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.
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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.