And now, on to the Parade of Depression.

Spider-Man / Wolverine #4 concludes the Marvel Knights miniseries, and removes any lingering doubts that the series was utterly pointless.

The plot turns out to be "renegade mad scientist who hates superheroes plans to sell bootleg version of Wolverine's healing factor."  Thus, our heroes must stop him.  What does this have to do with Wolverine?  Nothing, besides the convenience of his powers for the plot.  What does it have to do with Spider-Man?  Nothing.  At all.

The comic would like to be an inconsequential lighthearted romp - it even does that old Silver Age team-up standby, the costume swap.  But it lacks the lightness of touch to get away with that approach.  With its convoluted yet dull plot about corrupt black ops organisations (and gee, we've never seen that one before), it ends up grim and empty.  Dreadful plotting holes only serve to make matters worse - if you want to do brainless action stories, fine, but the audience needs to be swept up in the flow so that they'll miss the obvious problems.  Why exactly does Nick Fury drug Wolverine to remove his healing factor immediately before sending him on a mission?  It makes no sense.

The framing sequence turns out to be an elaborate set-up for a mindnumbingly awful gag, as the mysterious interrogator is actually Aunt May talking over the kitchen table.  This is a gag which doesn't work in comics.  It would have worked in prose, or confined to narrative captions.  But in this case, the big reveal involves essentially conceding that all the previous panels were drawn with completely the wrong backgrounds and lighting.  It's a cheat.  More to the point, it's a blatant cheat unredeemed by any degree of cleverness.

The selling point of this miniseries, presumably, is meant to be Vatche Mavlian's art.  Certainly Mavlian's work is often attractive, but if they were looking for a vehicle to show off his talents, this wasn't it.  Mavlian's sketchy, wispy work does not look at home on action sequences.  Frankly, if you were tailoring a comic to his strengths (rather than his interests), it would probably be something along the lines of the Flower Fairies.  Seriously, he'd be very good at that.  He'd probably do a decent storyline in Fables or something.  But he is not an artist for big dumb action stories.

A dreadful miniseries.  Avoid the trade paperback like the plague.

Rating: D+

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