I didn’t think Return of Wolverine was going to be good – and it wasn’t; nothing Charles Soule writes these days is – but I was curious to see how they’d bring Wolverine back from the dead. I expected time travel to be the clichéd get out of jail free excuse and surprisingly it wasn’t, so props to Soule for that! What it turned out to be though, revealed at the end in a vague, nonsensical page from the villain of this story, was unsatisfying and dumb.
That’s the end though – right away, Soule just launches into it. Wolverine’s back – just like that! Hmm. That’s very anticlimactic. And the opening scene is reminiscent of Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X: Logan’s in a lab, carnage ensues. The choice is indicative of the book’s story which is derivative of so many Wolverine stories: it’s time to trot out the amnesia and manipulation trope again! So Logan is puppeteered into fighting various foes, including the X-Men, but mostly a group of faceless, dreary bad guys called Soteira.
Nothing much interesting happens. Wolverine effortlessly defeats every “obstacle” in the way, the big bad has the generic bad guy motivations (blow up the world) and the usual bad guy monologue at the end explaining why they did what they did. Soule has turned into such a hack writer at Marvel – all of his titles are so bland, boring, unimaginative, and instantly forgettable. It’s like reading comics written by a robot!
The art is half-decent. Steve McNiven draws the opening and closing issues and Declan Shalvey draws the middle three. The action is suitably bombastic and slick-looking, though both artists have produced better work elsewhere.
Wolverine’s unsurprisingly back (even though he never really left considering Old Man Logan was wandering about in the interim) in a very unimpressive return. I’m sure he’ll be dead again soon enough!
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