Wolverine / Doop also finishes this month, although it's really just two issues of X-Statix published under a different name.  There are two likely reasons for doing it that way.  One is that it gets Wolverine's name into the title, not that it seemed to make much difference to orders.  Retailers seem to have ordered this as if it was just another issue of X-Statix.

The other reason is that it's very different from X-Statix, and it lets Milligan do the story without disrupting the flow of that book quite so much.  From time to time, especially back on Shade, Milligan likes to produce elliptical stories which, quite consciously, don't entirely make sense.  Rather, they hint at sense from a discreet distance while remaining relentlessly odd.

Unfortunately, this one doesn't work.  It's a strange mix of deliberately artificial plotting - something it shares with X-Statix - with mock noir and surrealism.  As a story, it's a bit of a mess, which careers around for a while until it stops.  This one's sort of spiralled off into incoherency and meaninglessness.  That's part of the point, of course, it doesn't click.

In X-Statix, Milligan gets away with the artificiality of the plot and the deliberate playing up of plot devices because there's still a sense of overall coherency to the story.  Moreover, the characters maintain their believability in the midst of the contrivances.  Here, the plot is so relentlessly and shamelessly nuts that there's not much scope for any of the characters to make sense, and several (like villain Hunter Joe) are deliberately one-dimensional.  Frankly, it comes across as a rather soulless exercise in parlour games.

While X-Statix walks the tightrope skilfully, Wolverine/Doop leaps gamely off to the side, only to meet an ugly fate on the rocks below.  It's quite funny in parts, and artist Darwyn Cooke runs entertainingly with the lunacy.  But taken as a whole it doesn't add up to much.

Bit of a misfire, unfortunately.

Rating: C

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