Wolverine's monthly title is now effectively a series of miniseries, with completely different creative teams coming on for each arc, and largely ignoring what's gone before.  The latest contributors are writer Jason Aaron and artist Ron Garney, who are responsible for the book's "Divided We Stand" arc.

As we've come to expect when Wolverine participants in a crossover, this story is off on the margins somewhere.  Apparently, Mystique somehow escaped at the end of X-Men #207, which doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense, since as I understood it, her mind was absorbed by Rogue... but whatever.  It doesn't seem to have done her any harm, and as usual, neither the creators nor the editors seem to register that this might be in some way anomalous.

Wolverine goes after her, and that's basically our story.  It's Wolverine as hunter with Mystique on the run, and it's all intercut with flashbacks to their first meeting as friends back in the 1920s.

This is a strange comic.  Jason Aaron is best known for his work at Vertigo, but he wrote an excellent fill-in issue last year which suggested he was a good match for the series.  And for the most part he is; he's got the voice down perfectly, and his story is a tightly paced affair where the jokes work and the shocks pay off.  It's a simple premise: Wolverine hunts down the shapeshifter, and isn't quite sure which person is her.  Ron Garney is also at home on the book - he's a great artist for action stories, and Wolverine is precisely the sort of character who works in bold strokes.

And yet it feels a little off.  Obviously, a part of that is the fact that the story doesn't actually seem to fit with the "Messiah Complex" plot thread which it's supposed to be continuing.  But more fundamentally, Aaron is going for the idea that Wolverine is especially determined to get Mystique, and that he's implicitly as bad as she is.  So we've got him accidentally killing the wrong person after mistaking her for Mystique, which begs two questions: one, er, how?  And two, shouldn't he be a little more bothered about this?

In fairness, judging from Aaron's interviews, Wolverine's behaviour in the present-day sequences seems to be at least partly intentional.  So I'm open to the possibility that it'll make sense by the end of the story.  But for the moment, it just feels a bit weird, and frankly out of character.  Obviously, that knocks the book down a few marks.

Leave that aside, however, and it's a well-executed chase story, well paced and convincingly handled.  I'm prepared to give Aaron the benefit of the doubt for now and assume that there's a clear reason behind Wolverine's slightly uncharacteristic behaviour.  On that basis, it's a good issue.

Postscript: Yes, alright, as several of you have pointed out, I completely misread the final scene.  The idea is that Mystique is impersonating Wolverine in the opening, which makes perfect sense.  It's a little confusing in the execution, but to be fair, it's there if you're paying attention.  Oh well, nobody's perfect.

Rating: A

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