Wolverine is relaunched, although for some reason Marvel have chosen not to stress the point on the cover.  Actually, it's an odd cover all round - you'd have thought they'd want to avoid versions of the character that don't have the trademark hairstyle, especially when we're this close to the film.  It's a nice enough picture - by Essad Ribic, I think - but it looks more like a vampire.

To all intents and purposes this is just a change of creative team.  The renumbering is presumably to emphasise the change of style and the move away from what Frank Tieri was doing on the book.  Which is a tactful of way of saying that the book is moving upmarket.  Fine by me.

The traditional approach to Wolverine solo stories, dating back to the first miniseries, has been to write them from Wolverine's perspective.  Generally they're accompanied by first person narration.  The effect, of course, is to put you in Wolverine's head.  Greg Rucka, in common with the recent fill-ins by Daniel Way, goes in the opposite direction, by writing the story from the perspective of an outsider.  However, while Way was basically working with the idea that Wolverine shows up as a familiar figure, Rucka sets out to stress how odd and alien the character would be to most people who encounter him.

And that's the meat of the first issue, really.  There's a plot - it consists of a waitress who's being hunted down by somebody or other spotting Wolverine as a regular customer in her diner and setting things up so that he'll do something about it when the baddies finally come for her.  But it's not a plot-heavy issue.  It's more about mood and trying to distance the audience from the lead character again.  That said, it probably goes a little far in that direction.  Wolverine remains on the periphery for much of the story, leaving Lucy as the real protagonist of this issue.  She's the only character that readers get to connect with, and given what happens to her at the end, that leaves the reader adrift. 

Darick Robertson's take on the character goes back to the earlier versions which emphasised him as a small, compact bundle of testosterone.  He's meant to be short - that's sort of the point of naming him after a small vicious animal - and somewhere along the line the height has crept up to an extent that starts to erode the design.  Of course, the viciousness isn't quite there these days - he's a more passive and contained character, particularly in this story.  The art hints at the other aspects of the character without letting us get too close.  I love Robertson's work, and this is no exception.  He's a fabulous storyteller, and he's playing up all the right elements of the character for this particular approach.

And yet...

It's too light on plot to work as a first issue, and it leaves the audience more closely connected to a character who's not going to be seen again.  To be honest, it's not really quick enough off the blocks.  I can see that it's trying to re-establish the whole approach to the character and get rid of the idea of putting us in the character's head.  It's successful in what it sets out to do; unfortunately, it really needed to do more.  It's okay, but I'm underwhelmed.

Rating: B

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