Greetings and felicitations, Malefactors! It is time for another GS review. Today I am going to review the already known Death of Wolverine 4 issue miniseries written by Charles Soule and art by Steve McNiven.
The reason I really wanted to do this review was because Wolverine is a very special character to me, having been my favorite character as a child when I originally watched the X-Men cartoons back in the day before I ended up becoming more of a Cyclops fan as I got older, but Wolverine has always managed to stay in my top 3. We all knew this death was coming as Marvel hyped it up months ago and with 3 months to die and coming off a horrible first run with Cornell, whom planted the seeds early on, and then proceeded to do an equally if not worse run after that. When you go from having a killing machine character to making him scared to shave and complain about allergies to his "big character growth" being him defeating his arch-nemesis with a punch while in his underwear, I take a bit of issue with that. Enough of my little rant, let's get down to it.
Summary
In a quick summary and in case you haven't read the series, the basis for this mini is that Wolverine has a bounty on his head. So Wolverine goes off on a spree to find out. He steamrolls through fodder, a lot actually, and he starts to face off against a lot of people from his past. We see Logan fight the likes of Nuke, Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, an encounter with Ogun and so on. Fast forward, and we learn the bounty was put on him by Dr. Abraham Cornelius. Logan confronts Cornelius and deals with him and his creation and then Logan does end up dying. Lots of stuff in between that happens and a lot of excellent fights, but I don't want to spoil too much.
Pros
There are a lot of pros about this series.
- Soulverine over Cornellverine- I loved what Charles Soule did with Logan. If you have a moderate amount of interactions with me, you probably know I absolutely hated Cornell's run on Wolverine. But Charles Soule absolutely killed it with Wolverine, no pun intended. For years we have had a poorly consistent take with Logan (not uncommon among writers), but he's been more controversial with his whole becoming of a headmaster and "think about the children" attitude, but at the same time two other writers will still have him walking knee deep in blood because, hey, it's Wolverine. Soule does a find job mixing these two developments and balancing them really well, which I think hasn't been much at all over the last couple of years. What I mean by that is Wolverine is still kind and caring, but one wrong move and you lose a hand...or two. His scene with Ogun/Kitty (before knowing it was Ogun), was an awesome scene. The dialogue and the art helped it. At the end of the final issue, pay attention to the panels, and the same thing. So he does touch on Wolverine's caring side, but he plays with Logan's beastliness and savageness as a fighter quite a bit during the action scenes. So to me, this is probably the most balanced Logan we have had in awhile and it sucked it only lasted 4 issues before his inevitable death.
- Story- The story felt mostly natural. To me, this didn't feel forced, it felt organic. Between how the pacing went with setting up the plot, Logan's tendencies and his death, it fit mostly well. Overall, Soule had 4 issues to work with, and he put in a lot of past Wolverine stories, faces, and references into this series. I felt like he truly cared about the character, the fans and wanted to give Logan a proper send off, which he almost did. A lot didn't feel out of character, and while some flaws stuck out to me that didn't make a whole lot of sense, there were only a couple, so that didn't bug me.
- Logan Can Fight!?- Remember how Logan is supposed to know almost every martial art and can bust out fancy karate moves every now and then? Charles Soule does. We finally get a reminder that fighting Wolverine that was a solid fighter for consistent issues instead of him going "ragghhh" and stabbing stuff, which he did even without his healing factor and for some reason forgot how to dodge (Cornell did it). Logan was vicious in his fight with Nuke. He took out fodder bare-handed and was blocking swords with his knuckles, and kicking people around like nothing. When Kitty was resisting Ogun, then you can see him blocking and defending against his attacks almost casually. I do feel none of the big fights were super exciting and drawn out, but Logan desperately needed to be touched up on that he can be brutal or technical, (see differences between his fight with Nuke and then his fights against Viper's goons or Ogun/Kitty).
- The Art- I like the majority of things that Steve McNiven draws, but I felt he was really top notch in every issue of this series. He normally has a very clean style to me, but this showed he can be almost cinematic in his approach and be gritty with it, too. When Logan slammed Nuke's face off, it was brutal. When Kitty ripped Deathstrike's hand off, that was brutal. Logan looked messed up in a lot of his panels, or you could tell he was getting tired and so on. From issue to issue, he just looked a little more beat up. But we also get scenes like the garden with Kitty and the artwork was beautiful for it. So McNiven does a fantastic job switching and setting the tone of the scene rather quickly when he needed to. He also did a couple of flashback panels during some of the important scenes, which I would group in with past references, but awesome nonetheless. (look at his fight with Sabretooth and his death are the ones that stick out most to me)
Just some examples.
Cons
Why, Logan? - What I mean by this is somethings Logan did were questionable to me. Primarily this was in the the 2nd and 3rd issues. One of them to me was when Deathstrike was going to kill Sabretooth and Logan said no....because he's suffered enough and poisoned and why would he care.(?) Idk, it bugged me. This is the same guy he thought he beheaded in the wilderness and left it at that. I get Wolverine's code of honor sometimes and Soule needed Sabretooth alive, but that irked me a bit. The other one was in issue 3 when Ogun offered him more healing serum, and my good friend and CV staff member, @k4tzm4n touched up on this quite nicely in his review of the issue I will link here. So he is about to face the man who set the bounty on him, but denies any serum? Hmm...just in case why not take some?
Final Issue -- So we get this big build up, and we see the real reason Logan was brought back by Cornelius, and we get the touted perfect weapon that is above Wolverine. Well, his name is Major Spark and just see how he is dealt with and you will figure out what I mean. Also, I felt like this issue was really rushed. It felt like Soule wanted to do a lot more with it, but just didn't have the room. Some things in this issue felt abrupt and the last villain is one of them to me. So I think while the intentions were good and this issue, given a couple more pages, could have been awesome. Still, the issue wasn't bad, but just not what I expected. And Logan's actual death itself was meh.
Conclusion
The Death of Wolverine was overall a good mini. I think the problem with Marvel hype is it is usually 90% sh*t. Soule lived up to the hype for the majority of the series. I felt there could have been things that were done better, but overall, the characterization of Logan was better than it has been in a few years. The story was solid. The art was fantastic, and the mini was really good with bringing so many different pieces of Wolverine's life, be it events or characters, and tying them into the scene at hand with only 4 issues to do it with. When Marvel does decide to bring Wolverine back, I really hope they give Soule the reigns to Logan. I think it was a fitting ending and despite my opinion of the last issue, I felt like Marvel has found their current niche writer for him.
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