Number 27 by Saladin Ahmed Glutton is available and features Logan alongside the Savage Champions, their multiversal counterparts, taking on Adamantine. As a reminder, Adamantine is the entity that is the manifestation of metal itself and is waging war against the Savage Champions.
Be careful, friend. Spoilers ahead.
Initially, the team is overwhelmed by the power and versatility of Adamantine’s physical manifestation. Victory is finally achieved for the Wolverines when Logan perseveres through sheer force of will. Help the Wild Champions hold on long enough to mystically transfer strength to it (something like a Spirit Bomb of Dragon Ball Z), allowing you to scratch the manifestation until you find a weak spot. He opens it and the fight ends.
Willpower is a commonly used trope in Logan’s story, although not as common as others. However, I don’t think this use of the willpower trope had enough emotional substance to really impact Logan. The main reason is that there is nothing at stake.
We don’t know these random Wolverines enough to care about them. They are mostly solid characters and give weight to Logan’s arc, but not his own.
For example, refusing to turn into an animal is one of the central aspects/discussions surrounding Logan’s character. One of the other Wolverines is Boneclaw, a Beast-like Logan who is still a protector with a kind heart, despite his appearance and his inability to speak a human language. It is an animal, but only in name. It doesn’t follow the features that come with one. The same goes for our Logan.
It works, but the dialogue surrounding Boneclaw didn’t do enough to make me feel for his own character. The same goes for the other Savage Champions, and better character dialogue for them would have been worth it emotionally when all the Wolverines were on the brink of death during the climax of the battle.
Regarding the issue of transmitted emotion, many of the attempts to build bridges between introspection and the character’s emotion do not convince me. One reason is because of internal dialogue. Logan says things like “The grimy depths of my miserable excuse for a soul” doesn’t sound like something Logan would say. For starters, it’s too wordy for Wolverine, who is a king at delivering one-liners with depth. Second, Logan has dry humor, but this struck me as too serious rather than a joke.
Additionally, many of these low self-esteem lines often appear in situations where Logan feels bad about himself. In this situation, he was triumphing. It’s hard to make a line like that flow well in general unless you’re joking with a friend, but this time it’s internal. Communicating this line becomes more difficult when it doesn’t work considering the context.
I feel the same way at the end when they transport him back home. He says, word for word, that the X-Men care about him because they are his friends, but also because he is“An unkillable bastard that gets the job done.”
Again, it’s too wordy. But also, that would be something I could imagine him saying when he met the X-Men. Now, with decades and decades of character relationships and friendships, I feel like Logan knows that the X-Men value him beyond his fighting ability. Even if he could no longer fight or was no longer unkillable, they would still love him.
Previous issues in this same run feature Nightcrawler coming to check on Logan. It ends with him taking Logan on a trip to the beach just to cheer him up. It’s safe to say that the X-Men don’t just look back on him fondly for that reason.
Of course, that reflection was a setup for Logan’s delivery of the iconic “The best there is” line. But there are other ways to say that. Logan’s inner voice talking about protection would have worked. They both could have talked about how he loves to protect them and how they appreciate him. Lines like, “They know I’ll do anything for them. If that includes killing, so be it. Because I’m the best there is at what I do.” Something similar works.
What I really liked about it was that Logan accepted both the beast part and the adamantium part of himself. Both of these things have caused him a lot of pain, but he finally makes peace with them.
While it doesn’t work for me in many ways, I admire and appreciate the attempts to try something different instead of the typical Weapon X and sins of past stories that permeate the Wolverine books. You are facing something in the present.
I just wish the execution was a little better.
Classification: 3.1/5