Wolverine by Chris Claremont
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I got this as the Kindle “Daily Deal” about a week ago. It’s really a bundling of six comic book editions: Wolverine No. 1 through 4, and Uncanny X-Men No. 172 & 173.
The story begins as Wolverine travels to Japan to check on his beloved Mariko only to discover she is married to another man. Her abusive husband is a man owed a debt by Shingen Yashida, Mariko’s father and a Yakuza crime lord. Mariko is the repayment of debt. Over the course of the six books, Wolverine battles Shingen Yashida and–having defeated him–must take on Mariko’s half-brother, the Silver Samurai. In the process, while Wolverine loves Mariko, Yukio (Shingen’s assassin sent to kill Wolverine)falls for Wolverine’s animal charm. The final two editions involve the X-men coming to Wolverine’s wedding to Markio, but only Storm plays a significant role in the action.
I will admit that comic books are not my bag. As a writer, I generally find the dialog and internal monologues contrived and filled with jarring “as you know, Bob” style references. This is nails-on-chalkboard grating to me, and it was no less true for this book than others. However, I accept that some of this is an inevitable result of the serialized nature of story lines (often across different series), the space limitations, and the fact that boys are a targeted audience. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I have not yet read The Watchmen, which I understand is the gold standard for graphic novels, and so I’m not sure how well writing can be done in this format.
Having said that, I thought the story line was intriguing and it obviously kept my interest through to the end (albeit without much of a significant time investment.) There are lots of battles with ninja, so how cool is that?
It’s the first graphic-intensive book that I’ve read on my Kindle–which is the basic model, and I was surprised how well it worked. Each page contained several frames, usually in mice type that was hard on the eyes, but one could double-tap the screen to call up a single frame in very legible type.
I think this is worth a read if you’re interested in the Wolverine story. The upcoming Wolverine movie seems to share many of the same characters, but apparently with a different story line. Of course, as I understand it, the X-men series of movies are legendary for scrambling the mythology and timelines of the comics without much concern for being internally consistent, let alone consistent with the comics.
View all my reviews
Tags: Book Review, books, Chris Claremont, comics, Frank Miller, science fiction, silver samurai, Uncanny X-men, Wolverine
By B Gourley in Book Reviews, Books, fiction, Review, Reviews, Science Fiction on April 20, 2013.
