Astonishing Spider-Man and Wolverine: Another Fine Mess

This is another of Marvel’s Must Have bargain $5 reprints of the first three issues of what is presumably a hot series. I nearly didn’t bother with it, since I hated the last such collection, also with Wolverine, but this isn’t anywhere near that bad.

However, it does feel very derivative, particularly of recent Grant Morrison comics around the death of Batman. As in The Return of Bruce Wayne, our heroes are bounced back in time to caveman days; and there is even a magic bullet being fired at a very Darkseidish incarnation of Doctor Doom, as in Final Crisis. In fact, that alleged caveman time really bugs me, in that Spidey somehow calculates that they are there just before the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, even being able to predict the day it is happening and where the meteor will hit. My main problem with all this is that we don’t get much glimpse of the dinosaurs that were around then, but we do get primitive humans, well over 60 million years early, and scientist Peter Parker seems to find nothing odd in this. After the meteor hits, we jump forward to some future run by people evolved from one of these primitive human types, who apparently emerged after 65 millions years in hiding to take over when the humans we know were wiped out by the massively enhanced Doc Doom. We also get Devil Dinosaur, the Phoenix force and the Cosmic Cube. There are also all sorts of other mysteries piled on – magic diamonds, a mysterious woman obsessing Spidey, two people watching our heroes and manipulating things in unclear ways, a shadowy villain behind the scenes. I suppose there will be explanations later in the series, but it feels kind of random and nonsensical so far, and I’d only be able to forgive the insane science if the worlds Peter and Logan have been seeing are fantasies in some way.

I’m also a bit bewildered by the interaction between Spider-Man and Wolverine, who in this clearly hate each other and can’t connect at all. They have been together in the Avengers for quite a while now, and while that hasn’t made them friends in any meaningful way, the level of antagonism here is very different, and comes with no kind of explanation.

The art is okay. I fear I have always judged Adam Kubert a bit harshly for being nowhere remotely near as good as dad Joe, which is totally unfair. I think he makes one or two mistakes here, particularly when sequencing panels as a spread across two pages without making that obvious, but he also gives us some very strong sequences and panels, including a few compositions that felt very fresh and effective. I wish he were better on faces – some are crude and clumsy, and I like the art much better when the characters are masked.

The fact that this feels a bit of a mess may easily be deliberate, looking at the title of the collection, but that doesn’t make it any more satisfying, despite some good pages, lively moments and plenty of ideas, even if they are not actually fresh or original ideas. Maybe it will make a more coherent full-series collection eventually, but as it stands I am not tempted to pick up the rest of the issues.