Wolverine 1, Wolverine and the X-Men 26, Ultimate Wolverine 1

Wolverine 1
Cornell (w) and Davis and Farmer (a) and Hollingsworth (c)

If we're comparing Wolverine-based books, I think so far I'd rate this above Savage Wolverine. With only one issue of this and two of Savage Wolverine to base this comparison off of, I'm rating this one higher for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was an incredibly quick-moving read. I was pretty surprised when Wolverine started to say things that felt like wrap-up lines for the issue and more surprised when the comic actually did wrap up. Second off, and probably more important, there was far less gratuitous near-nudity in this issue (which, actually, is saying a lot, considering Wolverine spent a good half of the comic completely naked). One of my biggest issues with the Savage Wolverine book is that it spends all its time trying to appeal to the stereotypical comic book reader, the one who is sexually repressed and dreams of Shanna the She-Devil (who is, by the way, named Shanna the She-Devil) bursting out of her ludicrously limited apparel. I tend to try to distance myself as much as possible from that stereotype and I think comics are more than that. So here, we're pretty far from that stereotype, with Wolverine, a short and hairy man, entirely naked for most of this issue. Well done, I guess.

Anyway, we're opening with a storyline involving a gun with crazy tech in it being handled by a man who has held hostage and killed scores of people, including Wolverine (who has not been properly killed). The man, who has no prior mental illness history, has only two hostages left when he turns the gun on his own young son. Wolverine, healed enough to finally get back into the action, kills the man and tries to console the youth who later, as the police are cleaning up the scene and trying to piece things together, activates the gun and runs off with it before driving a police car into Wolverine who is having a bad day. Logan feels he owes this kid for killing his father and everything else this kid has been through today and has decided to hunt the child down, where ever he runs. No doubt we will see some Wolverine childhood memories interspersed with the story of this strange boy with an even stranger gun. There's not a ton left to say for me, anyway. There are a lot of Wolverine books. This is one of them. Coming up are two more.

Wolverine and the X-Men 26
Aaron (w) and Perez (a) and L. Martin (c)

Interesting turn for this comic. Dog, Wolverine's long-lost half-brother, has gained access to time diamonds, diamonds that, as the name might imply, allow him to jump in time. After a lifetime of resentment for James, who grew up wealthy and sickly before his mutation emerged as he killed their father for attacking his mother (his family history is all very complicated), Dog has finally tracked James down in the present with all kinds of futuristic weapons meant to contain Wolverine. On top of it all, Dog tells Wolverine that he's seen all the ways that his school plays out and every one of them ends in disaster because Wolverine didn't train the kids well enough. Dog plans on "fixing" that by putting the kids up against all sorts of horrors that he's time-jumped in, on top of the dinosaurs with which they've already been pitted against.

This issue was largely origin-based, giving us looks into James' past (I tend to call Wolverine "Logan" more than "James" but Dog is a Logan too, so I'm trying to make things less complicated in, probably, a way that is more complicated. Why Wolverine has a million names, I'm not totally sure) while focusing largely on Dog's. We see Dog as a beaten and deprived child who was friends with James before he knew their familial relationship. Though James was wealthy and spoiled, he was sickly and frail so Dog wasn't really jealous of the boy's wealth. Dog envisioned himself having a long life full of adventure and James, tragically, dying young. Instead, James' mutation kicked in and he was far less sickly and frail and went on to have a number of world-spanning adventures while Dog sunk deeper into alcohol and depression. Now, harboring a lifetime of resentment, dog challenges Wolverine as a fighter and as a teacher. With all of that backstory out of the way, next issue we'll actually see what that challenge amounts to for the kids of the Jean Grey School.

Ultimate Wolverine 1
Bunn (w) and Messina and Erskine (a) and Tartaglia (c)

With the Wolverine of the Ultimate Universe dead a couple of years now, the torch has been passed, rather recently, to his secret son Jimmy Hudson, currently starring in Ultimate X-Men. This book aims to show a little more about the Ultimate Wolverines of past and present as Jimmy tries to learn something about his biological father and the crazy hijinks that he was involved in. Right now, the key seems to be in some secret project called "Mothervine." Logan was on the trail of this Mothervine issue when it led him to a little girl with solid light manipulation who, with a trigger activated, tore a senator in half. Logan saved the girl, recognizing her as somewhat brainwashed, and followed the trigger man, only to find that someone else from Logan's past (currently undisclosed, but frankly probably Jimmy's mother) has killed the man first, keeping Logan's team from asking him any questions. The plot is brought to the present as Jimmy watches the recorded message that Logan had left with Kitty to give to his son after his own death. Black Box overhears the message and, as a technopath, figures out that there's a hidden message encoded in the not-so hidden message. It reads "Mother is calling her children home." Jimmy and Black Box set off to find out what that could possibly mean while, elsewhere, Quicksilver kills someone else attached to project Mothervine.

Presumably we'll get into more about Mothervine and the mysterious woman (again, my money's on Jimmy's actual mother) and Quicksilver's involvement in the whole thing as this four-issue limited series  progresses. I just had to look up how many issues the limited series was and, in truth, when I saw the number, it fits. I think this will be a tight, solid book. Limited series are kind of neat because they can spotlight characters that wouldn't necessarily survive a long book and tell a story worth telling without having to push too hard to keep an interesting running storyline going for a long time. I think this Mothervine conspiracy will stay interesting for about four issues. Certain other comics with code words that won't be immediately revealed could learn a lesson from this format, a four issue limited series that forces you to tell your story a little more quickly than, say, in eight issues focusing on one key word that won't be revealed through at least the majority of the issues, long after people stop caring. Anyway, that's my review of Ultimate Wolverine 1 and not in any way a review of any Daredevil: End of Days books.