Laura Kinney: Wolverine #6 // Review
Laura was bred to be the perfect killer. Senses that could allow her to sell the faintest trail of something on the air from miles away. Razor-sharp claws that pop out of her fists. The ability to heal almost any wound with jaw-dropping speed and efficiency. But maybe that’s NOT the story. Maybe it’s just all in her head. Maybe there’s something else going on altogether in Laura Kinney: Wolverine #6. Writer Erica Schultz continues a fun exploration into the psyche of Kinney in an issue brought to page and panel by artist Giada Belviso and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg.
She’s just gotten back from college and she’s a little bit confused. It’s winter break and she’s back at home visiting her father Logan and her little sister Gabby. It should be the perfect, little holiday in a nice, spacious home out in the middle of the wilderness of some small town, but there’s something about it that definitely ISN”T right and she doesn’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the fact that the stories that she’s been writing in college seem more real than the life that she finds herself surrounded by. Or maybe there’s something deeper at work.
The “it’s all really a dream, but really it’s not and the hero is being brainwashed,” them has been echoing through superhero comic books for decades. It’s one of those tropes that’s very, very difficult to do in a way that feels terribly novel. To he credit, Schultz IS using the format to dive into aspects of Laura’s personality that might not otherwise stand much of a chance of emerging under the traditional trappings of a Wolverine story. It’s an enjoyable trip throug the pages with someone who is struggling with a basic concept of reality that could bend in a million different directions.
Belviso is given the opportunity to explore psychological family drama with extremely familiar superhero characters. There’s no power here...just a whole lot of different familiar faces that would normally be associated with super powers and ridiculously powerful treats. To her credit, Belviso does an excellent job of amplifying the family drama around the edges of the mystery. Each character is imbued with a very firm poise and energy. Kids can be really, really difficult for any comic book artist to draw without making them look like weird, little proto-adult homunculi. Thankfully Belviso does a breathtakingly cool job of giving Laura’s little sister the perfect look for her age...which goes A LONG way towards selling a very compelling sort of drama in the visual.
It takes a hell of a lot of guts to just plunge the entire narrative of a full issue directly into a whole new reality which suggests that the whole rest of the Marvel Universe is just some where hallucination of psychotic fugue wolrd ot whatever. Schultz has a clever approach to creating a more realistic, earthbound reality behind the dramatic physics and overwhelming crises of the Marvel Universe.
