It’s Dangerous To Go Alone! Take This — Reviewing ‘Wolverine’ #40

Wolverine’s world tour of gratuitous cameos has come to an end the only place it could, alongside the amazing Spider-Man. Yes, the Fall Of X adjacent arc is now complete and the clawed one might have come to some sort of epiphany. Maybe.

Logan’s last solo move against Orchis has begun in Wolverine #40 from Benjamin Percy, Ibrahim Moustafa, Frank D’Armata, and Cory Petit.

This sure was something.

Okay, it’s not a bad issue, and not a great issue. It’s a pretty standard Logan type story with a standard interaction with Spider-Man as their move against Orchis goes bad. Lots of Logan slashing, failing, pontificating in the captions, and data pages used to further the story so that exposition isn’t needed.

Unfortunately, that is the problem with this issue. Nothing feels revolutionary or new or intriguing. Just a lot of been there done that wrapped up in Fall Of X wrapping paper. While mutants are around doing mutant things in this event, Logan has been catching up with old friends all as some way for him to now realize in his head “Oh I can’t do everything alone” and “we should not close ourselves off from all humans.”

Pretty sure Logan has learned the whole ‘lesson’ of not having to do things solo a billion times over the last few decades. A whole arc just to get to this point again feels pointless. Honestly feels like a lot of FOX is the line spinning wheels to get to the actual final event, after speeding up to end the line so that Marvel can reboot the line to be more status quo classic in 2024.

It doesn’t help that, apparently, this arc confirmed it’s been months since the Hellfire Gala moment, yet somehow all these mutants running around openly doing stuff don’t know that each other are out there. Logan think he’s the last one, when Iceman and clearly Nightcrawler are out there doing big open bold hero stuff. Where a team of Dark X-Men has been active, and the Uncanny Avengers are doing their thing openly.

But nope, you’re all alone Logan. Good job doing that whole paying attention deduction tracking thing. Always better to just sulk and bemoan woe is you as you go seek out non-mutant pals to connect with.

We get an artistic change for this final issue with Moustafa stepping in, since Ryp moved over to Immortal X-Men.

This is an art style that does lend itself to a Wolverine story. Dark, dense, heavy, and quite rough does fit the character. Some of the facial stuff is a bit off here or there but generally it’s fine. There is some good movement and placement, some of the panels working quite well to showcase the scale and danger of the Stark Sentinels and Orchis forces.

Part of what throws a few scenes off is that the colors are heavy to match the style, making a few of the scenes a bit muddy looking. D’Armata goes a bit too heavy with shadows in some places so we have a scene where Logan’s face is half obscured in a fully lit room. Most of the colors are very muted, lending to the more neutral state of a city space and the tones of a story like this. A few spaces allow for poppier bright colors, but most are more restrained.

As a complete package, it does the job artistically. Things move, they have presence, they fit the character. Sometimes that’s all a book needs, a team that can pull off the basics of the story. Especially when a story is pretty nothing but the basics with little room or care for bells and whistles.

Per usual, a lot of the words of this story come from Logan’s inner thoughts. There are more dialogue beasts later, especially since Spider-Man feels extremely talkative later (mostly to himself at one point). Petit makes it all flow and work, using sentence case which I love because it makes a solid baseline volume for words. In a few spots the balloons are far bigger than the font size which blurs things a tiny bit when glancing past them. Not a deal killer though.

Wolverine #40 is now available from Marvel Comics.