Hmm.  I liked Mark Millar and John Romita Jr's first issue of Wolverine, but the second part of "Enemy of the State" leaves me much less certain.

There's basically two parts to this issue.  The first half is the mind-controlled Wolverine running around the SHIELD Helicarrier causing chaos, outwitting his opponents, fighting off Elektra, and generally getting into good old-fashioned action.  This stuff works.  It's silly, it's over the top, but that's precisely why it works.

But the second half is dodgy.  The plot is fairly straightforward, which is fine, since it's really just a spine for some action sequences.  Wolverine is under Hand mind control.  The Hand want him to kill some superheroes.  Then, they're going to revive them as mind-controlled Hand zombies.  Silly, but it's a B-movie, so whatever.

And then we get page after page of the X-Men, SHIELD, the Fantastic Four and so forth going into lockdown, because the mighty Wolverine is coming for them.  This is where the book overplays its hand.  If you're going to do a high-octane romp in the Marvel Universe, you're stuck with some of the Marvel Universe's ground rules.  It might make logical sense to get this paranoid every time an attack was expected, but in practice, they never do.  So in effect we're being asked to believe that a visit from a mind-controlled Wolverine is the most devastatingly terrifying thing that these people have heard of in years.  And that doesn't ring true at all.

More worryingly, these scenes don't come across as if they're meant to be fun; they read like a sincere attempt at ratcheting up tension and drama.  But this storyline doesn't work because of dramatic tension.  It's worked because it's a silly, crazy action story.  Don't try and make me care, for heaven's sake.  It's far too stupid for that.  The scenes come across as Millar hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer and yelling "Look!  It's tense!  Tense, I tell you!"  Well, it isn't - and the result is something which all too often mars Mark Millar stories, a comic which is so busy telling you how good it is that it forgets to actually be good.

Please, Mark, just go back to the claws and the ultraviolence.  That worked for you.

Rating: B

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