Over in the parent title, Wolverine has just spent six issues tying in to Civil War - and as you might expect, it's done wonders for sales.

Unlike Civil War: X-Men, "Vendetta" really does qualify as a proper tie-in.  In fact, it's the sort of thing that the structure of a crossover story allows.  Over in Civil War itself, Mark Millar needed a big explosion in issue #1.  But aside from the fact that superheroes had to be to blame, the details weren't terribly important.

That leaves the way clear for Marc Guggenheim and Humberto Ramos to do this storyline, in which Wolverine tracks down Nitro, finds out who was bankrolling him, and generally hurts people.  This story doesn't much care about the details of Civil War, though.  Although there's a villain behind Nitro, he's got nothing to do with the crossover either.  Instead, he's a corrupt investor in Damage Control who figured it would be good for business if he arranged some more explosions.  So we have a free-standing storyline here, which simply takes a dangling plot thread from Civil War as its starting point.  If you're going to do these megacrossovers, that seems a fair way of putting them together.

From what I've seen, this story has had something of a mixed reaction.  It's an unapologetically straightforward action story, and at times it's lumbered off into the territory of gleeful absurdity.  When you have Wolverine fighting bad guys in Atlantis wearing a specially adapted diving suit for his claws... well, yes, that's silly.  But it's silly in the right way.  For the most part, this story was perfectly happy to be a sugar rush and to leave the content to another day.  Mark Millar's "Enemy of the State" did something similar, although it blew itself up to epic proportions.  This is just a comic having fun.  And I have no problem with that.  It's Wolverine.  He can't angst all the time.  He needs to have some stories where he just does cool things and wins.

Unpretentious, freewheeling and silly.  The ending has a stab at moral weight, but just about gets away with it, albeit that the pacing is a bit off.  Overall, though, this has been good fun, and a nice change from the character being taken so seriously.

Rating: B+

back | continue