Wolverine #12 is a single-issue story.  That mirrors the structure of Rucka's first arc, which also had a one-off story acting as an epilogue.  Presumably this is intended to set a pattern.

Anyway, "Dreams" is exactly what it says on the tin - a story which simply follows Logan's dreams for the night and presents a random jumble of images from Logan's subconscious which we're invited to make sense of.

I'm not usually that keen on these types of story, which are often little more than a corner-cutting way of doing character development by numbers.  Why dramatise somebody's inner conflict when you can just point the camera at it?

Rucka's approach is more oblique than most, however, as the issue swiftly rambles off into surrealism.  Very loosely, the thread of the story is Logan pursuing a red and yellow bird which is clearly meant to represent Phoenix.  However, the story is packed with random jumps, irrational scenes and non-sequiturs.  Scenes stabilise for a page or two at most, and even then don't make any literal sense.

It's an exercise in subtext, where the point is to work out what all of these things mean to Wolverine and what significance he might attach to any of this.  The roundabout approach certainly avoids it being excessively obvious.  The downside is that unless you have a reasonably good knowledge of Wolverine's relationship with some of the characters namechecked here, it isn't going to mean a great deal to you at all.  There's some obvious stuff about Logan keeping his animal side suppressed (at least sporadically), but there's also a whole load about his past lovers, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Rogue which will fly over the heads of readers who don't know the background.  And if you do know the background, it's debatable whether you're going to learn anything here that you didn't already know.

Darick Robertson returns on art, and does his usual excellent job on the character.  His layouts contribute to the tension between semi-coherent scenes and complete confusion.  There's a page incongruously inked by Tom Palmer which I assume is an art fix - it's the one with black blood all over the place, despite this being a PSR+ title.  Quite why anybody would bother to sanitise that page given the rest of the issue, the mind boggles.  But then, the mind boggles at a lot of things at Marvel these days.

An interesting book up to a point, and it does capture the randomness of dreaming better than most stories of this sort.  But I'm not convinced that there's any particularly unexpected insights lurking in here.

Rating: B

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