Wolverine Origins: Swift & Terrible by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon

Wolverine has discovered that during the war, he fathered a child, a son, on his handler. But the truth was hidden from him by her, and now he wants to track down his son and make up to him Wolverine's total absence from his life. But his son is working for the same shadow society that he once worked for, and he's angry that they have changed his son into a killing machine that actually enjoys taking lives.

His son, though, doesn't feel he needs a father. He thinks Logan is a coward for hiding behind a mask and a costume, and he'll be more than happy to kill Wolverine and take him out of the picture on behalf of those he works for. But just like Wolverine, his son was born with bone "claws" that can extend from his hands, and he has the same mutant healing factor that Wolverine does.

If Wolverine wants to defeat his son, he has to negate his boy's healing factor, and the only thing that can do that is a Carbonadium Synthesizer. And it can negate the healing factor without killing his son. But Wolverine was captured by shield, and who comes to see him but... his son- who immediately tries to disembowel him. But Wolverine has a healing factor, too, and he survives.

Someone sends men in armor to kill him, but Wolverine manages to escape the base and vanish, still looking for his son. As for his son, he is a racist... bigoted against the human race, and he doesn't seem to have many emotions except rage and hatred. He even kills the human woman he's been with by letting her see him with someone else, a man, and then when she returns home to drink and cry, he tells her that he spiked the drink with lots of crushed sleeping pills. He feels nothing for her because he is the inheritor of the human race- because he's better than human.

But Silas Burr, a mutant who calls himself Cyber is gunning for both Logan and his son, Daken. Reduced to something very much like Mental Ectoplasm, he takes over the body of an extremely strong man who is mentally retarded, and uses his body to try and take revenge on Daken, covering his body in Adamantium so that Daken's claws can't affect him.

But Wolverine knows Cyber from long ago, and he has a vengeance to take on the man as well... just as long as he gets the information he wants, first....

It's always interesting how far the apple can fall from the tree, and in Daken's case, he's very different from Logan. Logan wasn't the perfect operative because even though he's got a hair-trigger temper and the fighting instincts of his animal name, at heart he's really a decent guy. Not so for his son, and that's what makes the real difference between them.

But Logan seems smarter than his son, even if he is less ruthless and nasty. Daken seems to react as an animal might, but Logan is more of a man, more able to think, and that is why I feel he'll eventually beat out Daken when it comes to their war. At least I hope so.

I found this book to be very darkly themed, and yet, in the end I enjoyed it. Logan's fights with Sabretooth had all the fury of two animals, but the fights with his son are both more and less, but in all ways better. The stakes have been raised for Logan, and while he might hope he'll be able to turn his son good, I don't think it's possible. Recommended.