Tag Archives: Logan

Aug 31 2018

Depth of Field in Hunt for Wolverine: Dead Ends 1

By Drew Baumgartner

Hunt for Wolverine Dead Ends 1

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

I remember someone once telling me that they mostly evaluate a comics artist based on the detail of their backgrounds. That always felt like an odd facet to fixate on (especially with so many others to factor in), but it’s hard to deny that richly detailed backgrounds are dazzling. It allows artists to flex not only their attention to detail, but their capacity for deep perspective, lending a sense of lived-in reality to their settings. But it’s also time consuming — even the most detail-prone artists will pick their moments, reserving sprawling cityscapes and the likes for big splash pages, and making choices that compress the depth of field elsewhere. Time is an understandable driver of level-of-detail, but it doesn’t always coincide with storytelling in a meaningful way. With The Hunt for Wolverine: Dead Ends 1, artist Ramon Rosanas finds a much more thematically resonant way to use his depth of field, lending Charles Soule’s villain reveal an unsettling otherworldliness. Continue reading →

Jul 6 2018

Cypher Drives the Action in Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost 3

By Drew Baumgartner

Hunt for Wolverine Weapon Lost 3

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

One of my favorite insights in film criticism is that a shot can only have one subject. The subject can be (and often is) an individual, but the fascinating thing about a two-shot or group shot is that the individuals can’t be the subjects of those shots, so instead, the subject is their relationship. That is, when two characters are occupying a single shot, the subject of the shot isn’t either one of them, but their relationship to one another, whether it’s familial, antagonistic, friendly, or romantic. And I think we might be able to say something similar about ensemble stories. Or, at least, that the subject of an ensemble story can’t be several individuals. The subject can be anything from a character to a relationship to a theme, but there can be only one. So what is the subject if Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost? Is it Daredevil, our narrator (and most recognizable character)? Is it Frank McGee and Misty Knight’s budding romance? Is it the group dynamics of this makeshift team? With issue three, Charles Soule and Matteo Buffagni seem to have settled on an unexpected option as their subject: Cypher. Continue reading →

Jun 13 2018

A Mid-Issue Shift Elevates Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost 2

By Drew Baumgartner

Hunt for Wolverine Weapon Lost 2

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Listen, I know there were crime procedurals before Law & Order (and there have been plenty since), but that show was such a mainstay of my formative pop-culture years that I can’t help but think of it every time I encounter a new fictional criminal investigation. What’s remarkable to me about that show is how entertaining it could be in spite of having an entirely rote structure (it was so set in stone, in fact, that they decided to enshrine it in the very title of the series). That is, the drama was never in whether they caught the culprit (they always did), or whether they would be convicted (they were found guilty or pled out the vast majority of the time), but in how they did it — or more precisely who was doing it. Individual details of the case might be interesting, but only inasmuch as they prompted quips from Briscoe or righteous indignation from McCoy. The procedural is an excuse to watch detectives do what they do best, so giving those detectives big, distinct personalities makes or breaks the whole exercise. In this way, Charles Soule has truly stacked the deck in his favor, cramming four larger-than-life investigators into tight quarters and giving them a hard case to chew on. Continue reading →

Jun 6 2018

Waging Peace in X-Men Red Annual 1

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

“I was the Phoenix. I burned so brightly. Then I was dead. And everything was dark.”

Jean Grey, X-Men Red (2018) Annual #1

Writer Tom Taylor starts this issue with the narration above, quickly summarizing the tragic arc of Jean Grey. It was a violent life, and the bullet points of her story are mostly bummers. Over Scott Summer’s grave, Jean promises that this time is going to be different, and this annual is all about what that might look like. Taylor and artist Pascal Alixe offer an issue full of love, understanding, and difficult conversations. Jean’s still here to win, but it’s not war she’s waging. It’s peace.

Continue reading →

May 30 2018

Shifting the Narrative in Hunt for Wolverine: Mystery in Madripoor 1

by Drew Baumgartner

Hunt for Wolverine Mystery in Mardipoor 1

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

The Bechdel Test

Drew: This particular Dykes to Watch Our For premiered in 1985, and its premise is still ringing in the ears of writers and readers everywhere. Now known as “The Bechdel Test,” these criteria insist on something beyond simple representation (though it’s remarkable how many films fail to satisfy even that first requirement), aiming for a dialogue that features no males (even as subjects of conversation). And that last bit is a huge stumbling block for narratives to this day. Plenty will feature two women and even manage to put them in a scene together, but the conversation will still revolve around the male characters. It’s the kind of problem you might expect to plague any all-female tie-in to the “Hunt for Wolverine” event to suffer from — Logan is necessarily absent, but that fact is likely to be the subject of discussion — but Jim Zub and Thony Silas manage to shift the focus in Mystery in Madripoor 1, pulling the story in totally unexpected directions. Continue reading →

May 10 2018

A Bait-and-Switch in Hunt for Wolverine: Adamantium Agenda 1

By Spencer Irwin

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

There’s a joke amongst fans that if a team exists in the Marvel Universe, Wolverine has been a part of it. This is an exaggeration — it’d be funny to see him joining up with the Champions or Young Avengers, but it hasn’t happened yet — but only slightly. Logan’s prolific stature in the Marvel Universe is what allows for an event like Hunt for Wolverine, which rounds up as many characters with connections to Logan as possible, no matter how tangential, from every corner of Marvel’s vast universe. It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch, as bringing in all these characters has so far (in the two issues of Hunt for Wolverine thus released) led to stories that are rather light on Wolverine himself. Tom Taylor and R.B. Silva lean into that idea in Hunt for Wolverine: Adamantium Agenda 1, pulling a bait-and-switch on their cast as well as their readers. Logan’s former New Avengers teammates think they’re rescuing Wolverine(‘s genetic code), but it turns out they’ve stumbled into a very different, much more personal scenario. Continue reading →

May 8 2018

Assembling the Team in Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost 1

By Drew Baumgartner

Hunt for Wolverine Weapon Lost 1

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

There’s something fun about watching a team put itself together. It lends urgency to everyone’s presence, making their utility to the team explicit in a way that isn’t inherently true of pre-existing teams. That is, while Iceman is coming on this X-Men mission whether or not anything needs to be iced, Danny Ocean is only adding someone to the team if their skills are essential to the plan. With so many pre-existing teams in comics, we don’t always get to see purpose-built teams with quite so narrow a focus as the one in Charles Soule and Matteo Buffagni’s Hunt for Wolverine: Weapon Lost, which is exactly what makes its first issue so fun. Continue reading →

May 1 2018

Narrative Twists and Powerful Love in Hunt for Wolverine 1

By Michael DeLaney

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Modern storytelling loves a narrative twist — you could argue that most stories are exclusively centered around them. With that in mind, do we let the success of a twist dictate the overall reception of a story? Hunt for Wolverine 1 may be such an example. Continue reading →

Apr 5 2018

Are New Mediums Influencing the Artwork in Astonishing X-Men 10?

by Taylor Anderson

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Much has been made about how the internet and e-books are killing the printed word. Even though that’s a bit hyperbolic, it is true that more and more people are reading books on an electronic device. This same trend holds true in the world of comic books, where sites such as Comixology have cut into the traditional printed market. I myself prefer to read comic books on my iPad these days, and as I do so, I sometimes wonder how this change in medium might be affecting the way comics are made and published. With that in mind, I couldn’t help but consider Astonishing X-Men 10 an interesting case study in the way electronic formats might be alternating the way comic book artists produce their craft. Continue reading →

Feb 26 2018

The End of Deadpool vs. Old Man Logan 5 Isn’t About Her

By Patrick Ehlers

Deadpool vs Old Man Logan 5

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

The damsel in distress is creaky, well-worn trope. It’s an obvious and immediate call to action, and an easy way to assert both the heroism and the masculinity of our heroes. But, like, it doesn’t really really explain the motivation of our adventurers, does it? Deadpool vs. Old Man Logan presents the recurring issues of two immortal warriors as a kind of “we need to rescue / we need to deal with Maddie” quest. But whatever her deal is, and whatever she really needs, is totally secondary to how Wade and Logan deal with the problems that keep cropping up in their lives. It’s a depressing reminder of how stuck both of these guys are. Continue reading →