Wolverine #65

This is not my Wolverine.

That's not to say that this is a bad Wolverine comic.  It's just an interpretation of the character that I'm not wild about.  I'm sure it's one that can be justified given Wolverine's back-canon -- there's enough back-canon for Wolvie that it can probably justify anything -- but it's not particularly what I enjoy about him.

Essentially, Jason Aaron's premise is that Logan was a self-interested son-of-a-bitch willing to sell out his lover and his friends before they sold him out.  Then he met the X-men, and ever since then he's been making the long and painful Sisyphus-like climb to redemption.  But Mystique, a woman he sold out and betrayed in the past, is there to remind him that maybe he's not really such a great guy. 

I can roll with this up to a point.  I really liked the conversation between Raven and Logan halfway through the issue, where she posits that he hates her because he can't figure out why she won't accept the redemption the X-men are offering.  But then the twist in the issue turns out to be that, back in the old days, Logan sold out his gang of circus freak bank robbers -- Mystique included.  And I guess the function of this is to question Logan's moral standing in the story.  But usually if a writer's going to undermine a 'good guy' that way, I feel like the focus ought to be on bad qualities they demonstrably have.  And I could list a lot of bad qualities that Wolverine has shown over the years -- he can be bad-tempered, violent, judgmental, and ruthless.  Still, in the best depictions of the character he's always had a moral code.  It may not be a moral code that any sane person would recognize or agree with, but there are bad things he would do and bad things he wouldn't.  I'm not particularly convinced that selling out his confederates to the cops for money falls in the category of things he would do.  Mock the short, hairy Canadian samurai thing all you want -- and in a lot of incarnations it's eminently mockable -- but my Wolverine is not a narc.  I couldn't help reflecting that Aaron's arc for Wolverine is a lot closer to an episode of Joss Whedon's 'Angel' -- who really was an utter ne'er-do-well, even before he was a vampire, until he met Buffy & company, etc etc.  It's not at all a bad story arc, I just don't really think it's Wolverine.

There's still plenty to like in this comic.   There's a nice ambiguity to the ending -- is Wolverine leaving Mystique 'to die' because he wants her to suffer, or does he know just as well as we do that she'll be back before it's all over?  There's also an interesting echo of the classic Xmen issue where Lady Deathstrike is screaming at Logan to kill her because she deserves mercy, and Logan says 'earn it.'   But there, he's got an odd kind of moral authority, and here he just sort of comes off as a dick. 

Quite possibly, Jason Aaron got trapped by the end of this arc.  The editors weren't going to let Logan kill Mystique, and -- despite insisting otherwise -- she couldn't kill him (and it's a bit odd that she seems to think she could; granted, in just the previous arc this comic told us that Wolverine couldn't keep dying and coming back, but apparently nobody gave that memo to Jason Aaron, who must have killed the guy half a dozen times in these four issues alone).  While the previous three issues have given ingenious Spy-vs-Spy style game of oneupmanship, this ending just kind of ends, maybe because there wasn't any way for the story to go.  And since I don't really believe what the story tells us about Logan's character, Aaron's whole arc comes off as a valiant effort that ultimately doesn't have much of a point.  I don't completely agree with Neb's statement in his review that Wolverine is a dead-end character because he can't be killed (though it's an interesting argument).  I do think, though, that when you have an essentially indestructible character, you have to make the emotional stakes damn convincing, and it doesn't quite come off here.