Meanwhile, back in the mainstream universe, Wolverine #40 completes the five-part "Origins and Endings" arc.  It's also Daniel Way's final issue on the title, before he goes off to write the second monthly Wolverine title Wolverine: Origins, taking this storyline with him.

I can say with absolute honesty that I'm not looking forward to Wolverine: Origins in the slightest.  I think it's going to be tedious dross.  God knows "Origins and Endings" was.

The central concept here is that Wolverine regained all his memories during House of M thanks to the Scarlet Witch.  So he now remembers all the people who did him wrong in the past, and he's out for revenge.  So far, so good - at least it's a motivation.  But the good news stops there.  What we get, in the course of five issues, is Wolverine running around fighting the Silver Samurai for no obvious reason, some tiresomely cryptic flashbacks about the Weapon X project, Wolverine fighting the Winter Soldier from Captain America for an issue, and this pulse-pounding final issue in which Wolverine chats with the Winter Soldier for the whole length of the story.

You might have noticed that the cover shows Wolverine holding a sword and squaring off against the New Avengers.  Rest assured that nothing so exciting transpires within.  In fact, the Avengers aren't even in the story at all.  This is a wise precaution, because if they'd turned up, something might have happened, and we wouldn't want that.

The basic thrust of this issue is Wolverine delivering a flashback about his previously unmentioned first wife and daughter, and how they died.  In theory this ought to seem significant, but in fact it just comes across as rather tired.  The problem is that there is not one single character in this whole arc who seems like a fully rounded human being.  Wolverine goes through his usual tics, and everyone else is just a one-dimensional caricature.  Itsu, the wife whose death we're supposed to care about, gets precisely one line of dialogue - "I am with child, Logan" - and displays not one shred of personality.  Wolverine, meanwhile, narrates the flashbacks with dialogue like "Shortly afterwards, she honoured me by carrying my child."  This would be dreadful enough dialogue by any standards, but when it turns up three panels after Itsu tells him that she's pregnant, it starts to become surreally awful.

This is soulless crap which thinks it's clever.  It's taking an already cluttered back story, cluttering it further, and saying nothing about the character.  It isn't telling a story and it isn't entertaining.  It just hopes that if it dripfeeds information in a sufficiently cryptic way we'll think that it's intelligent.  It's an unconvincing and shoddy veneer of class amateurishly applied to a story that's missing all the fundamentals - such as a reason for anyone to care.  Daniel Way talks a good game, and knows how to mimic the style of better writers who actually have a story to tell, but that's as far as it goes.  This is the emperor's new clothes, and I'm not fooled for a second.

Rating: D

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