The dead speak! Logan encounters vampires and serves his vengeance ice cold as Benjamin Percy, Viktor Bognanovic, and Matthew Wilson sink their teeth into Wolverine #5.
Tony Thornley: X of Swords is just around the corner! But looks like Wolverine has some unfinished business first. You ready to sink your teeth into this issue?
Pierce Lightning: You could say the stakes have never been higher, Tony! Except for the ones in this issue because well, we’ll get into it.
Tapping The World’s Grossest Keg
TT: So we start right off with vampires telling bad jokes. You’d think millenia would make them better comedians than this. However, these bad jokes are all directed at their latest favorite cocktail- Wolverine on ice (this is a better joke than anything else in the issue). And the vampires are tapping him like a keg or the world’s ugliest maple. And why? Because his blood seemingly makes them invincible.
PL: Right off the bat, I’m going to go ahead and say this is Percy’s weakest issue so far. I thought that the book might be finding its legs with the last issue but the attempts at humor here don’t work and the whole issue feels like a story spinning its wheels to justify one data page about Wolverine’s blood type. I do like the Wolver-keg concept, though. [Ed. note: Which he even already did in the first issue]
TT: I don’t disagree. It doesn’t help that the story feels incomplete. There are some interesting concepts but otherwise, this is an extremely anemic issue. It almost felt to me like X of Swords scheduling got in the way of plans? I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate, but the pacing was definitely off, especially in comparison to the previous four issues.
PL: It does feel a bit like they ran out of room for a Wolverine versus Dracula story in the leadup to X of Swords. In a weird way, this issue doesn’t really build on much of the previous one at all. We know there are a bunch of vampires and that Wolverine’s got the best blood. But Omega Red is nowhere to be found. The horde that we saw at the end of the last issue is absent. Hell, Wolverine is on ice for half the issue.
TT: Conceptually though, I think there’s some fun things to look at though. The “bloodclocks” are cool, the rebel vampires are a nice change of pace, and that data page was a lot of fun bad comics science. Did you know that the molecules making up Logan’s blood on the data page are real? I mean I saw fucose and galactose and thought Percy made those up.
PL: Ha! That’s a good bit of fun. But I keep getting the feeling that Xarus is going to make a comeback at some point and I don’t necessarily want to revisit “Curse of the Mutants.” Are Marvel vampire rules the same as Anne Rice vampire rules? If you become a vampire as a snowmobile riding teenager, do you remain in that form forever?
TT: This does feel very much like Curse of the Mutants the Sequel, doesn’t it? However, there’s a much clearer goal here. Use Wolverine as the vampire equivalent to the fountain of youth, create new vampires in rural Canada then turn them loose in large cities… then profit?
Midnight Meat Truck
TT: Okay, I come from a transportation background, and I don’t think these Clive Barker wannabe vampires have their CDL.
PL: Creepy Dracula License? All jokes aside, Bogdanovich really just gives me Greg Capullo vibes. It works for the stab at horror that Percy seems to be taking here but I find it almost distracting. But do you find these vampires truly compelling in any way? I guess we could be looking at canonizing What If?… #24 but wouldn’t that almost undercut Percy’s attempt to do a sort of grisly Wolverine story? [Ed. note: The now classic, What If Wolverine Was Lord Of The Vampires?]
TT: Yeah, I joke about Clive Barker wannabes, and that’s really what I see with the two truck drivers. These guys are a mixture of cenobites and the leather daddy vamps of Curse of the Mutants. What I do find compelling are the Canadian baby vamps that wake up in Minneapolis confused and hungry. I really want to follow that plotline, but the issue drops that almost immediately.
PL: For sure. I think those characters have potential but overall, it feels like this vampire arc has skipped around from plot point to plot point without giving us a really clear vision of how they might be related. I don’t need all the answers but an inkling of meaningful direction would go a long way.
TT: Yeah, the plot is very all over the place, and then we know it’s going to get dropped for the next three months for SWORDS, so it’s not going to get a follow up until at least the beginning of the year. That’s a lot of time for those baby vamps to do some damage to Minneapolis!
Vampire Snowmobilers From Hell!
PL: So probably one of the more interesting parts of the issue is Logan’s letter to Louise, the templar that we met in issue one. It certainly seems like there are or were more plans for her in this arc.
TT: Yes, the second of the two data pages here is Logan’s letter to Sister Louise, and I REALLY like what Percy does with that. It kind of looks to me this is an in case of emergency sort of situation- if you don’t get a text message every day, go check this spot, and you’ll receive instructions from there? It’s very cloak and dagger, don’t you think?
This is another thing that makes me wonder if this arc got split up by X of Swords- the letter almost makes it sound like Louise was intended to be coming in to the rescue. Instead we get Logan saving himself- with wooden stakes bolted to snowmobiles.
PL: I want to love a giant stake on a snowmobile but the general lack of stakes in the story because of pending XOS business really lowers my excitement level. I just feel like a vampire story starring Wolverine should get my blood pumping more than this does. I do want to see more of Louise, though. Maybe she’ll invite Blade and Elsa Bloodstone into her Nightguard. (By the way, Nightguard was certainly a choice for a name there.)
TT: Oh definitely. I mean after the letter we get a fight between Logan and the vamps, and it sure ends on what feels like a cliffhanger. I expect after X of Swords ends, we jump right back into this, and it’s Logan the the one remaining punk vamp meeting up with Louise and the Nightguard. As it is though, it’s a bit of a let down that we get this pretty cool fight scene, and the promise of Wolverine confronting Omega Red over his betrayal… then “Next: X of Swords!” It’s kind of anti-climactic.
PL: Big rainbow, though. Is Logan headed to Asgard or what? I hear they are fond of swords there.
TT: I literally missed that “post credits” scene the first couple times I read the issue. Isn’t Logan in that Fortnite crossover? $5 says that it’s just a teaser for that. [Ed. note: I’d take that bet]
PL: Could be. I guess I’ll never know since I am too terrible at video games to play Fortnite.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- I miss Kubert but I like Bogdanovic’s action scenes. The linework is still a little thin for my liking but there’s good energy there.
- Regrettably, despite the good action scene at the end of the issue, none of the snowmobile vampires stake the leather vampires.
- No Krakoan tease at the end of the issue.
- Oh yeah that’s a good point. Could Percy be breaking from the format for a reason? I guess we’ll see.
- Soon, Swords
Pierce Lightning is a longtime comics journalist and critic, singer for a band called Power Trash, and staving off the crushing heel of capitalism with every fiber of their comic book loving being.
Tony Thornley is a geek dad, blogger, Spider-Man and Superman aficionado, X-Men guru, autism daddy, amateur novelist, and all around awesome guy. He’s also very humble.
