Marvel Comics Presents #72-#84: Weapon X

By 1991, Marvel Comics Presents had been headlined by Wolverine Team-Up stories for ages.  The story that starts in #72, by Barry Windsor-Smith (I think he's the first person to auter the X-Men) is a rather different take.  It is the story of How The Wolverine Got His Claws, finally.

Although this is a highly-serialised story (twelve parts), the trade paperback collection I am reading does not indicate the gaps.  Structurally these group into four bits.  There is a prologue, with Logan having been sacked from the Canadian army; he then gets used as a prop in a story in an unethical medical experiment.  About half-way through, Logan escapes.  Rather than the story following him, it becomes a slasher, instead, as our characters (Hines, the Professor, and Doctor Cornelius) are hunted down and killed; Logan then escapes.  And finally, it's revealed that some of that was a simulation.  Logan was loosed rather than escaping, and the trio are alive.

The beats were familiar, but some of the details of this story were surprising to me.  We know that at this stage Wolverine's claws have no bone substrate, but the idea that they just sort of happened because of excess adamantium, and the housings designed to stop him hurting himself (or rather to stop him healing after them popping) is a bit silly.  Given the lack of artifice in creating them, having them be coatings of bone claws make more sense!  Further, the idea that the staff of Weapon X didn't know that Logan was a mutant also is a bit odd. But... presumably the shadowy figure that the Professor reports to does know that?

Much of this story is lies, of course.  Apart from the bits it itself admits to (the escape), we know from later material that very little of this will stand. But that doesn't matter a bit.  It's moody, it's tense, it's pacy, it's violent, it sets the stage for more Wolverine material and a thousand other inferior 1990s imitators.

This is not really Wolverine's origin story.  It's not even pretending to be.  What his birth name is, and what his childhood like isn't Wolverine's origin story, either.  What led him to the state where he doesn't know if he has a mother, that matters.  Why Sabretooth has a grudge against him, that matters.  It'll be a while yet before we get to those, it's telling that those were left till last - it's not because they were least interesting, but because you could tell other stories revealing apparently quite profound bits of Logan's life while still retaining the Man of Mystery element.

But, as I say, that's later.  Much later.  If I ever get to it.  For now, I want to know, what effect is this going to have on the Wolverine of 1991?

Marvel Comics Presents #38-#50

Marvel Comics Presents ran a Wolverine feature from issues #38 to #47, named "Black Shadow, White Shadow". This was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by John Buscema. It offers a fairly simple story about monochromatic monsters that turn out to be manifestations of some guy's mind, and emphasises the idea of Wolverine as a someone who is by temperament a family man, but has been prevented from such from fate and his own decisions. I like how Logan starts wearing the Wolverine costume half-way through, and people call him "Patch" (with scare quotes, in dialogue).

#48-#50 runs another story, "Life's End", by Erik Larsen. This is one of the first Wolverine/Spider-Man team-up stories (the first was I believe Marvel Team-Up #117 from 1982). It's a combination that will later form (with Luke Cage) the core of the New Avengers, and I kind of like their chemistry here. The comedy aspect might be a bit too much for some, though: the story is a fairly simple team up to defeat a villain, but with added fourth-wall breaking. In particular: Spider-Man has become aware of how amazingly improbable his life is, and how all his supervillains turn out to be people that Peter Parker happens to know, even though so far as he knows his secret ID is solid. What gives? Having set this up, it then delivers a payoff by having one of the minions of Critical Mass be... Peter Parker's... dentist. Hah. Well-played, Mr. Larsen. Well-played.

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...