Well, the Nightcrawler prequel turned out to be such a good read, I turned my attention to this one-shot. I was pleased to find Y: The Last Man scribe Brian K. Vaughan's name associated with it, so I thumbed through its pages. What I found was a well-crafted, well-paced that will be of interest to fans of the first X-Men movie. But as for those of us who are familiar with the comics incarnation of the title character, the book comes off as a bit on the repetitive, generic side.
Professor X points Logan in the direction of possible answers regarding his past... a past he cannot remember save for flashes of pain and torture. He ventures into the Canadian Rockies, only to happen upon an old enemy. He soon discovers, though, that they have something in common, and they're seeking the same answers. Enemies become friends when that hazy past catches up with them in a firefight in a country bar.
Mandrake's wild style was an excellent choice for the feral mutant with the adamantium claws. He captures the raw, savage nature of the main characters quite well, and his flowing artwork really brings out the action nicely. My one moment of disappointment in the visuals comes, though, at the end of a fiery fistfight. The flames are intense and convey the extreme mentality of the characters, but Mandrake fails to show a single aftereffect of such a nasty tactic. I expect that a choice was made to tone down the more gruesome aspects of the story in the expectation that a younger audience might be drawn to a movie tie-in.
The early scene at the X-Mansion strikes me as a bit redundant. Vaughan rehashes the ending of the first X-Men movie for five pages, and it really could have been condensed to just one. The main point of the story here seems to be to wrap up a possible loose thread left hanging after the first movie. Not all of the characters from the first flick are turning up in the second, and this story seems to offer an explanation for one of those absences.
There's really not a lot wrong with this story. Sure, it doesn't offer much in the way of resolution, but that's what the movie is for. Vaughan presents a Wolverine story that plays to what makes the character popular: violence, mystery and a sense of isolation from others. But the team-up here and the "revelation" of a connection between will fall flat for regular comics readers and X-fans. They are not the target audience here, though. Hopefully, it will find its audience among the occasional X-fans familiar with the big-screen incarnation of the characters, not those one finds in comics.
