Return Of Wolverine #5 // Review
Logan finally finds out Persephone and Soteira’s plans in Return Of Wolverine #5, by writer Charles Soule, artist Steve McNiven, inker Jay Kristen, colorist Laura Martin, and letterer Joe Sabino. This book has been a disappointment since the first issue and this one is no different.
Logan makes his way to Soteira's orbital satellite and is confronted by a hologram of Persephone. She tells him about what is going on in the satellite and gives him a chance to join them. he refuses and Persephone activates a death trap, which Logan is able to escape. He finally finds out what Persephone has planned for the human race and sets out to stop it, fighting his way through Soteira's security forces. After ending Persephone's threat for now, Logan makes his way to a familiar mansion.
As far as the story goes, there's very little good about this issue. Soule is definitely trying to set up Persephone and Soteira as a new thorn in Logan's side, but he's failed to make this new villain and her organization even a little interesting. The long info dump Persephone goes into to try and ingratiate herself to Logan kills any momentum the book could have had and doesn't really serve to make her any better of a character. Her plan takes advantage of her powers and her organization's resources in a novel way that isn't predictable. Yet doesn't serve to make either Persephone or her organization any better.
The mystery of the hot claws and how Logan got an Infinity Stone or how he lost his memory in the time between giving up that Stone and the events of this book isn't answered, but that's probably going to be left to future books. It's a little frustrating, but it's not a big surprise. Marvel seems to think that the continuing mysteries will keep fans coming back to Wolverine, as if fans of the character haven't been clamoring for his return for a while now. That's another reason this book has been such a huge disappointment. Soule tried to layer the book with so many mysteries and introduce something new to the Wolverine mythos, but he failed in that the hot claws are a dumb idea and in making his new villain and her evil science cabal at all intriguing.
Steve McNiven is back on art and his art fits the book much better than Declan Shalvey's did. In fact, the art is probably the best part of the book even if it suffers from latter day McNiven art inconsistencies. He again apes Barry Windsor-Smith's style and it looks very nice in some places but in other places his line work is rather weak. There's some very nice action panels and he's always been good at character acting. Still, there's some places where the art is kind of lacking the flair that other panels have.
Return Of Wolverine #5 brings this mini series to a close and it ends the way it began- disappointing. Marvel made Soule their go to Wolverine guy since Death Of Wolverine, and while that book was nothing special, it's way stronger than this book. Soule completely failed in bringing anything new and intriguing into Wolverine's life. This issue could have fixed that, but it doesn't. The fact that he spent so little time developing Soteira or Persephone throughout this series means so much of this issue is just a massive info dump that slows everything to crawl. Because of this, the rest of the books accelerates wildly and is extremely unsatisfying because it doesn't have room to breath. McNiven's art is strong in some places and weak in others and it's still the best part of this lackluster effort.
