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Storm 2 (May 2006)

Eric Jerome Dickey/David Yardin

We don't exactly learn more in this issue about the death of Storm's parents than we did when it was first revealed, in the outstanding flashback sequence of X-Men 102, but I think the way it's positioned here, in 2006, as against then in 1976 is kind of interesting.

The 1976 story is rooted in a very specific piece of history, and is explained that way. That doesn't change here - we can see that it's the same incident, but the written framing doesn't identify the time or place, and you realise now reading it that this is extremely a 2006 comic, and that this whole incident has been reframed by the War on Terror.

This is one of those cases where the so-called "sliding timeline" of the Marvel universe works beautifully, to create a moment that's both rooted in canon and organically relevant to the story as it's being told. Although, that relevance comes from the fact that the Middle East has been being continuously bombed by the West for 80 years, so, yeah.

That said, it is of course still key that this happens in Egypt - and not, say, Iraq, or Palestine - because that makes it still an African story (arbitrary as that distinction is in some ways, yadda yadda - you know what I mean). The rest of this issue, and of this series, returns to a much vaguer and less interesting depiction of sub-Saharan Africa, but it seemed worth picking up on the early pages of this issue and what they do with their setting and their era.

The politics of the rest of this issue are...less subtle, but actually I quite like how hard it keeps hitting us over the head with this stuff, because, sure, why not.

I said last time that the baddies aren't very interesting, and they're not, they're disposable pieces for the story: but the sheer joy the writing takes in making them totally hateable is quite fun.

What still isn't very interesting is the plot, which I'm not recapping in much detail, but know that by the end of this issue, the man of the hour has shown up.

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Storm 1 (April 2006)

Eric Jerome Dickey/David Yardin

In 2006, in the then-present of the Marvel timeline, Ororo "Storm" Monroe and T'Challa "Black Panther" got married, and Storm became queen of Wakanda. I believe they ultimately broke up - presumably for some suitably insane comics-y reason, like Ororo had actually been Doctor Doom during the wedding or some shit - but obviously the romantic relationship between the two biggest Black characters in comics has always been a big deal, and the moment of their actual marriage an even bigger deal, referred to by Marvel at times as "the Weddine of the Century" - a tagline that they then re-used a few years ago for a different X-Men wedding, despite the fact that we are still very much in the same century as 2006.

All of which is by way of explaining why, in 2006, Marvel also published a six-part prequel series exploring how Ororo and T'Challa first met, decades before their wedding, when they were teenagers, which in turn is why we're reading that now. Everyone loves Storm, and T'Challa is cool too, but truthfully this series is kind of cringe. It's got a lot of..."African" stuff.

To be clear, the writer here, Eric Jerome Dickey, is Black: he's African-American, just as Storm's mother was and Storm sort of is, and the tension between that identity and an African one is a theme here, and feels quite well done, but the African detail in general tends to feel a bit thin.

That extends also to the villains, your generic white poacher/mercenary/big game hunter dudes: Storm steals from them at random, setting up the chain of events where they realise her powers and come looking for her which forms the spine of the series' plot.

It's...not a great plot, truthfully, and I won't recount it in much detail as we read these, but there's some interesting stuff to be said. And at least it's not about Wolverine!

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First X-Men 5 (March 2013)

Neal Adams & Christos Gage/Neal Adams

This sucked, and now it's over. Thank god. It ends on all sorts of smart-assed moments like this one, but why bother.

I really wonder how this all came about. Did Marvel offer Neal Adams a bunch of cash, as a big name? Was he really keen to do this but hadn't actually read an X-Men comic for decades? It feels, honestly, like both. Also, I was looking forward to reading a non-Wolverine comic and this was fully just another Wolverine comic. But next up, I promise, is a genuinely non-Wolverine comic. I think.

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First X-Men 4 (December 2012)

Neal Adams & Christos Gage/Neal Adams

At this point, Neal Adams has introduced seven brand new mutant team members to this series, which is ostensibly a prequel series about established characters and which ends next issue (thank god).

Are they even good characters, I hear you ask? Good god, no.

The Sentinels show up in this one, and Wolverine invents the fastball special. Boo, hiss.

Please! Yes! I fucking hope so!

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First X-Men 3 (December 2012)

Neal Adams & Christos Gage/Neal Adams

I've complained at length now about how this is a bad story - ill-fitting to the characters, confusingly constructed, unnecessary - with bad art that lets down Neal Adams' legacy. The very first panel of this issue recapitalutes all those problems.

That "crazy super-strong hobo" is Namor, currently without his memories, who Logan has decided should join him, but instead they fight and three pages later Logan gives up on the whole idea, and Namor never appears in the series again. Meanwhile look at this fucking art! Who is the fucking guy diving in from the right? How does his position and perspective fit in with any of the rest of this? Has he been photoshopped in? Does any of this matter? No. I know what you're really asking though - does Sabretooth get laid?

Rest easy, pals. Indeed he does.

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First X-Men 2 (November 2012)

Neal Adams & Christos Gage/Neal Adams

Neal Adams, baby, I'm sorry, but, in the forty years since we last read your work - his very late 60s work on the X-Men before the cancellation of their first run - what the fuck happened?

Neal Adams, formerly the maestro of strange layouts, extreme facial expressions, offbeat colouring, powerful left-field art effects, drew this whole series. How? I mean I get that he got old - lots of artists get old and they lose the clarity of their line, that kind of thing, but this completely pedestrian, anonymous comic was allegedly drawn by one of the most revolutionary comics artists of all time? How did this happen?

The book that First X-Men powerfully reminds me of is X-Men: The Hidden Years, where another artist legend of the 60s/70s - John Byrne - returned to fill in some gaps in their history (gaps that didn't need filling) and also produced a completely anonymous, uninspired run of artwork. These two books are also similar in that Byrne and Adams also were given writing and plotting duties, and they didn't do a great job.

That gag, admittedly, made me laugh. That was great. The rest of this is a baffling mess that introduces a wave of new characters - three in this issue alone, and no I can't be bothered to tell you about them - in what's meant to be a prequel comic about established figures, while giving us little or no insight into those figures. Victor Creed - Sabertooth - is here the whole time as an ally of Wolverine's and nobody seems to find this remarkable or interesting. Wolverine, notoriously a loner and an enigma, travels around making friends with every mutant he meets, trying to band them together for a great ideological cause. Magneto bails on all this and I wish i could too.

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First X-Men 1 (October 2012)

Neal Adams & Christos Gage/Neal Adams

Yo, remember Neal Adams? Well what if...he sucked?

Ok, so. In 2012, Marvel published a five-issue series called First X-Men, set a few years before the 1963 debut of the X-Men, and dedicated to exploring what was going on with a few crucial X-Men characters in that period, putting the pieces on the board before the curtain went up. At least, that was the idea.

What they got instead was...another fucking Wolverine story, basically, in which Wolverine puts together a sort of proto-Xmen team, heavily featuring a not-yet-altogether-evil Sabertooth. This was a bizarre decision because, as you surely recall, the 1963 debut of the X-Men doesn't feature fucking Wolverine! It features, you know, Xavier and Magneto. Who, don't worry, get to appear in this issue. Xavier, specifically, appears as a student at Oxford, refusing to join Wolverine.

And Magneto appears on the very last page being, to be fair, extremely fucking cool, as usual.

So, fine, I have my quibbles with this plot, and also with having to read yet another Wolverine story. Actually though the thing that makes me mad about this book isn't that, it's the art. But we'll talk about that next time.

[keepsmagnetoaway]

Thank you so much for reviewing all of the non-essential Wolverine comics. You're doing the Lord's work! I feel like as a Wolverine-fan that there's just so much Wolverine comics and yet there's an issue with quantity competing with quality especially in the late 90s onwards. I appreciate your perspective and the moments where you do find something of interest in these many, many pages.

Thankyou so much! I really love hearing from people who've enjoyed anything about this ridiculous project. A lot of the Wolverine prequel stuff was absolute garbage but this is sort of one of those things were the garbage is sometimes as fun to read and write about as the good stuff, you know? I'm into the next era now (as in, I'm reading it now, though the posts aren't up yet) and trying to decide if I should read some optional Wolverine stuff there too, so I'll take this as one vote in favour of me doing so, and others should let me know their thoughts too!

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Logan: Shadow Society (February 1997)

Howard Mackie/Tomm Coker

Another day, another deeply non-essential Wolverine story. This is a full graphic novel first published as such and written by Howard Mackie, just like Logan: Path of the Warlord that we read the other day. It suffers from much the same issues as that one did: a muddled and overlong story and a total absence of Wolverine claws. The "new" element here is Carol Danvers.

Carol and Logan have long had an implied backstory that isn't explored much, although we looked into it a bit with the (bad) series that also involved Ben Grimm. This is another go at that, I guess: implicitly it's set in the 50s but it very much feels like an X-Files comic rather than an X-Men one. Also, check out these glasses.

And this is an Indiana Jones gag, I guess? This whole book is smugly full of cutesy references.

Also, relentless gags about Wolverine's Canadianness.

And a cameo by a kid Angel, being taken to the Hellfire Club by his dad.

And and and and and. None of this really adds up to anything, and much of it is deeply confusing. Sabertooth shows up at the end, but this is before he and Logan have actually met, I'm pretty sure (you may recall Sabertooth's debut in Iron Fist, of all places): but they act like they're old foes.

And then it ends on another incredibly pleased with itself note. Unclear what the point of any of this was. But good news, we're finally going to move onto something that isn't about Wolverine!

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Wolverine: Agent of Atlas (January 2009)

Jeff Parker/Benton Jew

Welcome back to my tumblr, All Gorilla Man All The Time. But sadly, no, we now have to say farewell to Gorilla Man. We hardly knew ye, because these three issues totalled 15 pages and, to be honest, kind of sucked.

In this one, Wolverine fully kills a dude and then peaces out, unwilling to be anything but the hairiest member of a team, unable to stand the sheer magnificence of Gorilla Man.

Oh also brain-eating bugs are controlling Fidel Castro. Someone go read Agents of Atlas and tell me if it's any good.

I wonder if Gorilla Man appears in any other X-Men comics. God, I hope so.

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Wolverine: Agent of Atlas 2 (January 2009)

Jeff Parker/Benton Jew

This is actually a (three-part) series of five-page mini-comics. This sure makes me life easier, but actually this is also kind of a fun one for me - and literally just me - because, as noted before, these issues feature the beloved, legendary, world-famous Gorilla Man, previously seen way back in X-Men: First Class. The reason he shows up both here and there is that they're by the same author, Jeff Parker, who fucking loves Gorilla Man.

This comic, indeed, was a digital-only mini-prequel that lead in to a full Agents of Atlas series that Parker was writing, using a bunch of neglected 1950s Marvel heroes including, yes, Gorilla Man. That series doesn't feature Wolverine or any other X-Men, and we're not reading it: this little prequel clearly includes Wolverine in an attempt to grab interest with a big name. The series as a whole never took off, getting rebooted a couple of times after brief runs but never lasting more than a few issues. Probably didn't have enough Gorilla Man in it.

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Wolverine: Agent of Atlas 1 (December 2008)

Jeff Parker/Benton Jew

Sometimes for this project you try and cram an entire graphic novel into one post, and then sometimes you read a five-page digital exclusive comic. Some days are easier than others.

Explaining what any of this is about is basically pointless so instead I'll say this: hey, look! It's Gorilla Man! I love that guy!

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Logan: Path of the Warlord (February 1996)

Howard Mackie/John Paul Leon

More Wolverine, more Japan. Logan: Path of the Warlord is a full standalone graphic novel set sometime in the 50s with Logan running around Japan fighting supernatural gangsters.

Occasionally for this project I end up reading full graphic novels but it doesn't really work very well given the scope. Happily this one is basically bad and I don't feel bad about not bothering to go into details: it also has essentially no bearing on any wider story arc.

What is enjoyable here is some of the art, specifically the bits linked to one story strand involving a kind of shadow realm where some of the gangsters operate. It's not worth explaining but the weird 50s magical technology necessary to get there is beautifully done by John Paul Leon, who I enjoyed so much in The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix: I think his stuff is less good in this book but still scratchily enjoyable. The shadow world itself seems to "Istanbul, but make it hot pink", which I am obviously into.

What's weird about this story - really weird - is that Logan at no point uses his claws. It's as if whoever wrote it got mixed up about the timeline and believed this was set before Wolverine got claws. As we know, he has had claws basically his whole life, but maybe the canon on this was less clear when this was written? Anyway, it's very distracting and strange.

The back cover suggests this really is set before he had anything going for him at all - although he does have the healing factor - so, yeah, idk. Weird one

Also lmao at that typeface. I haven't gone on about the orientalising in this one, but, trust me, it's still there. Getting reeeeeal tired of Wolverine stuff now.

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Logan 3 (July 2008)

Brian K Vaughan/Eduardo Risso

The end of this brief and disappointing series. This one's mostly present day, actually, as Wolverine returns to kill the unkillable burning ghost of the bad guy, who was obliterated by the bomb but couldn't actually die. The visual is cool, we have to admit that.

But for every page like that we get one like this, technically bad and kind of gross.

I wanted to like this, but in the end it's just another senseless bit of Orientalising. I don't get Wolverine's Japan thing, but at least when it first shows up early in Claremont's run it's kind of surprising, a suggestion of hidden depths. After it's been used this often it's just not very interesting to see yet another Western artist use a few vaguely Japanese motifs to tell another clunking story.

Next up: guess what, it's more Wolverine!

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Logan 2 (June 2008)

Brian K Vaughan/Eduardo Risso

I didn't really bother to recap anything that happened in the first issue of this, but helpfully the first page of issue 2 does the job for me.

This was obvious meant to be a very prestigey series, with big names and fancy-pants art, and to be fair some of the art is really lovely. Risso goes in that category with Mignola and John Paul Leon of dark, chunky, expressionist forms that I really like.

On the other hand, I have to be honest: some of his art is technically terrible.

Fucking jumpscare, that is. That's Atsuko, and she's what's basically wrong with this series. Guess what, she's a silent, demure but secretly badass Japanese maiden who's also abused by the other characters and who remains extremely sexually available to Logan, and who then conveniently dies! This is so original!

This suuuuuuucks. Then he kills her and Logan fights him about it, and then this happens.

I get that this is trying to be all Serious About World Events but actually, sorry, Wolverine happening to be in the exact right place at the exact right time to get nuked the first time it happened is just silly.

Fine, that's a good last page. Doesn't make up for the rest of it, though.

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Logan 1 (May 2008)

Brian K Vaughan/Eduardo Risso

When I began this Era 0 section of the read I was aware that I would mostly be reading Wolverine, but I don't think I realised quite how much Wolverine. Here is some more Wolverine.

This is Logan, a 2008 three-issue series by Brian K Vaughan and Eduardo Risso, both of whom were (and are) huge names: at the time Risso was in the process of finishing up drawing the title that made him famous, 100 Bullets, and Vaughan was coming off writing Y: The Last Man, which was the title that made him not just famous but a megastar. Both of those were original titles not set in any wider universe, but apparently they were then both lured back to Marvel for this, in which modern-day Wolverine returns to Japan to settle some unfinished business from the Second World War.

The story is mostly told in flashback to 1945, which is why we're reading this now. And the unfinished business is...well, there's no good way to say this, but it's the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Thanks to this series, Wolverine was canonically present when Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Y'all, they got Brian K Vaughan back for this.

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Wolverine 1000 (April 2011)

Various

Couple of programming notes up top: firstly, my reading order suggested that I read a comic called X-Men: True Friends at this point, but looking into it, it's in essence a comic that belongs to the whole Excalibur/Captain Britain spin-off world (which I have not been reading). It's also absolutely terrible and features Queen Elizabeth II as a child, but that's not reason enough for me to do a bunch of posts about it. Similarly the reading order proposes imminently reading a bunch of Namor stuff but I have also been skipping his whole...thing (I should probably add something to my pinned post about the stuff I don't consider to be X-Men comics and am not reading, huh), so, instead, it's endless Wolverine prequels, like with today's gimmickily titled Wolverine 1000, which collects half a dozen short and disparate Logan stories.

Two of them are set during the Second World War - which is what puts this book here in our reading chronology - and two of them are about werewolves, but there's no overarching theme. The first once has - as you can see above - some quite nice art but with a distractlingly complex way of drawing textures and backgrounds with cross-hatching of many different kinds. It has occult Nazis - always fun - and an early reference to the super-soldier "Weapon Plus" program that would eventually give rise to the Weapon X experiments on Wolverine (here he has the bone claws and the healing but not the adamantium), but my favourite thing about it is this Nazi woman calling him "bestie".

The second story is also about werewolves and is seared into my mind via Rafa Garres art, which I almost want to like but ultimately totally hate. This is probably a bigger discussion for another time but locating just the right amount of stylization in comics are is basically the whole conundrum, right? And Mr Garres has done something that's certainly interesting but is also practically impossible to look at.

What are the spatial relationships of any of these people to each other? How do their bodies work? Why has the art been dipped in tea? Every page is like this.

In amongst these bizarre distortions is a pretty unpleasant plotline about "Miss Jailbait" (charming) and some werewolves, but it's in places literally impossible to follow.

That leaves three much briefer stories, two of them light-hearted (one about a teenager meeting her idol, Wolverine, and another about Logan being used as an action movie star by some aliens) which are both fine, and one deeply dull and very short one where he kills some non-supernatural Nazis.

This is all very whatever and at the end of the day none of us have learned anything about Logan or anything, but sometimes it's fun to read these compilations of a bunch of different styles and ideas. I just hope I don't have to read a Rafa Garres comic again.