Welcome To Beast’s Emporium Of Wolverines And Death: Reviewing ‘Wolverine’ #32

Once upon a time, basically the early 2000’s, Marvel Comics had Wolverine appearing in a good portion of their publications. One couldn’t shake a clawed fist without stumbling across the best there is at what he does, some books even make the joke that it made no sense he could be on like six X-Men teams at exactly the same time.

In his supposed drive to protect Krakoa, by any means necessary, Beast has taken that idea and turned the dial up way past eleven at this point.

It’s no secret, especially if one has been reading these reviews for most of the last year (it’s almost been a year exactly since I took over reviews of this title), that I’ve been quite up and down on this series as a whole. Many times, it’s been because some stories had that “been there, done that” sort of overall hook, and for others the dragging out of the long-simmering story that included Beast felt like it was taking too long. Well, all that waiting is over and now we’re in seemingly the endgame as Beast has gone off the full deep end into the “I still believe I’m the hero” level of villain and Wolverine is deadset on stopping him.

I have to give a nod to Benjamin Percy for the tenacity and drive to keep to it and get to this point. The man had a vision and is seeing it to fruition. Whether I enjoyed parts of the middle of the ride or not, the outcome we’re seeing is proving to be worth the wait in many cases. Basically, the road was long with tons of bumps, and we surely got lost more than a few times, but the destination is pretty darn good. I still have some minor quibbles with the timing of this whole thing (not sure where this fits at all with X-Force currently or the rest of the line but that’s not just in this book) and some of the execution but I cannot argue with the results. The fall of Beast and his being dealt with is something that I, even as a Beast fan, have been wanting to see for a long time and so far, we’re getting our money’s worth.

We got giant plant skull robots, Wolverine clones used as assassins at Beast’s whim, Beast clones kept under the thumb of Beast Prime, some Maverick shenanigans and the freaking plant skull robot used Wolverine clones as claws to take down a submarine. This is some damn fun and brutal comics right here.

All of it is brought to life once more by Juan José Ryp who has steadily found a groove on this title. For many of the issues early in the arc the artwork could feel a bit static and not fitting of the story, but that was also because a lot of the early issues were very static full of flashbacks and imagery that was more fitting of a photograph than action pieces. Here though the artwork moves and breathes and brings some life to some of those aforementioned pretty damn cool moments. Some of the natural slicknesses of the artwork doesn’t seemingly scream being part of a Wolverine book but overall it works pretty well as we dive deeper into this whole story.

All that shininess is also present in the colors that come from Frank D’Armata but they also have a good depth and weight to them. As Ryp’s artwork has settled into the tone and fit this book so to have D’Armata’s colors moved a bit more to mirror that settling/change too. There are a lot of lighter colors and tones on display mixed with the darker ones that really carry the action and moments, as this is a very dark book at its core. A lot of brutal things happen but together they make sure that while we feel the brutality and the outcome it doesn’t move into a gore-porn sort of level.

Cory Petit has plenty to bring to the pages as anything with Beast means plenty of dialogue or captions because boy does that furry boy like to monologue, even to himself. Using sentence case brings stability to things and creates that unifying sort of normal/neutral tone that can be built off of to create changes in tone/volume/etc whenever it is needed. There isn’t an issue of caption boxes being confusing this time as it’s all Beast in them, as the prime Logan only appears briefly in the issue and the clones don’t have a lot to say other than all those usual grunts and snikt snikt sort of stuff.

Wolverine #32 is now available from Marvel Comics.