Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi's run on Wolverine was heavily hyped and, so far, has been singularly unimpressive.

Of course, it's beautifully drawn.  Nobody can dispute that Simone Bianchi does lovely figures. But aside from that, it's hard to get worked up about anything going on here.

Jeph Loeb has decided that the focus of his story should be the true relationship between Sabretooth and Wolverine.  In theory there's nothing wrong with doing that story, but the reality is that it stopped being a major issue a good decade ago.  Sabretooth is the darker, more violent, less controlled version of Wolverine.  It doesn't really matter why.

On top of that, when you consider the way in which Wolverine's character has been developed in recent years, Sabretooth has arguably become much less relevant as an enemy.  When Sabretooth was introduced, Wolverine was still defined in large part by his struggle to overcome his own berserker rages.  Sabretooth demonstrates what would happen if he failed.  That's why he worked as Wolverine's arch-enemy - he dramatised Wolverine's defining inner conflict.

But when was the last time anybody wrote a story where Wolverine struggles against his berserker rage?  I can't remember one.  It's fallen by the wayside completely.  It's a concept that people like Mark Millar wheel out every couple of years when they want to have Wolverine kill a stupidly large number of faceless guards.  It's a piece of nostalgic window dressing.  It no longer serves as a lynchpin of the character, and so there's no need for Sabretooth.

Even Loeb isn't doing "berserker rage" stories.  Worse yet, he seems to be writing Wolverine as the noble warrior who would quite rightly and properly murder Sabretooth given half the chance.  (Given Loeb's track record, it's highly likely that this moral stance is one we're supposed to be accepting at face value.)  That only serves to make Wolverine more like Sabretooth, and to present it as a good thing.  So instead of being a version of Wolverine who's succumbed to his darker urges, Loeb's Sabretooth is just a guy who happens to kill the wrong sort of person.  It's not as interesting.  It doesn't have the same dramatic weight.

Having missed the point by a mile, Loeb then goes on to set up an unpromising new back story for the two characters, in which he seems to be suggesting that they're the reincarnations of some ancient half-animal tribe.  Nothing about that concept strikes me as even remotely interesting.  Tying two perfectly good characters to a rehashed fantasy concept is not an improvement.

That's the fundamental problem with this story.  But there are others.  It's slow and ponderous - the bloated six-issue arc is going out of fashion in comics as a whole, but apparently not for Jeph Loeb.  Continuity is shot to hell - even though this story is taking place during Sabretooth's stint with the X-Men, he's kept on a very, very tight leash in the team book, and there's not even the slightest attempt to explain why he's being allowed to run wild here.  And while Simone Bianchi produces beautiful images, the narrative flow is a lot more questionable.  Page 13 (not counting adverts) seems to have given up on telling the story entirely, blurring three panels together in a way that makes no sense at all.

Mainly, though, it's just not very good.  It's a bad idea, done (at best) competently.

Rating: C-

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