Ah, now this is a bit more like it.

Wolverine #188 is the first half of a two-part fill-in story by Daniel Way, as the book continues to mark time before the relaunch.  The traditional problem with fill-ins is that you can't actually do anything in them, and the traditional way of getting around that is to bring in a completely new character and focus the story around how that character gets changed.

Taking this to rather drastic extremes, what Way has written here is a crime story that has nothing whatsoever to do with Wolverine.  The title character finally turns up in the last panel, but this is not a Wolverine story by any stretch of the imagination.  By all appearances, it's an unrelated crime story which has had Wolverine thrown in so as to justify its appearing in this series.  We'll have to see next issue how the character gets worked into the plot, and whether it comes off as forced.

For the moment, this is a decent set-up story.  Detective Lester Brown of the Internal Affairs department is absolutely convinced that drugs officer McLawry is going around murdering suspects.  Unfortunately he has two major problems in doing anything about this.  First, he's got no evidence.  Second, he's completely useless at gathering any.

This first half of the story is a bit of a slow burn, setting up the story.  But Way livens things up by leaving room for the possibility that Brown might be completely wrong.  It's not a flashy story, but it's solidly put together, and that's the important thing.  Frankly, I'm not sure it's going to gain anything from having Wolverine in it, but that's a problem for next month.

Perfectly acceptable stuff.

Rating: B+

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