There’s One Wolf Inside Him — Reviewing ‘Ultimate Wolverine’ #4

Control. It’s slipping away.

Where memories should be, there are none. It’s all slipping away as man and weapon duel.

Winter Soldier. Specimen. Logan.

Prepare yourselves and turn the pages carefully and deliberately. Don’t miss a single moment as Chris Condon, Alessandro Cappuccio, Bryan Valenza, and Cory Petit take their audience on a mental journey deep within the mind of the mind of the Ultimate Wolverine.

The realm of possibility is almost endless with comic books. They’re able to do things that require massive budgets or technological leaps for other mediums. Creator imagination has no limits on these pages.

Sometimes a comic comes along to remind us of this fact. At certain periods in the history of the medium there are far more of them alongside the standard baseline approach to comics. This is one of those periods and this is one of those comics.

How this crew of storytellers takes a sort of routine (in a way) beat for a character and turns it around is inspired. They cast aside a more traditional, tried and true approach to Logan’s pushback against his captors and torturers.

Instead of just seeing him breaking free and the chaos, we’re presented with something more symbolic. Cappuccio’s artwork is what makes this story and series work even more. It’s so dark, moody, and tonally perfect to the struggle our title character deals with, imagery of an altered, bloody, and broken wolf fighting a polar bear feel larger than life.

Darkness creeps into everything as the artwork always has dense heaviness. Every blow, bit of blood, chaos, and brutality has weight to it. There is meaning and importance felt with every panel. Never are we allowed to forget what is happening with and to Logan and those around him.

Rough textures sell it so much more. That image of blood-soaked Logan, red eyes glowing, amongst the carnage will stick with me. Its shows a veiny, out of control being who still is missing the heart and soul stolen from him. They took one of the most liked X-Men characters and made him almost nightmarish.

Adding to this feeling are the similar color palette choices made by Valenza. It gives the darkness a permanent home in all the elements on the page. Blood is almost crimson and black, feeling somehow even more sinister in the moment. Starker color schemes make up the backdrops and the barren icy spaces of the mental imagery landscape.

Conveying how sterile and ‘normal’ many of the spaces are, where something unnatural and inhumane is happening. This showcases the horrific lengths that many will go to control or warp the world around them, using science as a sharp blade applied with no concern to anything or anyone else.

A variety of voices are heard as Logan struggle within his mind because of the particular setup they are caption box voices rather than bubbles. It would have been simple to just place a few similar boxes and call it a day. Instead, Petit makes sure that each voice is clearly distinct.

All of that makes following their journey from Logan’s stresses to eventual bloody release track better. We see the different colors which house the varying types of people who are behind this project; the confident, the pretend confident, the scared, the loyal, the wise, and the dumb. At the same, time the more mundane color to Logan’s mono-syllabic thoughts is perfectly contrasting.

From a scripting standpoint, Condon is on another level.

Together with Cappuccio, Valenza, and Petit, they have taken one of the most predictable and standardized characters into new realms. Regular Logan in the Marvel Universe deals with a lot of the same things. Repeatedly the nostalgia and status quo beats are played out just with different orchestrators leading the show. Here, though, the familiar truly feels fresh, different, and creative.

It’s all turned on its head, flipping the audience upside down as well, in the best ways possible.

That final page reveal would have felt shruggable in standard Wolverine stories. Because the connection between the characters is overplayed and they would have plot armor. Not here. Anything is possible to happen to any character. Just ask the dearly departed Nightcrawler and Mystique.

We love a good data page and the ones in this book never disappoint, especially in this series’ case. I didn’t expect to get some info on some big X-characters. Nor did I expect the sad Phoenix situation presented here to get even sadder and creepier. Well done, well done indeed.

Also, we get some name drops of other mutants in a similar situation to Logan. Their names will be familiar to those with knowledge of Russia’s usual mutants or anyone with access to a search engine or wiki.

This is the kind of series that really proves what the Ultimate Universe redux is trying to accomplish, which is something truly special.

Ultimate Wolverine #4 is now available from Marvel Comics.