I don't know about whether regular posting will be maintained in the near future. Power is out at my current locale (and has been for over 3 days), so until it comes back, I'll be dependent on whether I can spare the time to hit the library each day. We shall see, just providing a heads up.
At one point, I had all of Greg Rucka's run on Wolverine. Now it's down to 3 issues, all from the first arc. I can't say why exactly I gradually removed the other issues. I think I enjoyed them alright, but I didn't have any interest in rereading them. I don't believe I was as interested in the ATF agent that Rucka introduced as he would have liked. One thing I realized was that I'm more interested in how Rucka shows Logan interacting with people, rather than the violence. A lot of that is because Rucka didn't have Wolverine spend much time around previously established characters, besides Sabretooth, and a couple of appearances by Nightcrawler. The rest of the time, Logan's meeting new people, or more accurately, fighting with new people. And when it's Wolverine versus Random Cultists/Militia Imbeciles, well, there's not much suspense as to how that's going to end.
But I like how Rucka writes the quieter moments. The issue with Lucy, who had run away from home, living alone and scared in the big city, and she has the odd neighbor, a short, hairy, ugly kind of dude who comes home with a knife in his leg, but also really likes to read. What's she to make of all that? Or #3, where Logan goes looking for her father, and ends up fighting the guy before he realizes who he is. Then he gets to tell the man his daughter died. Darick Robertson's artwork helps a lot, because he shows Logan just standing there, shoulders slumped, looking sad, without a clue waht to do for this big guy who's crying in front of him*.
I especially like #6, the aftermath, where Logan asks Kurt to meet him at a bar, and Kurt tries to help Logan deal with the fact that he kind of flipped out and killed 27 people earlier that week (the aformentioned cultist/militia guys). Kurt wants to know whether they'd "earned" Logan's rage**, and explains if they were innocents he'd die trying to stop Wolverine. It's a somber issue, Logan trying his best to get drunk, trying to, I imagine, forget that he didn't save Lucy, and all he could do was kill the people who'd killed her. Not much consolation at all. And neither was much of what Kurt had to say. When Logan tells him what the now dead men were up to, Kurt says he's described evil, and that evil begets evil, which Logan interprets to mean him. Kurt responds that he can't speak as to Logan's nature, because he's unique***, and he asks whether a wolf is evil when it culls sickness from the herd.
Well, that's one way to look at it, but Logan says he's not a wolf, not an animal. But he doesn't say it with a lot of conviction, and he looks really beaten down as they stand there in the rain. It's one of those illuminating moments where you remember a healing factor can't deal with all one's pain, and just because it sounds cool to be able to fight and kill, and never be stopped, it really isn't.
* Well, I'm sure Logan knows something he can do, but eviscerating people isn't going to help in the immediate present.
** And it's kind of interesting that Logan described himself as enraged to the bone, but he still recalls exactly how many men he killed. Maybe he made a point to count them after he cooled down, maybe some part of him remembers them by individual scent.
*** Which means Kurt can't speak to anyone's nature, besides his own, can he? Which is OK, I'm kind of a believer in the idea that no person can ever really understand another person.
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4 comments:
I actually rather liked Rucka's run, it was a bit different from the usual Wolverine story.
Jeeze, you make Wolverine sound almost interesting...
Rucka's Wolverine was interesting. I think I like it more in retrospect than I did at the time. It followed up on a very big, very superhero-y story line. So I think the move to "quieter" story's bugged me at the time.
The character development was the best part, mostly due to the fact that none of the people Wolverine ends up fighting are even remotely in his weight class.
I actually liked the early introduction of the ATF agent, if only to get a look at police investigation in a world where wolverine can walk in and kill 27 guys with knives out of his hands.
As readers we know what Wolverine can do, but to a local cop or ATF agent in the Marvel Universe walking into a Wolverine crime scene must be hell.
sallyp: I think I liked it too, but maybe for me, just a little can go a long way?
diamondrock: Well, you know what they say about how with the proper writer, any character can be interesting.
seangreyson: Even though I don't still have much of it, I think I like it more now than I did then. back then, I think I bought it out of reflex, as much as anything.
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