WOLVERINE #179
"Of Lesser Demons..."
Neutral (4/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Matt Nixon
Pencils: Ethan Van Sciver
Inks: Lary Stucker
Colors: Avalon Studios
Letters: Comicraft
Editor: Mike Marts
Price: $2.25 US/$3.75 CAN |
As a Canadian, I have a soft spot for Marvel's team of super-heroes from the Great White North, I admit, and I was pleased to find that Matt Nixon's work here was far better than what we saw in the two-parter that preceded this issue, "The Shadow Pulpit." Nevertheless, the story comes off as generic at best, with a couple of clever ideas peppered in.
An otherdimensional spirit -- another shaman, long since dead -- turns up at Alpha Flight headquarters, waiting for a new recruit to usurp for its own dark purposes. It takes over Alpha Flight's headquarters, and the only available member not under the spirit's sway, Shaman, summons the team's one-time leader, Wolverine, to the remote forested lands of British Columbia to help retake the facility and free his old friends.
Van Sciver captures the title character's intensity quite well... a little too well at times. Wolverine's feral and hairy nature goes a little over the top at a couple of key moments in the story. Mind you, the artist's work on the creepy, organic, supernatural setting in which the main action takes place is quite effective. The climax is a bit confused visually, though. It's hard to discern the moment at which the demonic creature loses control of the situation, or even what it was trying to do to Snowbird. Avalon's colors are vibrant and bring the energy of the characters to life nicely.
The gecko -- the unusual method of communication Shaman uses to bring Wolverine into the fray -- made for a great moment, both visually and conceptually. t reinforced the more natural side of the Shaman character as opposed to the supernatural. Nixon also piqued my interest with the notion of a shaman prodigy, an individual Logan is apparently going to help protect and train.
In the end, though, Nixon offers up a fairly generic super-hero plot. We've seen this time and time again, and as a result, it holds no suspense for the reader. Mind you, this did serve as a nice, light introduction to Marvel's Canadian super-hero team, if an inconsequential one.
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