Check out the weirdest noir detective story this side of Chinatown from Benjamin Percy, Adam Kubert, Frank Martin, Espen Grundetjern and Cory Petit as Wolverine #16 goes noir!
Tony Thornley: Well that was… Huh. I really don’t know if I like or hate Solem coming out of Wolverine #16. And that’s… Huh. Kinda at a loss for words here, Pierce.
Pierce Lightning: Hey, welcome back, Tony! We’ll get you back into the swing of things.
Drinks With The Devil
Tony: After I took a month off with our last issue, this issue is interesting to come back to. Somehow, we still get that same noir-ish feeling of the Madripoor issue, but it also feels very pulp adventure. I think Percy leans into some fun tropes of pulps in Wolverine #16.
I mean, here we get two enemies sharing a drink while they are both pointing metaphorical guns at each other under the table. We see the villain trying to gain sympathy. We even get commentary on the liquor. I can almost hear Harrison Ford voicing Wolverine and Solem using an Austrian accent in my head. Okay, now I want Wolverine to do an Indiana Jones.
Pierce: Honestly, I didn’t love Wolverine #16. I get that Percy is working on fleshing out Solem a bit more, but the conflict feels flat. I’m all for a trickster-y fuckboy villain, but this issue saw Solem leaning into his conniving bluster. I wasn’t convinced, and it felt odd that Logan was.
I hear you on the Indiana Jones/pulp hero thing, though. Maybe it’s the pirate-y nature of this arc? I appreciate a story that feels specific to Logan in a way that his adventures in other books don’t always.
Tony: See, you hit the nail on the head for why I’m torn. I liked most of the issue, but Solem himself? I can’t figure him out. You say trickster f-boy, and I don’t think you’re wrong. He has a weird vibe that’s going for sympathetic but leans too far into the mercurial evil. It’s slightly Loki-ish, but the character isn’t sympathetic enough.
Pierce: I don’t know if he’s ever even approaching being sympathetic, though. Solem might consider himself misunderstood, but he’s still a villain. He has constantly proved there’s no reason to trust him. We’ll get to a topic in a second, but that makes the whole crux of this issue ring hollow for me.
Tony: Yeah, exactly. I like Solem for his potential, but I don’t think I like him as he is on the page. He’s just too ill-defined at this point, I think, for the story to work as intended.
Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal!
Pierce: So the double-cross… Tony, when I tell you, I sighed… Solem’s motivations still feel so obtuse here. Is he an agent of chaos? Is he flirting? Does he have some master plan? Is that master plan to create clones of the X-Men that he wants to have sex with? All of the above?
I dug how Logan dealt with Sevyr, but besides that, I didn’t get a ton from this whole section.
Tony: Yeah, I liked the action beats through here quite a bit, which Kubert and Grundetjern deserve most of the credit. The character beats, however, fall short. The only surprising aspect of Solem’s betrayal was how quick it was. I agree, it did give us a pretty fun fight between Sevyr and Logan, though.
The fight did one thing well. The creative team deserves credit for it, in my opinion. Seeing Logan as the intelligent brawler- rather than just “stab cut slice!”- was very cool, and it gave Logan the win.
Pierce: I enjoy Logan when he’s more deliberate than his berserker reputation. I think he is overlooked in the strategy department quite often. The guy has been around the block once or twice, and he knows what he’s doing.
Kubert does a solid job choreographing the fight in Wolverine #16. My favorite page has to be the win. I love how he guides the eye, and Sevyr sinks lower and lower, leading ideally into that incredibly satisfying panel of Wolverine with the Muramasa. I think this Kubert guy might have a long career ahead of him!
Tony: Amen to that! That page ruled.
We Like To Party
Tony: Okay, the closing scenes in Wolverine #16 made me realize something about Solem. Thinking back to the idea of “you have new gods now,” you can see the archetypes of the gods of myth in the X-Men: Magneto is Zeus; Storm is a mixture of Hera and Thor; Jean is Athena. It’s not perfect, but if you squint, you can see it.
But Solem? He’s a fighty Bacchus.
I don’t think this changes what we were saying earlier, but it helped me understand him a little more.
Pierce: I like that you landed there because I wasn’t even thinking that! The closing scene frustrated me still because Solem still feels like a character with very obtuse motivations. The continued secrets of Arrako/Krakoa have piqued my interest.
I love that there’s so much we don’t know. Percy does a good job setting the stage for Wolverine’s next chapter, especially as Inferno looms over the line. Hickman and the rest of the X brain trust have been playing things reasonably close to the vest. It’s why we are just scratching the surface of the dynamics at play here.
However, Emma’s outfit in that last scene is a travesty. I honestly didn’t think it was her at first.
Tony: Another area where Kubert’s art doesn’t get Emma right is a bummer. Wolverine #16 was a compelling issue overall. Despite Solem being so difficult to invest in, I felt like we got a solid action story. There were several exciting teases for Inferno. Then there’s the series you and I haven’t mentioned yet, “X Lives of Wolverine” and “X Deaths of Wolverine”. I wonder if some of the elements we struggled with are set up for that?
Pierce: You might be right. This could be a classic “wait and see” scenario but considering how much of Percy’s run has forced us to wait with little in the way of meaningful payoff, forgive me if that doesn’t seem especially exciting.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Grundetjern steps in for Martin for the vast majority of the issue and doesn’t miss a step from the long-time color artist. Some great work in the color department.
- Sex in superhero comics is cool with me, but the data page toward the end felt kind of clumsy. I’m pretty sure we could tell from the rest of the book that Solem wants Wolverine in the biblical sense.
- I think you can feel Emma’s disgust for Solem pretty well on that same data page, though. Don’t know if that helps or hurts quite yet.
- How many X-Men know about Solem’s little cave, and why do I feel like one of them is Quentin Quire?
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.
