Sunday, April 26, 2009

Wolverine: Prodigal Son by Antony Johnston and Wilson Tortosa

Logan, also known as Wolverine, is a teenager living in a martial arts school called Quiet Earth. He was found as a child by the Sensei of the school- Elliot, naked and alone, and the man adopted him and took him in. Logan had no memory and no idea of why he was in the forest like that, but he's been training at the school ever since.

He's the best in the school, and he knows it, using his speed, skill and agility to come out on top of any fight he gets into. One of his closest friends is the Sensei's daughter, Tamara. She's just as good as he is, but Logan's ability to heal from just about any wound means he isn't all that interested in defending himself completely, if he can take a hit and go on to defeat his attacker.

The Sensei realizes that Logan is looking for a challenge, and so agrees to let Logan go to the City with him if he succeeds in a test called "The Test of Wind, Wood and Water". But to teach him to work with another, he tells Logan that he must work with Tamara to defeat the test. If either of them loses, both of them will lose. The other students consider Logan to already have lost, since even the Sensei wasn't able to pass the test!

Their first test is to take a bell from around the throat of a wild deer, and they manage to do it by working together. The second part of the test is to take a bowl of water to the top of a specific tree without losing all of the water. This, they also strive to do, but the students and masters of the school also attack them on the way as part of the test, and the bowl has a small leak in it. However, Logan lets Tamara drink some of the water and carries her to the top of the tree, using his claws to scale it- nobody said the water had to be in the bowl.

Thus, Logan and Tamara succeed, and Logan gets to travel to New York City with Sensei, but the bustle of people are almost overwhelming for Logan, and when some man bumps into him, he challenges the man to fight, until Sensei tells him that the man didn't challenge him, it was simply the way people are in the city.

Logan has a hard time controlling his temper, and when the Sensei shows him off to the Sensei of another martial arts school, Logan gets into a fight with the best student of that School. He loses, and nearly kills the boy with his claws, dishonoring his sensei. But after the fight, he and Sensei are attacked by men in black, and Sensei is captured. He tells Logan to go back to the school and give a message to Tamara, but when he gets back, the school has been attacked, is on fire, and all the students and teachers are dead... except for Tamara. She blames Logan and attacks him, but he manages to convince her he wasn't responsible.

They find out who was: a student who left years ago when Logan defeated him. Logan was only a child at the time, and the young man was humiliated to be defeated by him. Now he's returned, and while his men helped take out the school, he's not doing this on his own, he's working for someone else. Someone who wants Logan. But who can it be, and can Logan defeat these people while keeping Tamara alive?

I was quite honestly scared at the idea of a manga Wolverine. I don't think the character of Logan goes very well with the whole sensibility of manga. And in the end, I did find it an awfully rough fit. While apparently this book was done with the permission, and even blessing of Marvel, I didn't like what they did with the character.

As far as I can tell, they jettisoned the whole of his backstory to make him a modern-day teenager. He still is called Wolverine, as a nickname, because he tends to act like one, but he's more of a moody teenager when he's not being cocky and arrogant. If you really want to see him as a character like this, its best to jettison everything you knew about the character before- as his youth as James Howlett, his past with Rose and the boy named Dog... everything. This may be a Wolverine, but his connection to the usual Marvel character is his names and his claws- that's pretty much it.

It's an okay story, but the disconnect between who the creators were asking me to accept this character being, and the character as presented on the page was so wide that I just couldn't do it. He may be *a* Wolverine, but he's not *the* Wolverine, and my mental attempts to stick him in that mold failed miserably. So I couldn't enjoy the story because my mental misery made me very uncomfortable reading it. Had they named the character something else, it would have been fine, but this is not Wolverine, and I just can't see him as Gorgeous EmoTeen with Claws and Amnesia. It didn't work for me.

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