Daken: Dark Wolverine 9.1

Obviously “this works – let’s have some more of it” is commonplace thinking at just about any business, naturally enough, but Marvel have been surely stretching the point in recent years. Multiple Hulks, Spider-clones of various types, a second Thor, two or three Avengers teams at a time. I suppose it derives from the success of the X-franchising of some years ago. Here we have Wolverine’s son, who is a lot like him but a bad guy.

My only previous familiarity with him was via Dark Avengers, where he seemed something of a cipher, with no more to him than the last phrase in the previous paragraph. I’m also losing patience with these .1 issues, too many of which are poorly thought out as jumping-on points, as well as often being bad comics.

This isn’t terrible, but I can’t really see it hooking new readers. It feels like one of those quiet issues between big storylines, though I guess there is also some kind of statement of intent, albeit of a largely negative kind. Daken has taken over the island of Madripoor’s crime world, but his final victim suggests he is just an unimaginative son of Wolverine, which is how he strikes me too. Daken therefore goes to see Wolverine (with guest shots from the rest of the Avengers) to tell him that he won’t be troubling him in the future because he is going his own way. Not knowing just how obsessed he has previously been with dad, I can’t tell how significant this is, and we don’t get any suggestion at all of what this new way might be, so it’s hard to read it as terribly enticing. Daken doesn’t get a lot of dialogue in this, so I don’t get any real sense of his personality here, again beyond that first impression.

But even though I don’t find the story something to grab my attention, the scripting is rather good. He gets the current Bendis feel dead right on Spider-Man’s dialogue, and a couple of other characters get some strong lines too. I don’t really get the point of the opening and closing scene, though, where Daken is choosing some art for his new home – if some prior knowledge of the comic is needed to comprehend this, it’s another piece of bad .1 thinking.

The art is okay, though there is little that wouldn’t have looked at home in a Wolverine comic 25 years ago. It does get everyone right, and it is clear and there are no bad moments, and given how many comics can’t get the basic craft right it deserves some credit, but there is nothing special about any of it, no terrific faces or panels or layouts or whatever.

This is not a bad comic, but it strikes me as another failure at providing a jumping-on point for new readers, since its change in direction is not a change if you’ve not followed the direction before, and its future is not implied in any way. It won’t keep me buying.