Random comic review 14: Wolverine Origin

The concept of Wolverine Origin seemed pretty spacious. The acknowledgment even mentions this. Why tell Wolverine's origins now? The advantage of comics is if a terrible story is told, we can always just retcon it or send it down the memory hole. (Like the rework of the Punisher's origin where his family was killed in a human sacrifice by demons and he was given angelic superpowers. As far as I know, it was never officially retconned, but everyone ignores it, which amounts to the same thing.)

I am a relative newbie to the Wolverine party, but my understanding of the character is that his central drive is the continuing struggle between civilization and savagery that rages within him. Wolverine seems to struggle between different levels of this dichotomy: noble savage, failed human, barbarian and bloodthirsty killer. In Origin, he starts as a pampered wealthy boy with a pet puppy and crippling allergies. He seems to have a psychotic break after seeing his father and mother die on the same night and refuses to speak to anyone for a long time. From here, he grows into a rugged frontiersman, which seems to suit him. Civilization and tangled relationships blast through and he falls further and goes to live in the wild, turning his back on humanity entirely.

Now I'm sure there are loads of crap Wolverine comics, but between Origin, Weapon X and Wolverine by Claremont and Miller I am going to tenatively look for more Wolverine stories to read.

Random Comic Review 13: Unknown Soldier volume 1

Unknown Soldier falls into that Vertigo mold of updating an old DC property. This is however worlds apart from Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol or Shade. Unknown Soldier takes place in the very real and very fucked up miliue of Northern Uganda, where a not particulalry nice man named Joseph Kony leads an army of brain washed children on a crusade to create a theocratic state based on the ten commandments.

This is a story where a self described pacifist loses his cool and tortures a man to death. Unknown Soldier explores the limits of pacifism as well as the futility of violence. It's a tragic, well-researched, depressing, amazing, violent story.

Random Comic Review 12: Wolverine: Weapon X

I've always sort of wondered about Wolverine. He's immensely popular, from cartoons and movies and so on. But what about comic books? What are the Wolverine comics to read?

Weapon X is a good place to start. It's good. Surprisingly so. The story has a jumbled hard sci-fi narrative that blends delusion with reality. Logan is dehumanized and turned into a puppet at the behest of some scientists. It's bloody stuff, torture for fun and profit.

Is Logan a man or animal? Are we all animals on the inside? Could any person be reduced to a feral state? Is that our natural way? Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I really felt the struggle of a man fighting the brainwashing of his captors. Certainly, in real life there is documentation of the CIA sponsoring experiments to induce psychotic breaks or memory loss on (voluntary) subjects. This isn't too much of a stretch for a program to dehumanize a captive, and Logan is really put through the grinder here. It made me want to read more Wolverine.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Hobbesian savages