Savage Wolverine vol. 2: Hands on a Dead Body

To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ll get around to buying another volume of this title.  “Savage Wolverine” is the “Wolverine stories from a rotating cast of creators” and its quality has been all over the place over the course of its run so far.  For all the stories that look interesting — like the two-part war story from John Arcudi and Joe Quinones — I’d be getting another less impressive one if I picked up the volume that collected it.  This particular collection was meant to be an exception to that rule.  After delivering an entertaining Spider-Man/Red Hulk story with their opening arc on “Avenging Spider-Man,” Zeb Wells and Joe Madureira re-team for an incredibly violent battle that pits the title character and Elektra against the Arbiters of the Hand.  Then you’ve got Jock writing and illustrating a story that has Wolverine stranded on an alien planet with a little boy who has some secrets of his own.  I was expecting this to be a solid read given the creators involved here.  What I got was something that while not really bad, feels like it’s more for the completists than anything else.

If you’ve been reading “Wolverine” stories for any length of time, you know that the struggle he faces between his animal and human instincts is one of the defining parts of his character.  To wit, there have been many, many stories about it over the years and finding a new way to look at this aspect gets harder to do every year.  Zeb Wells and Joe Madureira… fail to do this as they have Wolverine and Elektra team up to stop the resurrection of Bullseye at the behest of Wilson Fisk.  This story takes place during the time that Fisk was running the Hand, and his leadership is being challenged in one of those ancient rites that these organizations are full of.  This leads Wolverine and Elektra to go up against the three Arbiters who are in charge of the test so they can make sure Bullseye stays dead.  Problem is, Fisk hasn’t been entirely honest about who the Hand have really brought back to test his fitness to rule the Hand.

This leads to Wolverine taking on Shikaru, the biggest and burliest of the Arbiters, and Fisk fighting the last person he’d ever want to put down himself.  There’s a decent idea about how fisk has to extinguish the last bit of compassion he had in order to do this, and it probably would’ve been served better if the story didn’t also have to deliver on, you know, being about Wolverine.  The fight scenes between Wolverine and Shikaru are a good showcase for Madureira’s skills, and Wells even wedges in some clever bits of humor into the mostly super-serious proceedings. In the end, this is a story about how Wolverine’s animal rage is always present within him and how he always manages to triumph over it in the end.  It’s a story I’ve read plenty of times before.  Sometimes the art was worse, and sometimes it wasn’t as funny.  Still doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t really offer anything new here.

Jock’s offering, on the other hand, is about as out there as you can get for a “Wolverine” story.  It starts off with the character falling from a spaceship, going through atmospheric re-entry, and then crashing onto an unknown planet.  He’s now only left with his innate skills and mutant abilities to survive until he can find a way back home.  It isn’t until he comes across a kid who was given instructions to find the mutant that such a plan even becomes feasible.  This means that he’ll have to go through the group who wants him for their own experiments, but that shouldn’t be too hard…

Don’t go into this story expecting every little bit to be explained.  What the origins and motivations are behind the group who orchestrated all this are never addressed, as is the final fate of Wolverine and the kid.  That said, this is one of those stories that actually feels stronger for the mysteries it sets up over the course of its run.  This isn’t “Lost,” it’s just Wolverine on a strange planet.  Yet it still finds time to have him take on some alien wildlife and some bad, bad men who deserve what they have coming to them.  As Jock is one of the best at depicting action in comics, all that stuff looks fantastic.  He also creates a good rapport between Wolverine and the kid with the revelation of their shared heritage actually creating a good amount of sympathy for the child.  It’s nothing mind-blowing, but Jock’s “less is more” approach to the material works pretty well here.

So you’ve got one story that’s kind of a miss and another one that’s a hit.  Neither are particularly essential reads, though at least Jock’s leaves me wanting to see the writer/artist take another crack at the character in the future.  The best recommendation I can give this is that if you’re looking for some no-frills “Wolverine” stories that don’t have any distracting attachments to continuity while rummaging through a half-off bin somewhere, the ones in this volume will fit the bill.