Now that Mark Millar's top-selling run on Wolverine is over, the unenviable task of following him falls to Daniel Way.  He's been writing for Marvel for a while now, but they're now pushing him as one of the (ahem) "Ten Terrific", a sort of writer-oriented version of the "Young Guns" promotion featuring ten writers who seem to have been selected by no consistent criterion known to man.

If nothing else, Way is a very different writer from Mark Millar.  He's produced some interesting books in the past.  But he's extremely hit and miss, with pacing as a recurring problem.  His Venom series took forever and a day to go nowhere interesting, and he has a tendency to write extremely talky comics.

"Chasing Ghosts", his debut Wolverine arc, is no exception.  In fairness, Way is hobbled from the outset by his remit.  He's required to produce a House of M tie-in, but there's no space for one.  Wolverine is the central character in early issues of House of M, and he's occupied for pretty much the whole storyline.

Way's solution is to give us a story about one of Wolverine's recent missions, as narrated in flashback by his partner Mystique.  Of course, as near as it's possible to decipher from the comic, the rules of House of M mean that none of this stuff actually happened; the characters merely have false memories of a different history.  Presenting the story as a flashback gets around the non-existence problem.  It doesn't resolve the "who cares" problem.

The story involves Wolverine and Mystique investigating an apparent scheme of Nick Fury's to hijack a Sentinel and use the stolen technology to bring down the government.  Wolverine goes after Fury with gusto, because he misses the good old days of the war.  The big twist, and you'll kick yourself if you don't see this coming given that she's the narrator, is that it's just Mystique trying to give Wolverine something to fight for again. 

Now, this is all very clever in theory, but it means that if you read the story in accordance with its own ground rules, it's a spectacular non-event.  Not only did none of this stuff happen, but even as the characters remember it, there still wasn't an actual threat of any sort.  You need powerful character material to get away with a story where so little actually happens, and this story doesn't deliver it.  Wolverine's an old soldier who liked the war for its own sake; Mystique's trying her best to support him.

It's just not that interesting, and the decision to intersperse it with interminable conversation scenes between Mystique and Shaw doesn't help.  Artists Javier Saltares and Mark Texeira are a bad match to start with, producing rough and awkward art that seems to be pulling in two different directions at once.  They certainly don't manage to make all the desk-bound sequences visually interesting.  But a bigger mystery is why they're there in the first place - what's wrong with narrative captions?  This is supposed to be a visual medium, yet Way often seems like he'd be happier writing radio plays.

I've read a lot worse, but ultimately, I just don't see the point of this story.  It tells us nothing new about the character, and takes three inconsequential issues to do so.  It really does seem to exist solely as an attempt to squeeze three more issues out of House of M.

Rating: C+

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