Wolverine Annual #1 is the first comic by novelist Gregg Hurwitz.  It's rather similar, in many ways, to last week's Punisher Annual - both stories involve the titular hero hunting down and killing a relatively minor criminal who spends most of the issue trying to avoid the inevitable.

But Hurwitz's story is better.  His criminal is a more rounded character, and there's a theme beyond the mere fact of Wolverine hunting down a bad guy.  Smitty is a potentially redeemable character who has drifted into a life of crime.  In keeping with his Catholic upbringing, he fully intends to get around to reforming one of these days.  After all, sincere repentence works wonders. 

Unfortunately for him, he's left it a little bit late.

It doesn't read like the work of a novelist.  Admittedly, there are a couple of lines that leap off the page as belonging in a genre novel, but the visual storytelling and the use of the page is much more advanced than you'd expect from somebody coming to the medium fresh.  Whether that's attributable to Hurwitz, or whether he simply gave artist Marcelo Frusin a lot of discretion, is hard to say.  But it's a well told story, and one that isn't afraid to let the pictures do the work.

The official title, "The Death Song of J Patrick Smitty", practically begs for accusations of pretentiousness.  It is, of course, a reference to TS Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock," and for once, the literary allusion doesn't stop with the name of the story.  "Prufrock" is a poem about... well, people are still arguing over exactly what it's about, to be honest. 

But broadly, it's about a man who has drifted into a rather dreary existence.  Among other things, he procrastinates about addressing this unsatisfactory state of affairs while expresses the unconvincing view that there will still be time to get around to it.  At the very least, this is clearly what Hurwitz takes from the poem, going so far as to take the repeated "There will be time" motif and incorporate it in Smitty's narration.

You might say that this is a clever literary reference.  Then again, you might say that "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" wasn't really crying out for a guest appearance by Wolverine, and that drawing such explicit parallels between the two just seems a bit weird and incongruous.  I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but on balance, I think Hurwitz just about gets away with it - at least in so far as the allusions serve the story, and not the other way round.  He's certainly not seriously trying to present this story as a remake of TS Eliot.

On the other hand, and on a much more prosaic level, I'm not sure this is really a Wolverine story.  Killing the bad guys in the heat of battle, sure.  Killing in a rage, fine.  But hunting down a random bank robber for the express purpose of killing him in cold blood?  Mmm, no, that's the Punisher.  It's not glaringly out of character, but I do think it's noticeably a little bit over the line.

Still, it's got ambitions beyond just trotting through the usual Wolverine routine, and it's largely successful at what it attempts.  Good debut.

Rating: A-

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