Wolverine 11, Savage Wolverine 11

Wolverine 11
Cornell (w) and Davis and Farmer (a) and Hollingsworth (c)

Wolverine is still mortal and his chances at becoming invincible again are seemingly dwindling, both as Fury and his team use the Host to try to attack the virus and as Wolverine's new series rounds the corner. Context clues, you guys. Anyway, he and Kitty are still trapped in the mall with human security guards and members of the Hand and Sabretooth's strange gang (including Lord Deathstrike and the Silver Samurai) still coming from all directions. To add insult to actual injury, apparently the weird acupuncture guy who showed up before also opened avenues of pain previously unknown to Wolverine. Wolvy has always felt pain but he's pretty used to it by now. Unfortunately, this guy amplified Wolverine's pain, making his fighting that much more reserved. The intense pain is making him more feral and, in his moments of clarity, he decides to set out by himself to lure the other villains to him and protect the people he's with. It's by himself that he's attacked by the Silver Samurai as the issue ends.

This mall thing feels like it's been going on for months and I know that it hasn't. One of my biggest issues with this series has been the pacing of the stories and of the individual issues, which have dragged tremendously. There's an excess of exposition, needed or not, and it's crushing the flow of this book. I will say, particularly on the heels of the new WOLVERINE book announcement, that I think that Alan Davis' art isn't necessarily the best fit for Cornell's somewhat slow book because it makes Davis' art feel slow and dramatic, but not in the good way where it actually creates drama. Overall, I think the book itself is just slow, which is too bad because I think there are some decent ideas in here and some neat little character pieces here and there (I continue to not need Wolverine's super secret group of smart friends or whatever they are. Happy he's been pretty reserved with using them). I'm hoping that the start of the next series will find a more dedicated book, one that's more sure of itself and that needs less explanation, then. I also hope that it sees a bit of an adrenaline boost from Stegman's art.

Savage Wolverine 11
Jock (w and a) and Loughridge (c)

Wolverine has found a lab on this mysterious planet that seems to answer some of his questions about exactly what sort of experiments were going on here. Like Wolverine's young friend, who he seems to have named Kouen, the lab is full of more children in stasis meant to be a new Wolverine, as it were. Almost immediately upon seeing these kids, Kouen enters and is even more immediately speared through the chest and lifted up off the ground by one of the creatures running the lab. Wolverine yells while the man soliloquies about how all of these children are imperfect copies which can be disposed of now that Wolverine himself is here. Meanwhile, Kouen learns that he can heal and bares his own claws and frees himself from the pike, giving Wolverine an opening to run over split the man in two. Wolverine and Kouen talk about the children in stasis and Wolverine admits that, since they're only kids but their skeleton is metal, their bodies likely won't hold up. Kouen produces a syringe that the scientists had said would cure the children, which Wolverine doubts. He tests it on himself and reveals that it's just poison, a powerful poison at that. Kouen uses the poison on the mainframe of the tubes to end the lives of the other children before they can suffer his pain. He and Wolverine escape the lab and wait for more scientists to show up, as the man warned they would, ready to attack.

Really beautiful and fairly haunting final issue for Jock here. There was a neat thing happening with this run where it was a little hard to kind of follow and keep up, leaving a sense of mystery and a sense of the ominous to it. It wouldn't have worked long-term, I don't think, but this was a fairly short arc and thus the mystery has the perfect amount of time to kind of sit and make you curious before really clearing up. Of course, not everything cleared up (who were these scientists? Where is Wolverine? How did they bring him here? etc.) but I think we don't need everything cleared up. This is a story, and an interesting one at that, and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Unlike WOLVERINE above, this set of issues has moved remarkably well, allowing exposition to pave the way when it's needed but preferring to show and not tell, which also gave Jock, who is a tremendous artist, a chance to shine. I read this issue through once a couple days ago so that I would be ready to review it but I read it through again when the time came to actually review it. Typically I do that with books but oftentimes I'll end up just flipping through the book the second time to remind myself of things I wanted to say or little plot points here and there. This time I read the whole book through a couple more times to get the whole feel of the book. It's a really good story and I think a great show of Wolverine as a character. Solid stuff.