Wolverine: Origins is getting better.  The title's first arc, and the lead-in storyline from Wolverine, were little short of excruciating.  Nothing happened for long stretches, and when it did, it was dull.

"Savior" is an improvement.  Things actually happen, and some of them are mildly entertaining.  Since the book's most glaring weakness was its terrible pacing, this is a big step forward.  This is not to say that the pacing has suddenly become good - frankly, it's a somewhat scattershot collection of action sequences and extended flashbacks.  But at least it's not astoundingly boring any more.

Now that things are happening, we can move on to the next question: are they worthwhile things?  Well, in bits, yes.  There are some legitimately entertaining moments scattered throughout this arc, and some reasonably decent fight scenes.  But they're still just moments, and overall, the point of the whole exercise still eludes me.

In theory, this is a story delving into the mystery of Wolverine's past.  But there is no mystery, because all the relevant bits were explored into the ground over the previous fifteen years.  The notion that Wolverine is a man of mystery is, plainly and simply, at least a decade out of date.  Any last vestiges of uncertainty were laid to rest by the imaginatively-titled origin miniseries, Origin.

So in order to have a story, Way finds that he has to invent a mystery that wasn't there before: specifically, who were the conspirators that Wolverine worked for when he was a secret agent?  Somewhat remarkably, we're told that Wolverine himself didn't know even at the time.  This isn't very interesting.  It's not really a mystery about Wolverine, it's a mystery about the identity of his employers.  It doesn't really shed any light on the lead character.  And the conspirators aren't very interesting in their own right either - on the contrary, they're a generic, wheels-within-wheel conspiracy of the sort that we've all seen a thousand times before.  It's understandable that Wolverine might want to go after them and hunt them down - the idea is that this is unfinished business that was wiped from his memory by the Weapon X project - but it's simply not very original or compelling.

And then there's the subplot about Wolverine's son, who shows up at the end of this story (in shadow, naturally) and turns out to be pretty much Wolverine Jr.  Again, the existence of this character comes across as simply an off-the-peg Shocking Revelation rather than a truly interesting story.  And he has an awful mohawk hairdo, from the look of it, which suggests that a truly embarrassing character design may be in the offing.

For all that the story insists on telling us that Wolverine finds this terribly emotional, I simply can't take it seriously.  It reads as though somebody decided to do a "Wolverine's shocking past" series because they didn't know it had all been resolved, and ended up desperately trying to shoehorn even more "mystery" into the character's history.  It just feels contrived.  I have no idea what this story is actually meant to be about - in the sense of its themes or any real emotional content - and I've been reading it for over a year now.  It just comes across as a clever-clever logic puzzle where it drops hints about a big revelation, and I can't be bothered solving them.

It's better than it was before, but it's still fundamentally lacking.  The book feels entirely hollow.

Rating: C

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