Write What You Know, And Then Stop: Wolverine: In The Flesh Review

Editor’s Note: And one last quick review before the comic stores open today…

When I was younger, I was a professional stand-up comedian. I started almost exactly 20 years ago, performing for the first time in the back of a shitty bar called Headliners off of the main drag in Buckhead, Georgia (it’s not there anymore) in mid-August, 1993, hundreds of miles away from anyone who knew me, so that if I completely sucked and couldn’t face doing it anymore, no one would know that I stunk up the joint.

Well, I did completely suck, but I got better over the course of years, going from shitty college bar open mike to the back rooms of Chinese restaurants 20 minutes off of any highway in northern New England, honing my craft enough to reach the point where I could do some opening in bigger rooms in Boston. It took me years to get there… and during that time, there was nothing that pissed me off more than hearing that some bubblegumming fallen D-List celebrity or maybe some scandal celebrity try to string out their 15 minutes of fame by trying a stand-up.

Year after year, I’d hear it: Kato Kaelin was doing stand-up! Screech from Saved By The Bell was doing a weekend at the Comedy Palace! John Wayne Bobbit was doing two appearances at – wait, that was porn he did… but that’s not the point. The point is that it pissed me off that these celebrities thought that they could just announce that they were comedians and just do the thing that I had spent ten years going from crappy club to crappy club, eating shitty food and going without sleep while driving through the night, learning how to do well enough to reach the bottom rungs of the ladder of success! With my only consolation being that after those initial big announcements of their new careers in comedy… you never fucking heard of any of them again.

All of which is a long way to go to say that celebrity chef and Food Network personality Chris Cosentino has written a Wolverine comic book for Marvel, and this is my review of it.

Wolverine comes across a crime scene where the victim appears to have been professionally butchered. Logan, who clearly doesn’t know much about the use of knives, consults celebrity chef (big surprise here) Chris Cosentino, who confirms that the victim has been butchered in accordance with the methods of a professional chef. Wolverine then invites Cosentino on the investigation, where they come across another stiff with fast food wrappers strewn about. They follow this lead to a bunch of high end food trucks, and find one that is closed and that Wolverine can’t smell into. Cosentino returns to his restaurant, and Logan is captured by the bad guy. Cosentino, feeling guilty for leaving Wolverine, returns to the scene, leading to a battle where the stakes are life and death.

Okay. Let me start by stipulating that I’m sure Cosantino is a nice guy with good intentions. I base this on the fact that, several years ago, Amanda blind emailed the guy asking for advice on how to cook veal heart, and he replied promptly, with good suggestions, at no personal benefit to himself. But with that said, the man is a chef, and not a writer. A quick Amazon search indicates that he’s co-written one cookbook, and that’s about it. And hey, that;s writing… but I know from personal experience that someone can have a decent command of the written English language, and still no facility whatsoever for writing a story, with characters.

Thankfully, there are only two main characters in this story, and one is Cosentino himself. And if I were to hazard a guess, it’s because Cosentino recognized his limitations and decided to have at least one character into whose head he could get. And the Cosentino character feels realistic, particularly in the sequence where he ranks out a vegetarian for being a half-dead, protein-starved wuss. When it comes to his willingness to drop tools at his day job to follow Wolverine around on a manhunt, or his willingness to singlehandedly attempt to rescue Wolverine rather than call the cops, well, let’s just say I would never personally pick a fight with a blue collar dude whose job requires superior knife skills, but he’s not the first one I’d call to face off with Galactus.

His characterization of Wolverine, however, is rudimentary at best. We get a lot of “I’m the best there is at what I do,” and a lot of Logan using his enhanced senses to try to figure stuff out, but not a hell of a lot else. Frankly, Wolverine doesn’t need to be here at all; once Cosentino the writer makes the decision to have Wolverine seek out Cosentino’s the fictional chef’s advice, Cosentino has Cosentino (Christ, my head hurts) take the lead on the investigation, from the autopsy to following food trucks. Jesus, once “Cosentino” leaves, Wolverine is quickly immobilized and requires rescue by Cosentino; Wolverine is here purely as an excuse to make this a Marvel comic book.

Again, I’m sure Cosentino is a good dude who I would be happy to drink a beer with, but there just isn’t much good in this story. The “mystery” is rudimentary at best, solved when the killer leaves wrappers from his own food truck all over a crime scene. If Editors C. B. Cebulski and Jeanine Schaeffer had told Cosentino to cut the story by two pages, Cosentino probably would have had the bad guy drop his driver’s licence and the registration to his food truck next to the corpse. Cosentino has Wolverine’s senses come and go, depending on whether he wants to advance the plot quickly or slowly, and has Wolverine eventually captured with an electric cattle prod. I have comic books where Wolverine is hit with a fucking rocket propelled grenade and comes back swinging… but a butcher would have a cattle prod rather than a grenade launcher, so there you go.

And the dialogue is just stilted and expository from the beginning to the end (with the exception of the vegetarian rant, and even that feels shoehorned into a scene revolving around a butchered human being). We get sequences with Wolverine and Cosentino outside the morgue (just before the vegan bashing) with dialogue like:

Cosentino: I feel bad about leaving the restaurant, but I think Tatiana and my crew can handle it for a bit.

Wolverine: I’m sure they can, and I need you here. The people of San Francisco need you here.

Really? Stuff like this is the epitome of “tell, don’t show.” First, we haven’t seen Tatiana and the crew do anything but banter with Cosentino, so we have no idea whether they have even basic competence. Second: how did Wolverine convince Cosentino to leave his job with no notice to go to the morgue? Hell, just off the top of my head, here’s how you take what’s already here and tighten it up: have Cosentino make fun of some poor vegetarian in his own restaurant. Then have Wolverine ask Cosentino go to the morgue to look at a dead guy. Have Cosentino balk at the idea of seeing a cut-up dead person, and then Logan mocks Cosentino right back, waving his hands at Cosentino’s handiwork with pork. Then Wolverine shows Cosentino a picture of a female victim, Cosentino looks at Tatiana, we see him make the connection that the killer’s victim could just as easily have been someone he knows, decide that he has to help, and then cut straight to the morgue.

See? Most of those elements are already in the book. But instead of using those elements to give us any real emotional or logical reason for Cosentino to accompany Logan other than the desire to see himself in superhero comic book, he uses a couple lines of exposition to keep the plot moving. And that kind of thing happens all over this comic book. Jesus, the sequence I just came up with is no great shakes, but at least it advances character, includes logic, and shows us why Cosentino would help Logan instead of just deciding that it is a thing that will happen… and I have already stipulated that I suck and writing stories, and that I should not do it.

And that, overall, is the overriding problem with this comic book: Cosentino shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have done it because he is not a comic book writer. And yes, I know that fellow celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain wrote a whole graphic novel for Vertigo just a year ago, but the difference is that Bourdain was a published author of several novels before his did his comic… and even then, all he did was rewrite A Fistful of Dollars with cooks rather than gunfighters. There just isn’t anything in this comic to recommend it beyond the art – Dalibor Talajic does simply-lined, simple comic art with an easy layout and a lot of camera moves to add at least some dynamism to long, expository conversations – and I really think it only exists because Cosentino is a celebrity chef, and Marvel wanted to grab some of the kind of press that Bourdain got back in 2012.

And I can’t blame Cosentino for this – again, the dude doesn’t write comics. If someone offered me a fat check to try my hand at writing a comic book, well… actually, I wouldn’t do it, because I know my limitations, but I can understand why Cosentino did it. Hell, almost any comic fan probably would… but Marvel editorial should have read this book, thanked Cosentino, cut his check, and put it in the filler pile with the rest of the fan-written scripts that come in from fans with no experience.

Comics look easy, just like stand-up comedy, but that doesn’t mean that just anybody can do either. Cosentino’s recipe made one hell of a veal heart. He should stick with that.

In other words: don’t quit yer day job, kid.