Savage Wolverine #1 // Review
There’s a big mess in the desert somewhere in the western United States. A mean-looking guy with a weird haircut is assessing things. There are people chasing him again. He figures that the people who sent them are not that much of a threat. It’ll be a while before they try to track him down again given the mess he made of them. He might be right, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be danger in Savage Wolverine #1. Writer Tom Bloom delivers a solidly entertaining one-shot with artist Devmalya Pramanik and Guillermo Sanna. Color comes to the page courtesy of Java Tartaglia.
Logan is rolling-in to Tropica. The sign on the way nto town declares that it’s “Your Hollywood West of Sierra Nevada.” Logan’s not impressed with that. He really just needs gas for his bike. What he’s going to get is going to be considerably more complicated than fuel for his bike. And as long as he’s in town, he’s also looking for a beer. Best he can manage is a can of weak, generic “beer” brand beer out of a yellow can on his bike in the parking lot of a motel. He notices a few people who might be trouble...and he gets exactly what he expects...
Bloom has a solid premise that stems from a classic action hero cliche. A loner rolls into a small town that has problems. He’s got to solve the problem to help out the town. Bloom fuses the cliche with contemporary anxieties about insular paranoia and the power of influencers. It’s a remarkably solid fusion of action, drama, horror and a little bit of contemporary social commentary. No one genre ever totally overwhelms the other in an issue that feels remarkably entertaining from cover to cover while still being something like twice the length of a normal comic book.
The script that Bloom is exploring probably could have been condensed into a more standard length, but it would have lacked the deliciously creepy moodiness that Pramanik, Sanna and Tartaglia manage throughout the issue, The small ghost town of Tropica feels desolate with heavy shadows and a lot of mystery. The horror of fear bleeds out of the shadows in visuals that are draped in beautifully garish color by Tartaglia. Action moves across the page in powerfully familiar action as Logan strikes some classic poses here and there while fighting monsters conjured by anti-mutant paranoia. It’s a lot of fun.
The standalone story feels more or less perfectly placed on the page. There isn’t a hell of a lot of depth to the themes being explored, but it IS a lot of fun watching a familiar story make its way from cover to cover. The themes being explored in Bloom’s script may have met a more clever rendering elsewhere at a few different points over the course of the long and winding history of X-Men-related Marvel books, but its always reassuring to see some of the sentiment rushing across page and panel once more.
