felt like not enough happened in an issue. Like in "Enemy of the State", Millar made a lot happen in an issue, and all that, if I recall correctly, was in about five issues. You kind of get the feeling that there were all these wacky ideas that Millar had for this future, and that he wanted to add them all in, but they didn't all fit into the plot perfectly. It was the same with Civil War. However, as I said before, I feel like it's going to pick up in the next two issues, and that is going to be the true story that I, and maybe you, have been waiting for. Can't wait to get Issue 73, hopefully this weekend.

Final Note: I think I read this in the comments for the Wolverine #73 preview, but I think that whoever said that Woverine should come home too late after all is done in New Babylon, and find his family dead had a great idea. Kudos to whoever that was. Maybe the last pages should be that he comes home, sees the dead bodies of his family, and then the last panel is him pooping his claws, after not doing so in the whole series. That would be sick.