Wolverine: The Best There Is: Contagion

Sometimes a single panel seems to sum up everything that makes a comic terrible. Here it’s the bottom panel of page 15, which may be a contender for the single panel with most glaring faults in any Big Two comic ever. Wolverine is in a night club with some apparently random woman, and she is inviting him to dance. His reply is “Babe, I try to get my groove on, and I’ll need every team I’m on to rescue me out of that jam.” This is among the worst lines of dialogue I can remember reading in some time: awkward, forced, dated, tin-eared, not sounding like Wolverine, desperately straining for wittiness and missing by miles. The art in this panel matches that quality: the woman has Lolo Ferrarri tits, basketballs stuck to her chest; she has what I know must be a bottle in one hand, because it’s there in previous panels, but it is so ineptly drawn that it looks like she is tossing someone off, helped by the spilling drips; her head doesn’t quite make sense in 3D, though to be fair there are many worse examples of this kind of incompetence in this comic; certainly the angle of head and eyes makes no sense; Wolverine has two bottles, but again the right hand grip makes no sense; and his head is about 90 degrees right from where it should be; add in a totally misjudged other woman’s face in the corner, looking as if she has just been punched in the stomach, as a distracting compositional fuck-up of extraordinary proportions, and you have a monstrously awful panel.

I must emphasise that the panel described at too great length above is a convenient (though far from exhaustive) summation of flaws rather than an aberration in an otherwise less dreadful comic. This is consistently bad, featuring unintentionally ugly faces (imagine Glenn Fabry with a dash of Carlos Ezquerra, then deduct fifty IQ points and most of the actual technical skill) and countless examples of lamely faked anatomy (Ryp is particularly awful on grip), plus hideous colouring, and the whole thing looks a mess throughout. This is not helped by the excruciatingly bad dialogue, some of the worst I’ve ever read, and a plot that makes no sense: the villain has a complex plan requiring Wolverine, and fortunately encounters him at random; when he has him down and where he wants him, he lets him go without attempting to restrain him; when Wolverine comes back, he sends his minions to attack him in ways that make no sense and fail to contribute to his brilliant plan at all; which works anyway thanks to moments where Wolverine does things that are both deeply stupid and totally out of character. These things include having two villains at his mercy, his claws in them, and stopping to chat while they machine-gun him, then, knowing that the key threat here is a psychoactive control drug (the Beast analysed it for him, a pointless scene since he then does nothing to counter it and acts as if he doesn’t know), letting another villain kiss him. It’s too idiotic to believe for an instant. After they thereby take Wolverine down (and at least this time they don’t let him wander off), the villain announces that he wants to use Wolverine’s healing factor to cure his sick son: I am not making it up when I say that this takes 14 pages of just dialogue (Wolverine and the son are strapped down, the rest barely move a muscle). 14 pages to say that – you might take that from a Bendis, someone who can write dialogue with rhythm and wit and incision, but here it’s like torture.

I should add that this comes with a parental advisory, because the amount of gore and slicing is colossal. Most of it is out of character and irrelevant, but if it’s what you want, there is enough to satisfy anyone. Weirdly, the language is however really coy, even ###ing out the word ‘ass’ – you’d have thought the ‘NOT FOR KIDS!’ would mean they could have got away with a little more in the way of actual aggressive words.

This is a collection of the first three issues of Wolverine: The Best There Is under the Must Have legend. I thoroughly approve of collecting these runs for the bargain price of $5 for new readers, when a title has been in demand (I was very grateful for the Avengers: The Children’s Crusade one), but it is seriously depressing to think that, even with a character as perennially in demand as Wolverine (and I confess that I have never really understood his popularity), a farrago this abominably ugly and incompetent could have sold at all well.