This week's other delayed X-book is Wolverine: Snikt! #5.  Given that it's been two months since issue #4 came out, I suppose another week's delay is hardly a major problem.

Snikt! has already cemented its place in the long list of mediocre Wolverine miniseries which will be completely forgotten by next Tuesday.  The purpose of the exercise seem to have been to let manga creator Tsutomu Nihei do a Wolverine story, as an end in itself. 

This was presumably part of Marvel's ongoing attempt to find some way to capitalise on the massive growth of the manga audience - a subject that I'm writing about in Monday's Article 10, so I'm not going to go on about it here.  Suffice to say that the audience for manga in the USA has massively expanded in the last year or so, but unfortunately for Marvel and the other American publishers, that audience isn't crossing over into other comics.  Books like Snikt! are presumably intended to achieve appeal to both the manga audience and the conventional superhero audience.  In this case, it fails dismally with the latter, and it's hard to imagine it doing any better with the former.

Snikt! suffers from a classic case of interchangeable protagonist syndrome.  In no way, shape or form is this a Wolverine story.  He gets yanked through time to a post-apocalyptic future which Nihei presumably finds more interesting to draw, and then fights some weird-looking aliens.  He wins, he goes home, the end.  So what?  It's not even a particularly interesting fight.  It's just a fight.

The selling points of this series begin and end with Nihei's art, but that's not a feature which translates all that well to the pamphlet format.  In keeping with the pacing that's standard in manga (because they have more pages to play with), this final issue is simply a bit fight scene.  With a whopping fifteen pages of action with zero or virtually zero dialogue, it's not exactly a hefty read for your $2.99.  Why does manga get away with this?  Because it comes in huge great slabs and doesn't try to charge three dollars for twenty-two pages.  You just can't do this stuff in serial format.  It's ridiculous.

Marvel's desire to appeal to the manga audience is entirely understandable.  But they need to do it properly - either go outright on manga and abandon this attempt to please the direct market as well, or go for a proper third-way median approach rather than attempting to do two incompatible formats and genres at the same time.  This sort of thing is never going to work.

Rating: D+

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