Wolverine #48 is the epilogue to "Vendetta", and apparently Marvel think that this fact alone is enough to merit giving it a "Casualties of War" tie-in banner.

For those you who haven't been keeping track, here's how it works.  "Vendetta" was a six-parter in which Wolverine hunted down Nitro.  Since Nitro caused the big explosion back in Civil War #1, and some Atlanteans were wandering around, "Vendetta" could quite sensibly be billed as a Civil War tie-in.  This issue, on the other hand, is basically a monologue by Wolverine about what happens when he's nearly dead, and waiting for his healing factor to put him back together.  It's got nothing to do with Civil War whatsoever. 

But Marvel can't quite let it go, so because it contains some flashbacks to the previous story - and literally, that's the whole extent of the connection - they've given it the "Casualties of War" banner for second-tier tie-ins.  I really question this sort of short-term thinking.  Yes, sales on this title went up 50% for the true crossover issues.  But that doesn't make it a good idea to label every single story as a Civil War crossover, even when it plainly isn't.  Customer goodwill is not an infinite resource.

Let's leave that aside, though, and look at the story itself.  Some people really disliked the earlier issues of this series because it had Wolverine healing from frankly ludicrous injuries - most obviously, when Nitro blasts him down to just a metal skeleton.  Now, personally, I was perfectly happy to run with that, for two reasons.  One, it's drawn by Humberto Ramos, and I'm more willing to take that sort of thing as artistic licence when it's drawn in that style.  Two, it was a very silly action story (in a good way), and in that context, what the heck.

In this story, though, Guggenheim is trying to take it seriously, and that creates a problem.  A lot of long-established superheroes have suffered from what you might call power inflation, where writers just keep racking their power levels up and up, until things get utterly silly.  This is because it's a lot easier to write a cool scene where the hero does something on a bigger scale than before, than it is to write a cool scene where the hero uses his established powers in an inventive new way.  Much less creativity is involved.

Guggenheim is far from the only offender in this regard, but when you've got Wolverine literally recovering within minutes from being a burned out skeleton, you've pretty much lost sight of the original premise.  Wolverine is a guy who can afford to take damage because he heals quickly.  When you rack his healing factor up to this scale, he's just a guy who's functionally invulnerable, which is much less interesting.  This is a very recent development in terms of the way the character's written.  Back in 1990 or so, it took Wolverine months to recover from being badly beaten up by the Reavers.  Even in the histrionic mid-nineties, major traumas like having his adamantium ripped out seemed to cause him serious long-term problems.  We've now crossed a threshold where his healing factor is being defined at a level that's simply silly, and just doesn't work unless the story is equally silly.  "Vendetta" was utterly silly; this story isn't, and consequently it has a big problem.

Which is a shame, because Guggenheim does have some mildly interesting ideas about Wolverine's near death experiences.  There's a potentially intriguing attempt to suggest that, for some spiritual reason, Wolverine literally won't die, no matter how badly he's injured.  But it's nothing earth-shattering, and it's all hung on a terribly shaky framework with Wolverine recovering from nonsensical injuries.

They have short memories at Marvel these days, but it's less than a year since Stuart Moore and CP Smith did a basically similar story in X-Men Unlimited #12 which was a lot better.  You'd have thought editor Axel Alonso would have noticed that they did the same concept so recently, given that he edited both stories, but either it slipped past him or he thought the world needed to see the same story again, only silly.  It didn't.

There's a potentially decent idea in here, coupled with some typically enjoyable art from Ramos.  But it's not as deep as it clearly aspires to be, and it's marred by trying to build a serious story from some rather stupid plot points.

Rating: B-

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