Thursday, December 20, 2007

WOLVERINE #69 – May 1993


Induction in the Savage Land!
Credits: Larry Hama (writer), Dwayne Turner (penciler), Chris Ivy (inker), Pat Brosseau (letterer), Steve Buccellato (colorist)


Summary
Wolverine, Rogue, and Jubilee are sent to the Savage Land to investigate rumors of Magneto’s return. Jubilee is kidnapped by a native flying a pterosaur while Wolverine and Rogue are searching for clues. While Rogue investigates magnetic anomalies, she’s kidnapped by Brainchild and Gaza. Wolverine follows a group of Savage Land Mutates and natives to their temple, where he learns that Sauron is their new master.


I Love the ‘90s
In a Bullpen Bulletins cartoon, Tom DeFalco is badly injured after dancing near Wolverine when “some grunge rock” starts playing.


Review
Starting with this issue, I began buying Wolverine on a monthly basis. Seeing some of the X-Men guest star and knowing that the title would be playing a role in the upcoming crossover lead me to believe that I wasn’t a real X-completist unless I was buying this title (it would be a few more months before I would feel this way about Excalibur, but I never felt bad about missing the Wolverine stories in Marvel Comics Presents). Even though Wolverine’s memories were unlocked in the previous issue, the event is only mentioned in passing in one panel. Rather than being a logical follow-up to this title’s ongoing stories, this issue feels like it could’ve been a typical issue of X-Men. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad comic, it’s an average straightforward action issue, but I don’t think it’s what regular readers of this series wanted. The two approaches to franchise titles seem to be “make them all the same” or “make them all extremely different”. It seems like Marvel decided to go with the first option during this era. Wolverine starts hanging out with the X-Men more often, a more serious Excalibur moves to Muir Island and stops meeting so many Marvel UK characters, and X-Factor drops the humor and becomes the X-Men with government ID badges. And they all get together each year for foil-enhanced, die-cut, holographic crossover adventures.


For some reason, this story goes out of its way not to mention Magneto by name. This trick is also used during Magneto’s cameo in X-Men Unlimited #1. I’m not sure why exactly the creators are so cryptic about this, especially since Marvel’s promotion machine was already hyping his return in the “Fatal Attractions” crossover. Hama does play on this to reveal that Sauron, not Magneto, is the Mutate’s secret master at the end, but it’s still mildly annoying that no one will say the name of the character he’s trying to find.


Dwayne Turner’s art is vintage 1993, but he’s not the worst fill-in guy from this era. Most of his storytelling is fine, except for a confusing sequence on page six where Wolverine is supposedly stabbing a dinosaur in the eye, but it’s hard to tell. Rob Liefeld would be proud of Sauron’s disappearing feet on page thirty, too. I don’t care for his caveman rendition of Wolverine, but I kind of like his cartoonish version of Jubilee. I don’t really know why Jubilee is in this story, but her thoughts on the Dickens novel “David Copperfield” are funny.

4 comments:

Austin Gorton said...

I too started buying Wolverine with this issue, for the exact same reasons you did. What was on the periphery a month before suddenly seemed integral to the overall story.

Unknown said...

This is a fantastic blog. I'm really enjoying reading your reviews... and I haven't even read any of the issues in question!

I think the synopsis of a joke can be funnier than the joke itself. Years ago, my best friend and I cracked up over a description of a sketch from a Firesign Theatre album as "Nazis emerge from the South American jungles to eat moss."

Today, it's your description of the Bullpen Bulletins cartoon. Maybe it's that whatever our imaginations conjure is usually better than the reality!

G. Kendall said...

Thanks! You've gotta be careful around "grunge rock".

Arvin Bautista said...

Looking back on it could not stand Turner's art at all... it was boxy and exagerrated in all the wrong ways, like a bad combination of texeira and lee.

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