Wolverine #19 wraps up not only "Return of the Native", but also Greg Rucka and Darick Robertson's run on the title.

It would be fair to say that this run has not been an unqualified success.  Of course, there's been plenty to like.  Rucka has a good handle on the character, and Robertson's rendition of Wolverine (even after he was forced to prettify him) gets his essence.

But we've been faced with a particularly egregious example of decompressed comics over the last year and a half.  Even leaving aside the relatively low-key nature of the threats Wolverine's been given (some of whom didn't seem like much of a threat to him at all), the pace has been glacial.  "Return of the Native" clocks in at seven issues, an extremely protracted arc even by today's standards.  It has about enough plot for half that time.

To be fair, if you sit down and read the thing in its entirety, it works much better.  It will make a much more effective trade paperback.  But it's far, far too slow to work in monthly format.  So long as publishers insist on serialising rather than going straight to trade paperback (which would be a welcome development, by the way), some allowance has to be made for the fact that readers are not reading the book in one go.  They're reading it in instalments, and this rather slight story has been stretched past breaking point - it may have the legs for seven issues' worth of pages, but it doesn't have enough to hold attention over a period of six months from start to finish.

The ending of this arc is unlikely to come as an enormous surprise to anyone.  While the atmospherics and art on this run certainly deserve applause, the glacial pace has dragged the book down tremendously.  It's Wolverine, for god's sake.  It needs to move.

Rating: B-

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