On to the miniseries, and Wolverine: Soultaker.  It's the third Akira Yoshida miniseries currently underway, joining X4 and X-Men: Age of Apocalypse.  Because god knows the world needs six comics in a month from the writer of X4.

But credit where credit's due.  This is a considerable step up from either of those titles.  It's still a bit formulaic - Yukio calls in Wolverine to help after accidentally stealing a cursed artefact - but at least here the central premise is sound.  It gives us a workable plot for a straightforward Wolverine story.  And it provides Yoshida with the way in to the story he really wants to tell (from the looks of it, something about the back story of the artefact; Yoshida has mentioned in interviews that he wants to develop the Marvel Universe's historic Japan.)

It's not blow away stuff, but it's solid, and it's got attractive art from Jason Nagasawa, who knows how to put an action sequence together.  There's an interesting little vision at the end of the book where the art shifts into a more conventional sort of manga style, which is colourfully appealing. 

Perhaps more to the point, this book does give the impression that Yoshida actually has a story to tell - unlike X4 and Age of Apocalypse, which give the impression that Marvel wanted a miniseries and roped Yoshida in to write one.  And even if Yoshida does use some of the Japanese clichés, it's still nice to see Japan being written by somebody who doesn't regard it as a thrillingly exotic place full of people operating on plot-convenient codes of honour.

I have a nagging suspicion that at some point Wolverine's going to be kicked to the sidelines in favour of an extended flashback, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  Very readable, and really the first thing we've seen from Yoshida on the X-books that begins to make sense of the good reviews he got on Thor: Son of Asgard.

Rating: B+

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