Oh god, it's Wolverine: Origins.  I can just about summon up the interest to write about this series in a normal week.  With seven X-books, it's a bit of a struggle.

This is the final part of "Swift and Terrible", in which Wolverine interrogates Cyber about yet more vague secrets from his past.  You know the format by now; meandering action in the present day, and semi-cryptic flashbacks suggesting that Wolverine's entire history is part of some conspiracy or other.  The only vaguely interesting question still outstanding is who's behind the conspiracy, but Way is killing time rather than actually advancing that mystery in any meaningful way.

Way's angle on Cyber plays off the fact that he was one of Wolverine's military trainers.  The suggestion here is that he was responsible for programming Logan to act in the way his handlers wanted.  This is fine so far as it goes, but hardly as shocking and disturbing as Way seems to think it is.  There's something faintly quaint about an American, in 2007, writing a story in which a dastardly villain leads people to become torturers, and this is presented as somehow extraordinary and exceptional.

We're supposed to cheer for a closing twist in which Wolverine does indeed save Cyber's life as promised, but does so by saddling him with a radioactive pacemaker which will eventually kill him.  This would carry a bit more weight if Way himself hadn't arbitarily brought Cyber back from the dead at the start of the story.  So his new body dies.  So what?  He just possesses another one.  What's the big deal?

I've read worse stories in this series, but that's not saying a great deal.  Even though it's raised its game from the early issues, which were sheer torture, it's still a sluggish and uninspiring book.

Rating: C+

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