A farewell to arms...
Now that my head finally doesn't feel like it's cracking open anymore, I can actually review this issue of the very fine, soon to be finishing, Wolverine: Weapon X.
First off, there's an Iron Man 2 advert on the freaking cover, where the issue credits normally go. What the Hell, Marvel?! I know that (apparently) our money isn't enough to subsidise the comic book industry, and ads are something that we gentle readers just come to accept, but I'd be really, really pleased if they could at least keep them to the inside, or back, of the book. Great, thanks.
Now to get to actual reviewing of the book. I was totally in love with the last issue of Weapon X. Everything about it was just what I look for in a Wolverine book - wit, violence, great characters, and a simple-yet-effective storyline, as well as great art. Issue #12 was a little bit different.
In the opening pages we find ourselves in a dystopian future (futures are always dystopian in the land of the make-belief storytelling fantasy, apparently). It's the typical "everything looks nice and shiney on the outside but it's all owned by some mega-corporation so that sucks" type of set-up. We're then introduced to a group of militant-type people who gather in the
Despite the pretty crazy time-travel fiasco, the book does it all in a way that is clear, and surprisingly easy to read. Aaron definitely nailed how to write a proper future-present-future story. There are no loose ends in that respect, and I for one appreciate that (there's nothing worse than time-travel induced plot holes).
In my review for the previous issue, I mentioned that aspects of the story were quite derivative, which I didn't necessarily mean as a bad thing. After all, if you're going to rip something off, you might aswell rip off something cool, and rip it off right. With this issue, I'm not going to be quite so forgiving. You've got references to all sorts here - Terminator for one thing, Logan's armlessness is reminiscent of the Weapon X arc Insane In The Brain, where a guy gets his arms cut off and replaced with chainsaws (which in itself, I think, was an homage to the Evil Dead films), and there's a sort of nagging in the back of my head that's screaming "OLD MAN LOGAN!". Now I realise there are a lot of differences between this and Old Man Logan, but the fact that it's Wolverine, in the future, with a beard, makes it kind of hard to ignore.
Also, the addition of the adult Miranda character, and her thought boxes, was constantly reminding me of the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series that I didn't really enjoy so much. Miranda is basically the Sarah Connor of that series - yes she's a tough woman, but her frequent "life is so hard but it's up to me to keep fighting in this doomed war" thoughts depreciate that. Throughout the TV series, the only thing I was thinking was "WHERE is she narrating from?!!?" (something which often bothers me with introspective voice-overs in films). Comic books and regular novels have a history of the internal monologue, and thought boxes/bubbles/whatever-the-kids-are-calling-them are traditional, and also valuable. What bothered me about this character was not the fact that she had thought boxes, but the fact that the thought boxes seemed to be coming from the brain of TV's Sarah Connor. It was distracting, and unpleasant, for me because of the negative feelings I had towards the show, and I guess that's one of the pitfalls of writing a story that has been done before a hundred times - not everyone is going to like what came before.
Apart from that, I really had no problems with this issue. The art, as always, was excellent. Especially in this issue I found the colouring to be moody and atmospheric, with a pallet that spans across the whole spectrum subtly. The switching from future to present was handled really well, so the writing was still good despite being a little too on the derivative side. So it was really just the addition of a character that 1) didn't really mean much to me to begin with, and 2) ended up being shaped by my preconceptions from other materials that I found bothersome. This issue felt like the neglected middle-child in an otherwise healthy family (I think this arc has 4 issues so hopefull next months won't have the same problems). I still love this team though, best X-book out at the moment, so read it.