Written by Rob Williams
Art by Laurence Campbell and Kris Justice
Published by Marvel
If comics buyers actually spoke with their wallets, 2006 could have been referred to by future generations as The Year That People Got Sick of Superhero Comics Taking Themselves Too Seriously. Of course, comics buyers are, as is evidenced by the Factual Opinion being forced to give the title to Catwoman at one point, will pay for just about anything in fears of missing an issue. Still, even the most highly tolerant buyer has had to have reached an overload on angst in the last few months--while Batman, Punisher and Wolverine have always struggled with being the worst offenders in the "Let's pretend this stuff is real" department, even Superman and the "Only good when it's a soap opera" team books have come across less as comics this year and more as a constant attack on the idea that comics are for kids and immature adults by making them shitty metaphors for every aspect of grief and sorrow that an early thirties writer who hates Mcsweeny's can come up with.
In other words, chill the fuck out. We've got Vertigo, you're not as good as Alan Moore, and no amount of realism, angst, hard-bitten noir dialog is going to trick anybody into thinking that spandex costumes look good.
That being said, if you're going to have some fun with a character, and you've extra pages and no greater story to worry about, you could always turn to Wolverine #49 for a primer in having a good old comic book adventure: designed to be tattered, this is the sort of stuff that people should be making a hell of a lot more of. By liberally stealing the plot of the first Die Hard and adding Wolverine to the mix (but not in place of the Bruce Willis character, Logan's more a re-imagining of the black Twinkie-eating beat cop) and choosing to have all the disposable cannon fodder be actual midgets dressed as elves, Rob Williams (a writer just about everybody was looking up last night) has crafted one of the best issues of Wolverine in a long time. Whether it was Wolvie's future buddy cop calling him "Warthog Boy" or a bloody Weapon X standing atop a pile of slaughtered elves (in full Christmas Mall Regalia,) this is the sort of thing most Wednesday nights leaves readers craving: full-tilt action with a healthy dose of goof-ball logic. Of course Wolverine is going to stop in the middle of a hostage crisis to don his costume (which he, of course, brought with him, to the fucking mall.) Of course it's all going to end in front of New York's Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. This is comics we're talking about--this ain't Beckett.
-Tucker Stone, 2006
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