It's another very quiet week - aside from the final issue of First Class, everything is in mid-storyline.  But it's also a singularly dull week outside the X-books as well, to be honest.  So, more by default than anything else, I've thrown in Wolverine #53.  At least it's meant to be a major title.

I haven't been greatly impressed by Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi's run on this title.  Its strongest feature has been the art, which is undeniably beautiful.  But while Bianchi knows how to produce a striking image, he's not so great at stringing them together.  The panel-to-panel storytelling is hit and miss.  When it hits, the book looks magnificent.  When it misses, though, it misses by a mile, producing a clumsy jumble of confusingly arranged elements.

Still, at least you get some lovely pictures along the way.  The story has much more fundamental problems.  Jeph Loeb broadens his canvas here and attempts to explain not only the link between Wolverine and Sabretooth, but also the preponderance of mutants with vaguely animalistic powers.  Loeb doesn't make a very convincing case for the latter point, in his choice of characters.  Wolfsbane and Wild Child are fair enough.  Thornn and Feral would be reasonable illustrations if it wasn't for the fact that they were cats, not wolves.  Besides, they lost their powers on M-Day - and this being a comic edited by Axel Alonso, I have precisely zero faith that the continuity error is intentional.  Sasquatch's inclusion on the list is just baffling, since his powers are magical.  Or, if you prefer the original version, he had yet another accident with radiation.  Either way, he's not a mutant.

The angle here, ludicrous as it may seem, is that all these vaguely-related mutants somehow provide evidence of a parallel evolutionary strain descended through wolves.  No, really.  That's the idea.

And Loeb doesn't exactly endear himself to me by having Wolverine immediately challenge the very concept of evolution.  Now, I suppose to an extent you've got to expect this sort of thing when it comes to American pop culture.  With the best will in the world, there are broadly three categories of people who don't believe in evolution these days: people with very strong religious beliefs, people from countries with dreadful education systems, and citizens of the United States of America.  Wolverine, being a Canadian, is none of the above, and he's generally written as non-religious if not outright atheist.  And if he seriously had fundamental doubts about this whole evolution thing, you'd have thought it would have come up during his thirty year membership in the frigging X-Men, given how fundamental it is to the whole mutant question.  It's difficult to imagine a less appropriate person to raise the issue.

Loeb also seems to be suggesting that Sabretooth's uncontrolled behaviour is the result of his being older, and that Wolverine will eventually deteriorate in the same way.  Except we've had decades of character development with Wolverine going in exactly the opposite direction.  This whole idea seems to be misreading the character on a fundamental level.

Anyhow, let's leave that aside and consider the idea on its merits, such as they are.  What Loeb seems to be proposing here is broadly a cross between two very bad ideas from the past.  First, he's reviving the old "Wolverine is really an evolved wolverine" idea, which Marvel toyed with briefly in the mid-seventies before thinking better of it.  Second, he's using the idea that mutants with similar powers form a sub-species. Well, that idea was stupid when Chuck Austen did it in "Dominant Species", and it hasn't improved with time.

This being part four of six, of course, it's entirely possible that Loeb is merely teasing this idea, and plans to go somewhere else.  But that wouldn't greatly improve this story (except in the sense that it would do less damage).  Even on that charitable reading, it would still be a story that teased a dreadful idea, and had little else to offer.

This is poor.  So far, Loeb has done little to justify his star status.

Rating: C-

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