After last month's atrocity, Wolverine gets back on track with a double-sized fill-in issue by Jason Aaron and Howard Chaykin.  It's amazing what you can do by changing the entire creative team.

Chaykin is sticking around.  He's going to draw the next storyline, written by Marc Guggenheim.  And it turns out that Chaykin is a good match for the character.  He's working in a basically realistic, rough-around-the-edges style which can accommodate blatant nonsense while somehow remaining grounded.   For much of this issue, he's required to draw a man shooting Wolverine repeatedly with a stupidly enormous gun, which could easily come across as utterly ridiculous.  But Chaykin makes it work. 

And his Wolverine, splattered with random ink spots and haywire body hair, works perfectly in this context.  Surrounded by clean, angular figures, he looks like he's not quite in the same story as everyone else.  He's a scratchy, chaotic presence in a mundane, regimented world.  That's great for the character.

Jason Aaron has been writing great stories for Vertigo lately, and he brings some of that style to Wolverine.  Like many fill-in writers, since he can't take Wolverine anywhere in particular, he's written a story about a throwaway character who happens to meet the hero.  That's a standard device which has been around for years.  But this is an offbeat one.

Wendell is a prison guard, working for unnamed bad guys.  (Actually, a two-page epilogue says that it's Romulus, but I choose to ignore that, because the name sucks the life from the page, and it makes no difference to the story itself.)  He's one of the shift workers whose job is to guard Wolverine, who got captured somewhere before the story began.  Most villains would just lock Wolverine in a cell.  These ones have taken a different tack - they've thrown him in a pit, and Wendell's job is to shoot him repeatedly with a rail gun.

This is so over the top that it really shouldn't work, but Aaron neatly writes a deadpan story about two characters stuck together in an utterly ludicrous situation.  Wendell's marriage has recently broken down, and the guy in the pit just won't stop trying to discuss it with him.  Basically, it's a reverse Stockholm Syndrome story, as Wolverine steadily gets under the guy's skin and destroys him just by talking to him.

It's a great Wolverine story.  This is how you make the character work - he gets a ton of abuse hurled at him, he gets through it because he's ridiculously hard, and he ultimately wins because he's cleverer and sneakier than the other guys.  He's the hero.  It's simple.  Why can't we have more Wolverine stories like this?  Stories that play to the character's strengths and make him cool, instead of tedious lectures in continuity revision?  This is in a different league from pretty much every other Wolverine story that's been published in 2007, simply because it has its head screwed on right.

Aaron and Chaykin know what makes Wolverine work, and they just do it.  They deserve kudos, as well, for being audacious enough to take a potentially absurd set-up and committing to it until it makes sense.  I could happily lose the closing epilogue, but fortunately you can ignore that with impunity.  Otherwise, this is great.  This is how you do it.

Rating: A+

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