Oh, We’re Still Doing This? Reviewing ‘Wolverine’ #26
by Scott Redmond
Overview
‘Wolverine’ continues its journey to seemingly wrap up or at least address its bevy of dangling plotlines, doing so in a way that just doesn’t seem to fully hit the mark as much as it potentially could. This intro issue is very much a paint-by-numbers sort of story but could be setting up for something far more interesting with the following issues. Time will tell.
Overall
7/10Comic books can be anything. They can be gigantic and full of splendid colorful adventures, they can be deeply personal, they can be utterly boring, and sometimes they are just straight-up offensive or vile. Sometimes though, there are comics that just exist.
Say hello to Wolverine #26.
This is not a bad issue, but it’s also not a particularly good one. After the previous issue was just a massive monologue and the rapid lackluster wrap-up of a months-old plot, this one just sort of plods along once again addressing one of a million dangling plotlines from many moons ago. I will say the beginning that Benjamin Percy wrote that focuses on how Logan focuses himself when living a life that is just so full of brutality and mind-numbing actions, was pretty good.
Other than that we get more of Beast being the right bastard that he’s been for far too long now, the dude is in dire need of a resurrection reset, Logan’s CIA friend falling for an obvious beyond obvious trap, and then the auction group from well over a year ago in the series returns. Overall most of it feels very routine and almost just exists to finally start wrapping up a lot of plots, sort of like the abbreviated Hell Bride plotline went in the last issue. Percy was spinning a ton of plates and many of them are wobbling or have already fallen and these issues are trying to pick up the pieces or save those that haven’t fallen quite yet.
We get a new artist on board here as Juan José Ryp takes over with Frank D’Armata still handling the colors. The first few pages are very static feeling overall, feeling like capturing images for display rather than the more kinetic style for sequential art that tells a story. Some of the further pages have a more kinetic feeling to them, but there is something that feels off. Not in the artist or their style, but in applying it to a Wolverine story.
It’s a very slick and smooth sort of art style, with D’Armata’s colors taking on the quality too feeling a bit weightier with a brighter but also toned-down quality. I would even say there is almost an oil paint sort of appearance to them, which is different considering the type of brutality on display here.
Cory Petit keeps on keeping on, doing the great thing with letters. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m a fan of the use of sentence case when it comes to captions and dialogue in comics. It sets a nice normal baseline for conversation and allows for full caps and font changes to easily increase volume/tone anywhere that’s needed.
Wolverine #26 is now available from Marvel Comics.
