All-New X-Men 14, Savage Wolverine 7, Wolverine MAX 9

All-New X-Men 14
Bendis (w) and Immonen and von Grawbadger (a) and Gracia (c)

When we last saw the All-New X-Men, Jean seemed to be losing control of her powers under the illusion of Lady Mastermind. Instead, here, we find that she was intentionally making herself seem like Dark Phoenix to scare their attackers and didn't mean for her team to see the illusion. She apologizes to the team, who doesn't seem to have any trouble taking down the rest of the attackers but it still takes the majority of the issue to actually finish the fight. As they do, the Uncanny Avengers again turn up to either lecture or congratulate them as SHIELD again loses Mystique.

It seems here like Bendis does have a sense of who his characters are in a pretty general sense (Ice Man is the goofball, Hank is the smart but fun one, Scott doesn't like to speak, Jean is the important one) but the series is putting him into a weird spot where he doesn't actually have to build the characters because they're staples of the Marvel Universe and so all he has to do is put in some punchy dialogue while he gets to tell the stories he wants to tell with them. It's especially useful to him because these characters were originally written by Stan Lee back when he was writing about a million other books and people were reading more for the stories and the novelty than for the depth of character so their characters didn't have to go beyond the stereotypes. What's obnoxious now, though, is that we're well out of that time and I do care about characters being developed and I'm not seeing it beyond the "boy, Jean sure is powerful before she should be powerful" storyline. On top of that, I continue to not care for Bendis' Captain America, who always seems angry and unapproachable. Also, I tend not to like and/or trust SHIELD as is but they couldn't hold a prisoner for like, five minutes. How is ANYTHING this incompetent beyond as an obvious plot device?

Savage Wolverine 7
Wells (w) and Madureira (a) and Steigerwald (c)

Wolverine and Elektra are heading for the Arbiters in the hopes that they'll arrive before Bullseye's been awakened. Things aren't what they seem, though, as they run into two high-ranking members of the Arbiters and/or of the Hand (not super specific but suffice it to say they're attached). One, the blind truthsayer Mikaru gives warning of the other, the mute giant Shikaru. Once the battle starts with Shikaru, it doesn't end until one is dead. Wolverine happily jumps into that one as Elektra talks with Mikaru, learning that perhaps they've been deceived by Kingpin after all.

Don't let the short description fool you, plenty happens in this issue. First and foremost, I want to compare these two issues to the first five issues of this series. I feel like so much has happened and we've gotten so much understanding of who Wolverine is (nothing particularly revelatory, no, but more to people just diving into the character than we did in the first arc all together) in just two short issues. On top of that, the issues aren't half dedicated to showing as much flesh of the female character as possible, which was pretty much all I took away from the first arc. Yes Elektra still has a fairly skimpy costume but it's not paraded about in the same way that Shanna was in Cho's art. Instead, I would say this art is nearly perfect and amazing for this situation. The art and the colors both work beautifully to show the darkness and the red (particularly) of the situation while still straying away from the grittiness that tends to follow Wolverine where ever he goes. Far fewer browns and grays and more reds and blacks. Granted, the book follows Elektra fighting the Hand, all of whom are heavily red, but the book is still pretty gorgeous all the same. Wolverine's character is being nicely built here as he, like he tends to, begins to expound on his berserker rage and what it means to him and whether or not it's a curse, the extent to which it's a help and to which it's a hindrance. The best moment, though, is when Mikaru warns that locking eyes with Shikaru is a death sentence and gives an impressive speech that's cut off when Wolverine hurls a rock at Shikaru's head. As Shikaru turns around angrily, Wolverine points to his own eyes and says "right here." Perfect Wolverine moment. Solid issue. Pretty great twist of the plot and it casts Kingpin as the crafty puppet-master we know him as rather than the man trying to protect himself from Bullseye. Really nice to see the book becoming something greater than what it had been.

Wolverine MAX 9
Starr (w) and Boschi (a) and D. Brown (c)

Wolverine still doesn't know anything about his past and his only hope, it seems, is a note he found in LA that told him to go to Vegas. On his way there, his bike gets a flat and he has to stop. He helps a man in a diner from some thugs and inner monologues about killing them vs. warning them and so on and so forth. Back on the road the next night, finally, he senses he's being followed and pulls off to stop the guy, only to learn the man is mysteriously tied to his immediate present and somehow to his past.

For how much inner monologue there is in this series, there's not a lot of characterization happening. Part of the obvious problem is that Wolverine doesn't know anything about himself so everything he considers doing is tinged with the idea that maybe his past self wouldn't have done it or maybe his past self would have done it faster and so on. Still, at the present, we're left with a shell of a character who doesn't know if the decisions he makes are in character or not and who doesn't really understand what he's trying to do at any given time, only knowing that he wants to find out more. There's sort of a story here in that Wolverine is trying to find more and he keeps running into people who know a bit about his past (like Sabretooth in the first arc and the gentleman who appears in this one) but he doesn't seem to know anything more about himself than he did when we started this book. In some ways, that might be interesting, but here it's such a slow reveal and it might be impeded by the fact that the audience probably knows who he is. We're not waiting for Wolverine to figure out who he is, we know about Wolverine's past. Even if this is a different universe (at least a few of the MAX titles are technically different continuities) we probably have some idea of who this guy is so we're not exactly roped into the intrigue of what he's dealing with, making the main mystery, the thing that really drives this story, fairly boring. On the other hand, Jock did the cover and Jock covers are pretty amazing.