Marvel Comics Presents #1-#10: Wolverine

Marvel Comics Presents was a biweekly anthology series launched by Marvel in 1988. Each issue had 4 8-page stories. It debuted with stories featuring Man-Thing, Shang Chi, Silver Surfer, and Wolverine. Wolverine's first story was to last ten issues. They are collected together. I cannot tell you how many times I read that Wolverine has adamantium claws and a near-magical healing factor in the couple of hours of my life I spent reading it. Actually, that's a lie. I can take a very good guess. 10.

Wolverine's had that four-issue limited series before, and he co-headlined Kitty Pryde & Wolverine. Now Chris Claremont with John Buscema write a new solo series, in preparation for Wolverine's first ongoing, which they'll do together. Those earlier series had taken Wolverine outside of the superhero context and focused on Logan's adventures in Japan.

The story in MCP #1-#10, "Save the Tiger", sees Wolverine in another environment: Madripoor - a city of sharp contrasts in wealth where money can buy you anything... and he gets involved with a woman and in a tangled web of gangland struggles.

This is needlessly derivative stuff. We don't find anything new out about Logan - other than that he's been to Madripoor in his pre-history. He is perfectly at home in this murky world, and that makes it kind of pointless. Who wants to read about a man in his depth, after all? And yet. It helps that it's quite fun : there's an almost Liefieldian villain called Razor Fist (not new here), who has, well, razors for fists. And it's probably rather more engaging when read in 10 servings over the course of 4 months than it was in a dreary London evening: it takes real adavantage of the hyper-serialised form with cliffhangers and twists galore. Knowing that Jeesan Hoan from Uncanny #229 = Tyger Tiger = the gangland boss, I barely even noticed that this would have been quite a surprise, which can't have helped it...