Wolverine: Election Day by Peter David

Matthew Hayes is just an ordinary High School student who was asked to find a candidate to support for the President, and reasons to elect him. Despite feeling that the candidates were all the same, Matt eventually settled on a man named Winston Mazone, and shilled for him to the other kids in class. Regardless of his feelings, the kids chose other candidates, but in a way, Matthew did win over someone to Mazone's candidacy- his own teacher. Unfortunately for Matthew, he is kidnapped from his home soon after the end of school.

Tony Westlake is a soldier in the army. But when an argument between other soldiers over a poker game outs his mutant ability as a lie detector, his own comrades decide to take him out. But he's rescued by Wolverine, who asks him to consider joining the school for mutants in New York. Surprisingly, Tony pooh-poohs the idea as hiding away, and compares it to enclaves of black people hiding from prejudiced whites. Wolverine doesn't mind- that's his choice to make.

But when they find out about the kidnapping of Matthew Hayes, Tony begs Wolverine to help. Because he hasn't just been kidnapped, he's been kidnapped by a group of terrorists who threaten to kill him if the current US President isn't voted out of office on Election Day. Wolverine resists at first. It isn't his country or his president, it isn't his fight, but eventually, he caves, and he takes Tony with him both for his ability to fly aircraft, and his ability to detect a lie.

Of course, the eyes of the nation are on the situation, and the President is blamed for not doing more to prevent it. And Wolverine and Tony aren't the only ones on the case. A famous bounty hunter named Kaz, who claims to have gotten his powers from extraterrestrials, has assured Matthew's mother that he will find the people responsible for her son's kidnapping and bring them to justice. But does he really have Matthew's best interests at heart, or is he just playing the situation for his own publicity?

Teaming up with Tony and Logan, Kaz says he knows where the group that snatched Tony is holding him. Unfortunately, their Blackhawk helicopter is attacked, and by the time Wolverine and Tony get to the island, Matthew is already dead. Sometimes even the best don't make it in time.

Or is he dead? At the funeral, Logan realizes that the corpse in the casket isn't Matthew Hayes. Some kind of shapeshifter has been pretending to be Matthew's corpse, and Logan knows what this means- Matthew is still alive! The question is, can he track down the crew responsible for his snatching, and find out the reasons behind it before the mutant mercs responsible can take him out?

I found this book interesting. Wolverine, or Logan, as he calls himself, is supposed to be an almost wildman character, but Peter David makes him a lot colder than that. Despite Wolverine's reputation for going into frenzies, he's almost restrained here, and I thought that was kinda strange.

On the other hand, he does pull off a lot of things that are rather distasteful, like holding a guy upside down over a cliff to get information out of him, and later on in the book, skinning a dead merc to use his DNA to get past traps that only react to foreign DNA. In fact, that last one made me say aloud, "Wow, he's just made himself more repulsive than the mercs." I'll admit that it made him able to get pass the traps, but on the gross and disgusting scale, that was a 9 out of 10.

This book was a curious mix of a Wolverine who seemed almost too controlled and not quite animalistic enough, and one who very occasionally went far in the other direction. But I never got the sense that this was Wolverine, the comics character. It didn't feel authentic to me, and that's a shame, because I love Peter David's writing from back when he was writing Photon books. I guess my ultimate feeling about this book is merely "meh".

The writing is good and flows well, but the character issues caught me up, and I've read so many Wolverine comics recently that it really jarred me. So YMMV, but this book had enough flaws of character that I don't feel I can recommend it.