Mashup: Savage Wolverine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: “Cyclops”? “Storm”? What do they call you? “Spoilers”?

Yesterday, I recommended that the best way to read Batman #16 was to not think about the plot too much, because it gets in the way of what the story is really delivering to the reader. I’m gonna have to recommend the same thing for writer / artist Frank Cho’s Savage Wolverine #1, but unfortunately without anywhere near the enthusiasm I had for Batman.

Look, if you’re a fan of the berserker Wolverine, and like the Frank Miller / Chris Claremont miniseries from the 80s because of the graphic violence as opposed to the nuanced characterization, there’s a lot to like in Savage Wolverine #1. Cho captures the character visually, along with the attendant violence that would, in a just and true comics world, be a major part of any comic book about a guy whose primary visible power involves six machetes. It’s a good-looking book. It’s violent and exciting. And if that’s what you want from a comic, just enjoy it and turn off your frontal lobes using whatever method or chemicals you prefer.

Because if you don’t, it’s gonna be really hard for you to not notice that this book is Lost with Wolverine, has plot holes you could drive a bus through, and leaps in logic that would make Batroc weep in frustrated shame.

The story opens with a S.H.I.E.L.D. aerial geological survey of The Savage Land in progress, being guided by Shanna The She-Devil because she is a resident of the island and because Cho likes drawing her ass. While gathering data on a massive statue that looks like Cthuhlu taking a dump, the team loses control of the plane and crashes because of a magnetic shift and because, as Spider-Man said in New Avengers, every plane crashes in The Savage Land. Flash forward nine months, and Wolverine is teleported to The Savage Land by an unknown force or person called The Dark Walker, because shut up, that’s why. After an interlude where Wolverine cuts up a bunch of angry Neanderthals, he finds the surviving remains of the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew – i.e., Shanna – , who is still stranded and trying to destroy the monument to Diarrhetic Cthulhu in order to call for help, when they are attacked by reapers – think pterodactyls with English skills – and things go wrong in a hurry.

So let’s address the elephant in the room: so far, this book is Lost with superpowers and a bikini babe. We’ve got a plane crash on a strange island with odd creatures, an explicit threat that prevents escape by raft, and a mysterious giant statue. We have forces on the island that are bringing people there for an unknown reason, and local tribes that are an unreasonable danger given the surroundings. We are a weird hatch and a handwritten note (get it?) reading “Not Penny’s Boat” away from Wolverine being pulled away from the island by a massive lawsuit.

Further, a lot of the events in this book require leaps in logic that are damn near impossible to ignore, staring with that plane crash. Sure, given years and years of Marvel history, I can buy that a plane crashed in The Savage Land because honestly, it would be more unrealistic if the plane hadn’t crashed; after 48 years of comics, you should be able to cross that island by jumping from Quinjet wreck to Quinjet wreck. However, to believe that Shanna and the other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were stranded there for nine months requires you to also believe that no one knew where the team was going, and that the unofficial motto of S.H.I.E.L.D., rather than being “no man left behind,” is instead, “fuck ’em, we’ll replace them with a Life Model Decoy and keep their paycheck.” It is a plot hole that requires one hell of a lot of suspension of disbelief, and while it isn’t a dealbreaker for the story at large, it is a drag on it…

…As is Shanna’s leopard bikini. I get that that’s her accepted getup, and it makes a certain amount of sense that she’d wear such a thing living in a tropical jungle, in an area with very few predators, but seeing her in that costume while flying around with S.H.I.E.L.D. just kept tickling my brain, and not in that good, girl-in-a-bikini way. I just kept thinking that, what, it didn’t occur to any of these nice soldiers to say, “Hello, ma’am, thank you for assisting S.H.I.E.L.D. on this survey. Might we offer you pants?”

But if you can overlook those problems, there is a certain amount to like here. The name of the book is Savage Wolverine, and Cho delivers on that, even in Wolverine’s brief appearance. This Wolverine is a killer; he maims and stabs his opponents, going easily into a berserker rage like the old days of the 80s, and it’s refreshing to see a Wolverine who’s willing to shank a bitch for pissing him off. There is a refreshing amount of bloodshed for a Wolverine story, and while it’s not on the extreme level of, say, Wolverine: The Best There Is, it’s nice to see Wolverine acting like a guy who’s best known for always having knives.

And the book looks fantastic. While Cho might be writing a book with a bunch of plot holes in it, there’s nothing to complain about with the art. Cho works in a fine, detailed line, with very realistic (if idealized) figures and expressive faces. The battle sequences between Wolverine and the Neanderthals (which will be the name of my next pop-metal band) are exciting and well choreographed, and all the action makes sequential sense. I actually went through this issue and did the old Jim Shooter test of, “If you look at the book without reading any of the words, can you tell what’s going on?” and this passed with flying colors. And given that this is Frank Cho, Shanna is depicted in full-on pin-up mode. Cho clearly likes drawing beautiful women, and he delivers on Shanna, including one page-high pin-up that acts as a panel border on one page. So if you like that kind of thing, Cho delivers it to you.

Savage Wolverine #1 is a good looking comic book, with a visual depiction of Wolverine and his way of acting that is refreshing and exciting. But it has a bunch of problems, not the least of which is that the whole premise that puts Wolverine in The Savage Land seem derivative. It probably would have been simpler and less distracting for Cho to have simply written on the title page: “Wolverine is in The Savage Land with Shanna now. This is what happens.” But it’s worth a look just for the visuals. Time will tell if he can move past the obvious Lost influence… but pretty pictures or no, the minute I see a flashback to purgatory, or a big sequence of lottery numbers, I’m out.