The Marvel Knights imprint makes one of its rare incursions into the X-books with Spider-Man / Wolverine.  By the way, if anyone has a clue what the point of the Marvel Knights imprint is these days, do let me know.  It used to be the ghetto for slightly edgy Marvel books, but now that 90% of the line is like that, the imprint seems totally redundant.  If the name doesn't stand for anything, why use it?

Brett Matthews and Vatche Mavlian produced a Spider-Man / Daredevil one-shot last year which I had mixed feelings about.  The art was fabulous, the characters were quite well captured, but the plot wasn't really up to much.

It's hard to know quite what to make of the plot in this issue.  It's a perfectly effective exercise in setting up mysteries and leaving us to wonder about them.  It's reasonably well done, but it does leave me wondering what any of this has got to do with Spider-Man.  It has the distinct ring of creators plugging a character into a generic slot because they like him, even though there's no particularly compelling reason for him to be there.  Perhaps the reasons for having him there will be more apparent once more of the plot is revealed.

As for Wolverine, he's really kept in the background this issue; this is more Spider-Man's story.  It's really too early to tell whether they've got much of a handle on him.  The story seems to involve Japanese villains taking revenge on Wolverine for something he did a while back, which seems like well-trodden territory to me.  Still, at least these Japanese villains don't seem to be martial arts experts, which is a change.

Mavlian has a rather unusual style - basically sound anatomy and realistic backgrounds, but all exaggerated just enough to give it a cartoon edge.  He seems to have developed a taste for a mixture of high detail and sketchiness which don't always sit easily together.  There's something about the details which feel a bit contrived, either over- or under-rendered.  It's still quite readable, but he seems to be trying too hard.

Too early to tell about this one, really.  It's not immediately objectionable, but it's not immediately gripping either.  I'm increasingly sceptical about miniseries after the avalanche of superfluous nonsense that's been inflicted on us recently - I know there's a movie out, but do we really need Wolverine to have an ongoing series and three minis at the same time?

Still, if this turns out to be pointless, though, at least it's going to be readable and quite pretty into the bargain.

Rating: B

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