Wolverine #23: I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

We reach the end of the Wolverine/Deadpool/Danger storyline, and it’s a bit of a doozy. While I’ve been pretty…unimpressed with Percy’s X-Force, the same cannot be said for his Wolverine. It’s been one of the books I most look forward to month in and out. Especially after we finished the Vampire arc, and began focusing on characters like Omega Red, Maverick, and now Deadpool. It’s been pretty top notch, in my opinion, and the quality hasn’t dipped that much since this volume launched two years ago. 

Percy’s irreverent take on Deadpool has been one of the highlights of this storyline, and a lot of that has to do with the lack of… ridiculousness that has become synonymous with Deadpool over the last couple of decades. There’s humor here, but it’s not so over the top that it begins to grate on me, which is something I found shocking. I fully expected to get a Deadpool that would get on my nerves, but Percy’s take is more in line with how Fabian Nicieza wrote the character back in the ’90s, rather than the fourth wall breaking goon he’s transformed into. So seeing him portrayed like this gives me some hope that we’ll get more of this Deadpool over in X-Force, which is where I’m assuming he’s headed. 

To top it off, Percy made Danger the villain of this issue (the sentient AI that was once the Danger Room, but came to life in the second arc of Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men), which was a fun little experiment. I’ve always been of a mixed mind when it comes to Danger, and while she does have her moments when it comes to being an ally to the X-Men, I always found her more interesting when she’s an adversary. Percy’s Danger feels like a shout out to the robot Nanny, who kept the X-Men at bay while Magneto kept doing what Magneto did back in the ’70s, which was to try to take over the world. I’m not sure if that’s what Percy was intending to do, but it really worked for me, so kudos on the job well done. 

Don’t get it confused, I’m not a fan of Deadpool. I’m not really a fan of Wolverine either, to which I say let me explain. The X-Men was one of the properties that really snagged me into the medium, and as a child of the 90’s, every dollar I got was to buy more and more comics, and the prominence of the X-Men was hard to miss in this era, and Wolverine was the biggest cash cow Marvel had, outside of Spider-Man, and the guy was everywhere. On top of that, you had Larry Hama and a bevy of artists pumping out some stellar mutant books. One of those artists, Adam Kubert, also helped launch this new era for Wolverine, and what else can I say but damn. The man’s art ages like a fine wine, and the work he’s been giving us in this volume is some of the best of the Krakoan era.