It’s All In The Reflexes – Review Of Wolverine #18

There was a time when a man could be kingpin of the Chinese criminal underground in San Francisco in relative quiet and safe anonymity. Just be left to while the days away, occasionally kicking some uppity newbie Triad ass, collecting whatever protection money you had coming to you. Leave the city for weeks, months at a time on Avengers or X-Men business and come back, pick up where you left off.

Wait, what?

Yeah, Wolverine has lots of secrets.

Spoilers, a large sweaty man in a diaper and dragon chow after the jump.

Wolverine has come back to San Francisco to wrap up all his loose ends before he leaves to go establish what will be known as the Jean Grey School For High Learning on the site of the old Xavier School back in New York State. He needs to do all the usual stuff: break up with his girlfriend, collect his secret stash of money so he can bankroll his school and, oh yeah, wipe out a bunch of drug lords so he can resign his position as the Black Dragon of San Francisco – the Kingpin of Chinatown’s organized crime scene.

Damn that Logan, man – even his secret identities have secret identities!

Issue #18 finds Wolverine in the process of fighting a bunch of bad guys with names like Razorfist, Darkstrider and Soul Striker. You know what Soul Striker can do? Punch you in the soul. I know. I was as shocked as you to find that out. Oh, and the bad guys have red dragons. Not the kind you have to roll like 20 d4 for in melee and then roll again for morale after either. The real ones. In the, you know, comic book.

Anyway.

Things go poorly. Wolverine and his talking gorilla buddy, Gorilla Man, have been tied up to a couple dragons who are set to rip them in half. Then the villains conveniently leave to attend to other business, smug in their belief they’ve taken care of our hapless hero. Unfortunately for the villains:

I don't have opposable toes, but I can bend my thumb 90 degrees to the left over the back of my hand. So, that's kind of cool, right?

Damn. Defeated by opposable toes. Who would’ve seen that coming?

Meanwhile, a couple of the rest of Wolverine’s group have been dragged off to meet the Big Bad Lady who runs things under the earth. And, here I thought the only area I needed to worry about if I visited San Francisco was The Tenderloin. I guess there’s a whole city beneath the city, replete with dragons, poppy fields and an evil overlordess who likes to bathe in the blood of other women she feels threatened by. It’s like high school all over again.

Also, around this time, Wolverine and Gorilla Man meet up with an associate from Logan’s past who has also, conveniently, been wandering around in the caverns that apparently exist deep below San Francisco.

You drank Wolverine under the table? Please, please tell me that's up on You Tube somewhere.

How will Wolverine get his other friends back? Can it really be feasible to grow poppies in an underground cavern? Is Fat Cobra secretly the love child of Wolverine and Gorilla Man?

And will I buy issue #19 to find out?

Yes, at least the the last question. Jason Aaron is writing a fun book here. It’s goofy and yet action packed on a scale similar to Big Trouble In Little China. And, frankly, as much as I love me some Jack Burton, if Wolverine had been in Carpenter’s movie, Jack would’ve been all “If we’re not back by dawn… call the president – oh, hey Logan, I see you’ve brought back Miao Yin already. You find my truck too? Well, then. My work here is done.” Ron Garney is an artist who likes his camera angles and action spreads. They serve him well in here in telling Aaron’s script visually. Garney came up through Marvel in the boom of the 90s comic explosion and you can still see the 90s in his fine line work, but you also get a real sense of the fun he’s having drawing the characters. It all works.

The previous arc Wolverine went through was the bleak “Red Right Hand” storyline, in which pretty much everyone he ever pissed off came looking for their piece of revenge. “Goodbye, Chinatown” is a welcome antidote to having to have watched Wolverine kill – well, I’ll let you go find those books if you want to know. The spring is back in the Logan’s step with this arc and, if he’s killing folks on the way to his goal in this story, at least he seems to having fun while he’s doing it.