Marvel's sporadic dalliance with the 1970s Giant-Size formula continues with this week's Giant-Size Wolverine #1.

This is a downright weird package.  It features an original story by David Lapham and David Aja which clocks in at 34 pages - unusually substantial for the recent Giant-Size books, which have generally thrown thrown in merely token efforts.  This looks more like something that was originally commissioned for an annual.  In a curious choice, it's been paired with reprints of two X-Men stories from 1992.

Let's start with the original story.  Marvel are billing this as a Hallowe'en story, so naturally they shipped it in the first week of October rather than the last.  Hey, right month.

Basically, it's a moody horror story.  After a random fight with a HYDRA robot, Wolverine ends up in Waverly, North Dakota.  He's taken in by a young girl with a very weird, outcast family - mum, it seems, is either dead or a literal monster in the basement.  Unfortunately, Wolverine's arrival draws the attention of paranoid locals and HYDRA soldiers, and disaster ensues.

There's one strong idea in this story, which is the transformation of the unfortunate Mrs Buchman.  It's a good visceral concept, nicely realised by David Aja's art.  And the whole story has a suitably creepy air.

But beyond that, it's not that great.  Frankly, beneath the impeccable style, there isn't much substance.  Only Leelee, the daughter, remotely resembles a rounded character, and she's still a "wise beyond her years" cliche.  Everyone else is pretty much one dimensional, and Wolverine is used in a totally generic way.  HYDRA, the notional villains, are similarly generic - they seem to have been selected solely because they've fought Wolverine relatively recently.  But that was in "Enemy of the State", a ludicrously over the top action story which is surely the last thing this book should be trying to remind me of.

None of this makes it a bad book, as such.  But it's a rather average, lightweight story dolled up with a lot of atmospherics.  It's okay for what it is, but nothing especially memorable.

For some reason, Marvel have chosen to fill out the book with reprints of X-Men #6-7.  It's hard to see why these were chosen, except perhaps because they feature Omega Red, and he's currently being used in Wolverine: Origins. 

These stories come from the short-lived Jim Lee run, when he was writing and pencilling the book.  The art is much what you'd expect from Lee in the early nineties - it couldn't be further away from the tone of the lead story.  The story, unfortunately, is also much what you'd expect from Lee in the early nineties.  It's trying far too hard, and it's just hopelessly cluttered.

The only obvious reason for reprinting these stories is that they feature the debut of Omega Red, who's currently appearing in Wolverine: Origins.  Except they don't - Omega Red debuted in the previous issue.  Yes, Marvel have inexplicably chosen to reprint the final two thirds of a three-part story, without any attempt to recap part one.  They've removed the original story titles (er, why?), but they've left in a whole load of subplot pages setting up the next storyline which could quite happily have been cut.  It all looks like it's been thrown together haphazardly.

The lead story is okay - it has style, if not much else. Packaged as a freestanding annual, I'd have given it a B. But the reprints make for a downright weird package; it's hard to imagine many readers really liking both these stories, let alone wanting to shell out five dollars for the set.  Especially when the reprinted story isn't even complete.

Rating: C

back | continue