"They're mad, they're ancient, they're wolflike... and they're colour-coded.  Inane lupine retcons, tonight on Sick Sad World."

Every once in a while, we are blessed with a storyline that is truly abysmal.  Such a story deserves space.  Fortunately, all of the other X-books are in mid-storyline this week, which leaves me free to look at Wolverine #55 in all its awful majesty.

Now, before we go any further, it's worth taking a moment to acknowledge this storyline's one indisputable strength.  It's pretty.  Simone Bianchi can draw.  Even faced with a series of essentially random events, Bianchi at least manages to find ample opportunity for strong, memorable pages of artwork.  If you like pretty pictures, you'll like this story.  But then, Bianchi could illustrate the telephone directory and it would look good.

So let's pass on to consider exactly what Bianchi was given to draw.  This is the final part of "Evolution", a six part storyline written by Jeph Loeb and, it seems, tying in to the plot of Daniel Way's Wolverine: Origins series.  Basically, the function of this story is to introduce Romulus, Way's main villain.  That's not a good start, but it's hardly a fatal blow.

But good lord, what a mess.  Failed comics come in many types.  Some are the result of catastrophic miscommunications between writer and editor.  Some are due to deadline crashes or last-minute changes of plan.  Some are basically good ideas marred by inept execution.  And then there are stories like these - stories that fail on every level, from the basic concept through to the plot, the research, and the details of the script.  Stories where the pacing is shot to hell, and even the dumb entertainment value is almost entirely absent.  Stories with nothing to recommend them whatsoever.

It is genuinely surprising to see a writer as experienced as Jeph Loeb producing a story quite this poor.   To be honest, I've given him a degree of the benefit of the doubt so far with this storyline, on the assumption that it had to be heading somewhere at least passably rational.  But, well, here we are.

Loeb's output has always been, shall we say, inconsistent.  His contribution to the current Onslaught Reborn miniseries, for example, does not exactly read like the product of long hours of scrutiny and multiple drafts.  But the fact remains that he clearly knows his fundamentals, and he knows how to tell a story.  So when he produces something as absurdly wide of the mark as this, you have to wonder.  Can he honestly think this is any good?

Strangely, it's such an odd story that I suspect he probably does.  It reads like the work of someone who thinks he's being clever.  I strongly suspect that Loeb and his editor, Axel Alonso, honestly think this is great stuff.  They couldn't be more wrong. 

As I say, the story is a disaster on the most fundamental levels.  But let's start with the little things and work our way up.

In continuity terms, it's a train wreck.  The storyline opens at the X-Men Mansion, where Sabretooth is living contentedly as a member of the team, as per X-Men.  But the action then continues through to this issue, where Wolverine kills him dead.  Now, that's rather hard to square with Mike Carey's X-Men stories, in which Sabretooth betrays the team, escapes during the Hecatomb storyline, and is then dumped in the ocean during an episode of Cable & Deadpool.  Logically, all of that's got to come before this story... but then, why is Sabretooth being treated as a house guest at the start of the arc?  When does Sabretooth even return to the X-Men at all?  In Carey's stories, even before Sabretooth turned on the team, he was kept under lock and key.

Now, this is far from the biggest problem with the story, but it's not exactly trivial either.  It's a fundamental clash between this story and X-Men, even though the opening scene expressly founds on Carey's X-Men to justify Sabretooth's presence at the Mansion in the first place.  As continuity errors go, it's a pretty enormous one.

Then we've got Wolverine talking about Silver Fox in part one as if her death had stuck in continuity.  Since she showed up in Larry Hama's run alive and well some years ago, that doesn't really work.  Loeb's solution to this problem, in this week's issue, is to write a petulant monologue in which Wolverine grumbles that Silver Fox's death is still just as important even though it might not have happened.  The basic point is fair enough - it's still a traumatic event because he believed it at the time - but the defensive tone of the script is hard not to smirk at.

What else?  Apparently, the Black Panther and Storm are living in Wakanda right now, even though the core plot of Fantastic Four and Black Panther is based on the fact that they aren't.  Not so important, but still a pretty basic blunder.

And Loeb's collection of people with wolf-like powers descended from wolves includes Feral (cat), Thornn (cat) and Sasquatch (magical creature).  Hey, they've got fur, right?  That's close enough.  That's good enough for Jeph Loeb and Axel Alonso, and it'll damn well be good enough for you, oh paying customer.  Dog, cat, sasquatch, whatever.  They're close enough if you screw up your eyes and squint real hard.

Poor Rahne Sinclair gets some of her worst ever dialogue in this issue.  "I dinnae can say, Logan."  I mean, for heaven's sake, that's not any dialect known to man.  "I don't can say"?  Do you people even think about this stuff before sending it to the letterer?  I know it's not technically a continuity point, but believe it, it makes me reach for my baseball bat regardless.

Now, I know what you're saying.

This is trivia.  These are points of detail, of interest only to the sort of nitpicker who knows the difference between a cat and a sasquatch.  This is America, goddamit, and if our children leave school knowing what a cat is, they've been reading too many books and playing too little football.  What are you, some sort of difference-between-a-cat-and-a-sasquatch-knowing nancy boy?  Such considerations are beneath Jeph Loeb, for he is thinking of the bigger picture.  To the true maestro, the cat and the sasquatch are as one.

So let's look at that bigger picture.

The plot of this storyline borders on total incoherence.  Loeb's basic idea is that Wolverine has been plagued with dreams about the long history of a race of wolf-men, who have been led throughout time by the immortal Romulus.  This leads him to, well, attack Sabretooth in part one for no particular reason.  The two have a big fight.  This somehow leads them to end up in a desert where by sheer coincidence they are taken in by Storm and the Black Panther who coincidentally have recently learned about a Wakandan archaeological dig that turned up some wolf men the other week.  Even though they don't know anything about Wolverine's dreams, and therefore have no plot reason to connect the two, they still think this is information of massive interest to Wolverine.

Yet more fighting ensues.  Wild Child shows up as an agent of Romulus, as do a bunch of ridiculously ill-chosen wolf-characters (in the loosest possible sense), who stand around shufling their feet and mumbling that they don't actually know why they're in the story.  Loeb seems to have included them for two reasons - first, he wants to illustrate the point that there are lots of characters with similar powers to Wolverine.  That misfires spectacularly when he starts choosing people like Sasquatch to make the point.  Second, Loeb needs some throwaway bozos to kill off, so he digs up Feral and Thornn.  Except, oops, they both lost their powers on M-Day so we get some hasty dialogue explaining that they got their powers back except, hell, mutants can't get their powers back, can they?  Because that would screw up the big crossover.  So, er, they got their appearance back but not their powers.  Er... look, Feral's dead!

All this leads Wolverine to have a gratuitous fight with Sabretooth in which he kills off his arch-nemesis in double-quick time using a magic sword that was set up in Wolverine: Origins about a year ago, but was not previously mentioned in this storyline at all.

Wild Child then shows up to deliver a clumsy piece of exposition in which he claims that everyone with vaguely similar powers is part of a parallel strand of human evolution based on wolves (no, really, that's the plot), all of whom are somehow under the influence and control of the immortal Romulus.  Wild Child also explains - and I swear I'm not making this up - that throughout history, there have always been two wolf-types who've emerged from the pack, one of them with dark hair, and one blond.  Because, see, Wolverine and Sabretooth's decades-long rivalry carries much more resonance when you attach it to a silly prophecy written on the back of an envelope that has nothing to do with any story that either character has ever appeared in.

I mean, where do you start?  It's not a story.  It's just a string of random events in no logical sequence that happens to lead to a big revelation that we're supposed to care about.  Why are we supposed to care about it?  Because it's a revelation.  Characters wander onto the page and off again without ever having a good reason to be there.  It's disjointed, it lacks pacing, it lacks tension, and frankly, it would disgrace a novice fanfic writer.

Its key objective is to make us care about Romulus as a villain, and in this, it fails completely.  All that we get from this story, even read together with Wolverine: Origins, is that Romulus is a generic pack leader who does villainous things because he's evil.  Who cares?  The story presents him as a mystery and expects us to be intrigued.  But you don't generate interest just by shoving a question out there.  You have to give the readers a reason to care about the answer.  Nothing about Romulus suggests a remotely interesting character.

Now, compare and contrast somebody like Mr Sinister, a villain who debuted in the late eighties and lasted a good few years before developing a proper personality.  He was a cipher too.  But at least he was a cipher with a curious agenda.  He was obsessed with Cyclops' baby.  Why?  That's a mystery.  Why does it work?  Because we care about Cyclops, we care about the fate of his son, and we're given just enough information to speculate about why this strange villain might be interested in little Nate.  Sinister is hardly a classic creation - he rapidly degenerated into a character who could be wheeled out to perform arbitrary acts of enigmatic villainy.  But at least there was something to him when he was introduced.

With Romulus, we already pretty much know his agenda.  He's the pack leader and he manipulates his underlings.  We know his personality.  He's evil.  We've seen nothing to suggest any other dimension to his personality beyond that.  So he's an evil guy who does evil things because he's evil.  Where's the intrigue in that?

It's not even an original concept.  Chuck Austen did exactly the same idea with his Maximus Lobo character in "Dominant Species" a few years ago.  And "Dominant Species" was considerably better.  At least the imagery made some sort of internal sense, even if the underlying theme was absurd.  At least the plot had a halfway sensible structure.  This - and I can hardly believe I'm writing such a thing - isn't even in Chuck Austen's league.  He wrote some godawful stories during his time on the X-Men, stories where the central premise was irredeemable and the plot was riddled with holes.  But at least they had the basic shape of a story.  "Evolution" doesn't even have that.  "The Draco" was better than this.

What else?  I could also point out that the laughable "blond hair and black hair" prophecy suggests that nobody involved quite gets magic as a story device.  Technically, Loeb isn't invoking magic - he's just asserting that a blonde and a dark-haired wolf guy will always emerge from the pack because, hey, just because.  But when you start asserting all-purpose prophecies with no logical underpinnings whatsoever, it's close enough to magic for all practical purposes.

Now, lots of writers get away with arbitrary prophecies and magical gibberish that conveniently drives the plot forward.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. A lot of the underlying assumptions of magic, generally speaking, were based on the idea that superficial similarities between two unrelated things point to some deeper meaning and connection.  This is why magic is great for story purposes - it's metaphor writ large.  You can get away with pretty much anything when it comes to magic, as long as there's some sort of metaphorical or symbolic structure to it.  99 times out of a hundred, that's the difference between arbitrary nonsense and intangible meaning.

What exactly is being symbolised by the idea that there's always been a black and a blonde-haired duo who break out of the pack?  Nothing.  Loeb might just have got away with a duo, because a charitable reader might have read it as signifying that throughout history there have always been two great warriors defined by their rivalry for each other.  Their mutual hatred drives them to become great.  Or something like that.  It's not a point that Loeb makes in any remotely coherent way, but with a fair wind, readers might have given him the benefit of the doubt.

But when you start nailing on random hair colours, which signify absolutely nothing, in a clumsy attempt to show that Wolverine and Sabretooth have a lineage to the dawn of time, you're just getting silly.  It becomes painfully obvious that the writer doesn't actually understand how magic works (as a plot element) and is simply aping the sort of thing he's seen in other people's stories.  Hey, if Neil Gaiman can get away with it, why not Jeph Loeb?  Er, because Neil Gaiman knows what he's doing with this kind of thing, and Jeph Loeb does a very convincing impression of someone who doesn't. 

Worst of all, this series - and Wolverine: Origins - is engaged in a pointless attempt to reinvent the wheel.  Wolverine, as developed by Chris Claremont through the late seventies and early eighties, is arguably one of the best characters Marvel have developed in recent decades.  The mystery about his past was always a part of his appeal, but a peripheral part.  It was about the personality, the style, and let's be honest, the violence.  He didn't become an A-list character by appearing in tiresome stories giving him outrageously complicated and contrived origin stories.

Origins was a mediocre series, but one that did no real harm.  It added a fairly straightforward set of events that was consistent enough with what came later, and didn't complicate matters too much.  But now, even though all the real mysteries were resolved years ago anyway, we have Way and Loeb inventing new mysteries so that they can solve them.

The maxim "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has rarely been more appropriate than it is for Wolverine.  He's a simple, elegant, straightforward and direct character.  He does not need byzantine mysteries in his back story.  He does not need to be descended from wolves.  He most certainly does not need to be tied to the immortal wolf-man who founded Rome.  He just needs to be an ex-secret service guy with a vaguely defined past, who struggles to keep the balance between his humanity and his violent rages.  It's not hard.  That's the character.  You can do anything with him, anywhere in the last 130 years or so.  It's very flexible. 

There really is a certain arrogance in looking at Wolverine and thinking, do you know, I can improve on that.  I can make him the descendent of a hidden race of wolf-men.  That'll be much better.  It's such an underexplored archetype.

Somebody, I forget who, once said "It's easy to mock.  But that's no reason not to."  It is indeed easy to mock this story, because aside from the art, it is without any redeeming virtues whatsoever.  I've read worse central ideas; I've seen more incoherent plots.  But rarely have I seen a story that was so bad and so misconceived across the board as this one.  It's truly awful.

A powerful case can be made that this is the worst Wolverine storyline of all time.  I certainly can't think of any obvious contenders.

Rating: D-

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