Hunt for Wolverine

I was thinking about reviewing this for a podcast.  After reading it, I decided against it. That’s in part due to the fact that this is essentially sixteen issues (two one-shots and four four-issue miniseries) of setup for the main event that is the “Return of Wolverine.”  The other part is that this is a deeply mixed bag in terms of quality. Some of the comics here are pretty great — especially if you were a fan of “All-New Wolverine.” Others are simply passable or actively annoying. Did we need this much setup for Wolverine’s return?  Absolutely not. Still, this could’ve been a lot worse than what we got.

So here’s how the collection of comics in this hardcover edition breaks down:

Hunt For Wolverine:  The one-shot which kicks off the proceedings is split into two halves.  In the first, illustrated by David Marquez, the Reavers find out where Wolverine’s adamantium-entombed body is being kept and decide to steal it for a quick payday.  For once, though, the X-Men are aware of what’s going on and the resulting fight delivers some pretty good superhero action courtesy of Marquez. Writer Charles Soule also manages to make the Reavers into more sympathetic, and therefore interesting, villains than you’d expect, but the best surprise in his script is saved for what’s happened to Wolverine’s body.

That sets up the second half of this issue, which is in turn setup for the subsequent four miniseries.  In it, Kitty Pryde asks Daredevil and Tony Stark to look into this matter due to their respective histories with Logan, while she forms an X-team of her own to investigate his old haunt of Madripoor.  Meanwhile, the one surviving Reaver lets Lady Deathstrike in on what happened, and she resolves to try and track down Logan to put him back in the ground. It all looks nice, courtesy of Ramon Rosanas, and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and style.

Weapon Lost:  Soule was responsible for the “Death of Wolverine” and a lot of comics dealing with its fallout.  He’s also the main architect behind the character’s return, so you’d figure that the miniseries written by him would be the most relevant to the overall plot.  Right? Unless the “Return of Wolverine” series is going to be story in a noir style with occasional forays into horror/suspense it doesn’t seem likely. This miniseries sees Daredevil teaming up with Misty Knight, (Inhuman) Frank McGee, and the mutant Cypher to track down Logan’s body.  What they find is that Wolverine sightings are now almost as frequent as ones involving Elvis. Except one in particular catches their attention, about a man with claws slicing up people in Canada.

Artist Matteo Buffagni does the noir style well, giving the whole miniseries a shadowy look while still keeping the art easy to follow.  It’s clear that Soule wanted this miniseries to have a grounded feel to it, so that the undertones of paranoia and suspense would come through that much more.  If only “Weapon Lost” went anywhere interesting as it delivers a search for a red herring with too little payoff in the end. Some nice interplay between the characters is also dragged down by the fact that “information addict Cypher” comes off like a development that’s going to be ignored as quickly as it was brought up.

Adamantium Agenda:  Remember when Wolverine was one of the New Avengers?  Writer Tom Taylor does and that’s how we get the team of Tony Stark, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Peter Parker, with a very special guest who shows up at the end of the second issue infiltrating a black market auction where one of the items up for bids is the genetic code of an unknown superhero.  Naturally everyone assumes that it’s Wolverine’s. Whether or not that’s the case is the least of everyone’s problems as its origins turn out to be more Sinister than anyone expected.

This was a fun superhero adventure with lots of great interplay between the main characters and some really clever twists too.  While the present-day story is entertaining on its own terms, the story laid out in the flashback scenes in each issue — which illustrates why each hero feels indebted to Logan — is just as good.  Also great is the art from R.B. Silva as his bright, clean style is something that I’ve always found immensely appealing. There’s not a lot of payoff here for the actual “Hunt For Wolverine,” though the story Taylor gives us here makes up for that particular shortcoming.  Again, especially for fans of his “All-New Wolverine” series.

Claws of a Killer:  Realizing that she’s not the only one who wants to put Logan back in the ground, Lady Deathstrike teams up with Sabretooth and Daken to track down the lead she has on his adamantium.  This leads the three of them right into a zombie movie with a plot macguffin that turns off their healing factors. Working in this story’s favor is the fact that we get a better idea of what the secret organization behind Wolverine’s missing body is capable of, and some nice art from Jackson Guice and Mack Chater.  Dragging Mariko Tamaki’s story down to the bottom of this collection is that the three main characters, never very likeable to begin with, spend almost the entirety of the miniseries bickering with each other and acting like general idiots in the face of the threat presented to them. It’s an approach that might’ve worked had it been played for dark comedy instead of the serious tone taken here.

Mystery in Madripoor:  Out of all the miniseries in this collection, this one probably has the least relevance to the title matter.  Yet it winds up being critically important to one X-character in particular: Psylocke. She’s part of the team, including Storm, Rogue, Jubilee, and Domino, that Kitty assembled to investigate Madripoor.  Aside from being one of the Marvel Universe’s foremost hives of scum and villainy, it’s also the current home of Magneto as readers of “X-Men: Blue” can tell you. If you think that setting him up as the antagonist of this miniseries is too obvious a move, then you’d be right.  Someone with closer ties to Madripoor has made it her new seat of power and she, along with her henchwomen, aren’t about to let some X-women ruin their plans.

Jim Zub writes this miniseries and, like Taylor, he has a good handle on the characters, delivering some solid banter and interesting twists.  The biggest one involves Psylocke and addresses an aspect of her character which initially came off as really cool when it was introduced in the 90’s, but is now very problematic today.  Zub makes the twist work through some nice setup that pays off well when all is revealed in the final issue. Making this miniseries memorable from a visual standpoint is Thony Silas whose stylized art is distinctive and stylish on its own terms.

Dead Ends:  This one-shot is meant to tie all four miniseries together as Kitty, Daredevil, and Tony Stark meet up at the X-mansion in Central Park to discuss what they’ve learned.  It makes sense that they’d do this from a narrative standpoint, but it also has the effect of catching the reader up on any of the miniseries they may not have read were they following the event in single-issue form.  As anyone who picked up this collection has already read all four miniseries prior to this issue, that recap comes off as being pretty redundant here. Once the recapping’s done, we get to the meat of the issue which is a direct attack on the X-Men by Soteira — the evil organization that’s been behind everything here.  While the heroes are able to fend off the direct attack, they’re subsequently confronted by Soteira’s leader, Persephone, who makes a very convincing case for them to stop hunting for Wolverine.

So what was the “Hunt For Wolverine” all about in the end?  Mainly about setting up a brand new evil organization in the Marvel Universe in the form of Soteira.  It’s good that Soule is trying to add something new to the Marvel Universe, but Soteira in its current form doesn’t come off as all that interesting.  We learn they’ve got highly-trained squads known as killteams, a genetic database of all mutants, the ability to re-animate corpses, and have a significant orbital presence as well.  While all these things certainly qualify them as a threat, it doesn’t do much to distinguish them from all of the other evil organizations that are currently running around in the Marvel Universe right now.  What exactly is Soteira about besides stealing Wolverine’s corpse? We don’t get that answer here and that doesn’t leave the “Return of Wolverine” in the best starting place that it could be.

If nothing else, the “Hunt For Wolverine” hardcover does represent a good value for your money.  The four miniseries collected here are being reprinted individually for $15 each, with the “Hunt For Wolverine” one-shot included in all of them.  This hardcover will set you back $50 and is the only collection to have “Dead Ends” for what it’s worth. Individually, “Adamantium Agenda” and “Mystery in Madripoor” are recommended for fans of good Marvel comics, while “Weapon Lost” will probably only be of interest to fans of Soule’s work on “Daredevil.”  As for “Claws of a Killer,” I’ve heard that Tamaki’s work on the new “X-23” series is a better showcase for her talents. I guess what I’m saying here is that the “Hunt For Wolverine” hardcover is a good value for completionists. Those of you looking for the most efficient way to follow Wolverine’s return can probably get away with picking up the “Adamantium Agenda” collection along with “Dead Ends” before checking out the “Return of Wolverine” miniseries itself.