Oh god, another Wolverine miniseries.  I wish I was dead.

This is a fairly accurate representation of my feelings every time Marvel greet me with yet another shameless attempt to wring Wolverine dry.  If you think I'm being unfair, just look at the shit they've put out since the year 2000.  Since cover date January 2000, Wolverine has appeared in Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk, What If: Wolverine, Wolverine: Soultaker, Witchblade/Wolverine, Wolverine/Punisher, Wolverine/ Captain America, Wolverine: The End, Spider-Man & Wolverine, Wolverine: Snikt!, Wolverine/Doop, Wolverine: X-Isle, Hulk/Wolverine: Six Hours, Wolverine: Netsuke, Wolverine/Hulk, Elektra/ Wolverine: The Redeemers, Origin, Iron Fist/Wolverine and Before the Fantastic Four: Ben Grimm & Logan. 

That's nineteen side projects already this decade.  It's a depressing list.  Perhaps three or four are genuinely good, if you're being generous.  A couple more could be described as interesting failures.  The rest is just a dismal parade of dross.  Quality noticeably fell off a cliff around the turn of the millennium - in the late nineties, a gratuitous Wolverine side project meant something like Wolverine: Black Rio, which isn't fantastic, but it's still in a different league to most of the books listed above.

Claws is yet another Wolverine miniseries, and it will be right at home in the list above.  Written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and drawn by Joe Linsner, it's an "odd couple" story.  A bunch of eccentric rich people have Wolverine and the Black Cat kidnapped, and then hunt them down on an island.  And that's basically it.

This is a hackneyed old plot which would have looked tired thirty years ago.  A good writer can still wring something out of it - Dan Slott did it with the Thing about six months ago, and it was decent enough.  But this is just an efficient trudge through the motions.  The writers seem to have in mind that the whole thing will be driven by witty banter, which might work if any of it was funny.

It's technically okay, I suppose.  There's nothing outright horrible about it.  Joe Linsner gets the action across quite well, and I wouldn't mind seeing him on something with a bit more substance to it.  But it's just so dull and obvious and lazy, and it makes me lose the will to live.  Who on earth seriously thinks we need the twentieth Wolverine side project of the decade, just to go through the motions of a stock plot?

A complete waste of time.  Shameless milking of the character aside, there is no good reason for this comic to exist, and plenty of reasons why it shouldn't.

Rating: C-

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