I’m A Superhero: Wolverine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Many years ago, a secret government organization abducted the man called Logan, a mutant possessing razor-sharp spoilers and the ability to heal from any bad comic…

I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t feel like I needed another Wolverine book. We got the debut of The Savage Wolverine just two months ago, we’ve had Wolverine & The X-Men going since the end of the Schism event about a year and a half ago, and then there’s that good old Wolverine comic that, until recently, had been running since Logan put on an eyepatch and started acting like it would make people without massive traumatic brain injuries think he was a completely different dude with fucked-up hair and adamantium claws back in 1988. Even forgetting the recent Wolverine: The Best There Is series, throw on top of those books Wolverine’s appearances in X-Men, Avengers, New Avengers, and even fucking X-Babies, I wasn’t exactly waiting with bated breath to bring my monthly Wolverine expenditures into the three figures.

But still, I picked up the first issue of writer Paul Cornell’s and artist Alan Davis’s new Wolverine, partially because I generally dug Cornell’s recent work on DC’s Demon Knights, partially because I’ve liked Davis’s work since Captain Britain and more importantly (to me, anyway) Miracleman, and partially because I co-run a comics Web site and part of my job is to read stuff that I don’t necessarily give a damn about and write about it.

And it turns out that that’s not a bad thing, because Wolverine #1 is good. Really fucking good. Better than the opening to about any solo Wolverine story in recent memory.

Particularly that first page, which is one hell of a cool shot across the bow.
Let’s jump right into it, because Cornell and Davis did us the courtesy of doing the same. The story opens with a full-page splash of Wolverine, laid out on a bunch of skeletons, with half his body incinerated and looking terrified, telling someone off camera, “I-it’s okay. I’m a s-superhero.” Now that is one hell of an opening salvo, man. In a single image, we learn that Wolverine is facing one hell of a lethal threat – one that’s enough to terrify him – and that opening line of dialogue is just killer. It’s an irreverent, Ghostbusters-style line superimposed over an image of horror; it implies big, stupid fun combined with serious violence and action, and it’s a big statement. Combining fun action and serious horror generally only works if your name is Sam Raimi, although I guess a bunch of claws can fill in for a chainsaw hand in a pinch.

The remainder of the issue delivers on the promise of that first page. We’ve got a guy with a big, stupid sci-fi gun that glows blue and looks like it came straight from a Duke Nukem game. It shoots energy bonds and blows the clothes right off of Wolverine, leaving him naked and the butt of jokes when the cops show up… but it also incinerates people instantly, and the guy’s using it to eliminate his captives because he “don’t need hostages,” and he does it in front of his eight-year-old son. We see Wolverine in a stupid track suit, bantering humorously with the cops… and we also see him killing the kid’s father in front of him. This book constantly switches between horror and humor… and yet it all works.

The innate violence of the story, between the brutal murders of the hostages, the way that Wolverine is nearly incinerated over and over, and the claw-killing of the guy with the sci-fi gun all keep with the tradition of Wolverine stories where Logan is a lone ronin who kills first, never asks questions, and yet somehow is still a member of The Avengers. But the humor and over-the-top action make the whole thing an action movie; they cash the check that the line, “I’m a superhero” writes, and most importantly: it remembers that this is a superhero comic. And a superhero comic in the Marvel Universe means that you’re gonna face dudes with laser pistols, brainwashing and seemingly alien threats. And just as importantly, it means that your purpose is to protect the innocent, which Cornell brings front and center with the kid in the middle of the slaughter. In a nutshell, Cornell has taken Wolverine as he’s been written in his solo books, kept the general level of violence, and made Wolverine a superhero again rather than an enforcer in yellow spandex.

Davis’s art is much as it has always been since the 80s. He works in a fine line, creating realistic figures and extremely expressive faces, without any of the heavy stylisation we started to see in the late 80s when McFarlane and Liefeld became popular. The pacing and storytelling are excellent, and Davis follows a convention that Cornell no doubt scripted and which is reminiscent of the kind of stuff Davis did with Alan Moore back in the 80s, where the art ironically matches what other characters are talking about in a different context (as an example, as the dude with the gun is telling the police that negotiation is pointless and that violence is forthcoming, Davis shows Wolverine sneaking up on the gunman, preparing to “get this over with.”). In addition, Davis makes an interesting choice where he shows the sci-fi violence in full frontal detail – people being utterly incinerated with this weird-assed gun – and yet the one killing Wolverine performs takes place just off camera. The decision places violence front and center in the story, but keeps it away from the protagonist, making it as violent as one would expect after years and years of solo Wolverine stories, but elevates Wolverine to being somewhat above it. It is simply good-looking visual storytelling, and shows good balance for the kind of story this is.

I opened Wolverine #1 with dramatically lowered expectations. The last thing I really wanted to see was yet another 20 pages of Wolverine muttering about how he’s the best he is at what he does and smacking around Sabretooth or Omega Red or Silver Samurai yet again. But Cornell has done something really different than what I was expecting: he wrote an actual superhero comic. It’s got the violence that the average Wolverine fan would want, and yet it throws in enough humor, humanity and big Marvel science fiction fun to make it something very different than your average Wolverine book. This is a good one.