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Wolverine: X-Isle is a five issue
weekly miniseries, a format that Marvel have been
experimenting with of late. The theory seems to be that
if you put them all out in the same month, retailers will
order more copies rather than quietly forgetting about the
last two issues.
It's written by Bruce Jones, who was also
responsible for Hulk/Wolverine: 6 Hours, not to mention
last month's weekly miniseries, Captain America: What Price
Glory?. Traditionally issue #1 would be the set-up,
but Jones takes a rather more oblique route. It's an
entire issue of Logan having a day out with his adoptive
daughter Amiko, leading up to a bizarre jump-cut at the end of
the issue which brings the story back full circle to its
beginning (a close-up of Howard Pyle's painting Marooned).
Amiko has always been a bizarre piece of
Wolverine's continuity - an adoptive daughter who turns up, if
she's very lucky, twice a decade. You'd have thought
that that would make their relationship rather strained - and
come to think of it, I'm sure there's an unresolved Larry Hama
subplot about her being brainwashed by the Hand to kill Logan.
Jones takes a slightly less obvious angle.
The idea seems to be that Logan's attempts
to play the father figure for Amiko only flag up how
dysfunctional he is in the context of normal society.
Shoved in a family role for which he's woefully underqualified,
Logan is left thoroughly depressed about his inability to
relate to the rest of the world. Hence the title.
I see what Jones is getting at, but I'm not
convinced it works. Logan and Amiko's relationship still
seems too convivial for characters who almost never meet.
And Logan's never exactly seemed short of friends.
Despite his many mental health issues, he's never had all that
much trouble socialising. Consequently, Jones' take on
the character slightly misses the mark. Jones also seems
to be playing his lead as a bit of an idiot.
There are a couple of interesting ideas in
here, but it suffers badly from being a character-driven issue
that doesn't quite get the character right.
Rating: C+
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