It's a week of mid-storyline issues, which means most of the X-books get banished to the capsule reviews.  That leaves X-Men Unlimited #12, which gives us... why, it's two more Wolverine stories.  Filling a gap in all our lives, I think you'll agree.

"The Healing", by Stuart Moore and CP Smith, is simply eleven pages of inner monologue.  Following a battle with an unspecified villain, Wolverine lies in the snow in agony, waiting for his healing factor to work.  And that's it.  So nothing really happens, as such.

That said, one of the things that made Wolverine distinctive in the first place was that he wasn't invulnerable.  Instead, he got pretty badly mauled a lot of the time, because he knew the injuries would get better and was prepared to put up with them.  This ought to seem rather painful, but there's been a drift over the years either to treat Wolverine's healing factor as an exotic form of invulnerability, or to write him as so spectacularly hard that he doesn't feel the pain.

Moore and Smith do succeed in refocussing our attention on just how much this whole process ought to hurt, which was presumably the aim of the piece.  Smith's art is unexpectedly effective, considering that the last time I saw him, he was drawing New Invaders, and not making a very good job of it.  And it's not like he's got much to work with here - it's eleven pages of a man lying in the snow.  But with some imaginative use of colour, strong stylised layouts, and unusual hallucinatory diagrams, it's actually a very effective piece.

In the back-up strip, Christopher Long and John Lucas have Wolverine talking with a down-on-his-luck Puck and trying to talk him into seeking help about his alcoholism.  I don't recall Puck being an alcoholic, and I'm not wildly keen on relatively major characters suddenly being saddled with life-altering diseases simply because somebody thought it'd make an emotional moment in a twelve-page back-up strip nobody will remember next week.

That aside, it's a generic affair.  Puck is drunken and sad.  Wolverine is post-drunken and wise.  It's all a bit angst-ridden, without anything particularly new to say about the concept.  Passable on its own terms, but not especially memorable.

Overall, it's not a bad issue.  Smith's artwork has enough interest to make it a worthwhile read.  But at the end of the day, it's two throwaway Wolverine stories of no particular significance.  And is there really any sort of market for that, these days?

Rating: B

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