Wolverine/Captain America rounds up its weekly run.  God, it's bad.

This book has been in the pipeline for quite some time - note that the cover is signed and dated 2002.  It was originally supposed to be the first appearance of Rapture and the Contingency, who eventually turned up in a Weapon X one-shot instead.

One nice advantage for Marvel about shipping a four-issue series weekly is that retailers have to order the entire thing before seeing the first issue.  Now that the cut-off point for orders has been moved so close to shipping, you can't say that about most books any more.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that Marvel shelved this thing for two years, and then dumped it on the market in weekly format, because they knew it was a total dog.  But it's certainly bad enough for that to be the explanation.  A mixture of bad pseudoscience, unresolved plots and utterly generic writing, this is just depressingly unimaginative.

The storyline about the Shi'ar chip - ie, the central plot - is never properly resolved.  There's some grumbling about dodgy SHIELD schemes which has been done much better before and leads to Captain America threatening to bring the project down - on the last page, which is ludicrous, because if there's any justice in the world, we certainly won't be getting a follow-up.  Basically, writer RA Jones has produced the first act of what seems to be a planned longer storyline.  I sincerely hope never to see the remainder.

While Wolverine/Captain America is not as immediately and grippingly dreadful as some comics I could mention, it is in its way equally bad.  This sort of junk was ten a penny in the mid-nineties, and there's a damn good reason why it was all swept into the ocean.

The best to be said for this series is that, if you really want an old-school superhero story about Wolverine, at least you can get that here.  But it's a dreary, generic one.  If this is the sort of story you're looking for, you should be demanding to see it done properly.

Rating: D

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