After the year-long lunacy of "Enemy of the State", Mark Millar changes tack drastically for his final issue of Wolverine.  "Prisoner Number Zero" is a much quieter, more contemplative story than Millar normally produces.

It's 1942, and Major Bauman arrives to take command of the Sobibor concentration camp.  This ought to be a nice easy job, where he demonstrates some basic management skills and moves his way up the ranks.  All he has to do is keep order, reduce the number of escapes, and kill lots of people.  Anyone could do it.  But to Bauman's increasing horror, one of the prisoners just won't stay dead.  Why, it's almost like he's got some sort of healing power...

Reviewing this story seems almost superfluous, since Millar's closing editorial does a perfectly good job of explaining why the story works.  It's an anecdote about Millar meeting Will Eisner at a convention, explaining his difficulties with the story, and Eisner coming back the next morning to explain how to make it work.  In all honesty, it's actually a little surprising to learn that Millar had already worked out of his own accord that Wolverine's normal smart-ass attitude and one-liners wouldn't work in this story. God knows more than a few of Millar's stories would have benefitted from similar insight.

But, of course, it's quite right that that approach wouldn't work here.  This isn't Wolverine's story.  It's Bauman's, and Wolverine serves simply as a foil.  Eisner's advice was, basically, to play the concept as an EC ghost story, by removing Wolverine's dialogue and turning him into a silent figure who exists simply to haunt Bauman.  In keeping with the ghost story genre, Wolverine doesn't even have to do anything for this to work; the less he does the better.  The mere fact of his presence is enough to haunt Bauman into an early grave.

You could argue that this really isn't technically a Wolverine story, since the same basic idea could have been done by having one of the prisoners actually turn up as a ghost.  It also means Wolverine's acting rather out of character, since it's hard to buy him quietly sitting there and being passively annoying rather than fighting back or trying to escape.  All this is true enough, but it doesn't really matter, because it's a self-contained story, and we're not invited to relate to Wolverine as a character in this story.  He's just an icon - something that artist Kaare Andrew plays up to, by keeping the character almost entirely in silhouette, even when that doesn't strictly fit with the lighting.  The sheer inexplicability of Wolverine's presence actually adds to the story.

Eisner's other contribution, by the way, was to suggest that this should be a single-issue story and not a miniseries, as originally planned.  I can't for the life of me imagine how this story could ever have been made to work at greater length - it has one point to make, and makes it perfectly well here.

A very good issue by any standards, but it's particularly nice to see Mark Millar spreading out beyond his usual comfort zone.

Rating: A

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