Alex Sarll's Reviews > Wolverine: Weapon X

Larry Hama's 1992 introduction makes much of this being 'a one hundred and twenty-five-page Wolverine story where Wolverine never utters the sacred mantra "I'm the best at what I do," nor does he SNIKT-out his Adamantium claws – he doesn't even refer to himself as the "Ol' Canucklehead."' Little dreaming that, thirty years later, it would be just as much part of the checklist to flash back to Wolverine emerging from a tank with a load of cables attached, an old VR headset on, and the postures and angles carefully concealing his junk. And sure, in a sense it's a mark of success to have expanded the lexicon like that, to have actually changed a character who through his superpower, but more than that through being a lucrative corporate property, is set up never to take a mark from anything he undergoes. Set against which, this does feel a lot like an expression of that nineties comics tendency to conflate horridness with artistic merit and importance. Is a gory 'SHCLUK!' for Logan's claws coming out really so much of an improvement on 'SNIKT'? Which, in any case, does eventually make a crowd-pleasing appearance. And sure, doing a story which is at a certain remove from the normal X-Men tangles has a certain appeal, but is it not maybe confusing and disingenuous to go so far as opening with the line 'Storm's comin'' when your lead is often on a team with someone called Storm? As for trying to do the whole Watchmen 'how would superheroes be if we approached them realistically' bit...well, sure I can see the logic of having Wolverine's hair regrow quickly after he's been shaved, even if with hindsight it does feel a bit Homer Simpson. But if that's the case, how come he isn't constantly looking like Cousin Itt? Hell, even if you assume some kind of length limit, how come he just has the big sideys, not the full Yosemite Sam? It's not as if his chin and top lip normally look baby-smooth, is it? Which may seem pernickety, but so much of the story is like this, Wolverine being tortured and demeaned to a soundtrack of technobabble and bickering bastards. Plus, it's this same sort of supposedly being realistic, but then stumbling halfway and mostly just being ugly, which bugged me about Windsor-Smith's alleged magnum opus, the recent Monsters. I think I may just need to go back to his Conan, and henceforth treat him as having one of those Radiohead careers where people recognising how very good the early stuff was doomed the later stuff to disappear right up itself.