The sad state of Marvel comics part 1: The many faces of Wolverine.

Marvel comics has managed to put Wolverine in almost every single line of funny books that they make with a "Gotta Have more cowbell" zeal in an effort to whore out a "popular" character with the fanboys. This "milk the cow until it's dead" disregard for storytelling makes me wonder if anyone at Marvel is even trying anymore.

Allow me to give you a whiff of the monthly dung heap that they call continuity over at Marvel right now.

(yes all of this takes place in the same publishing month, if not week)

In the X-men books their having an event called Schism where Wolverine and Cyclops solve their philosophical differences by beating the crap out of each other and wind up splintering their little mutie cabal into Two separate factions.

Fine, but while this is going on we have Wolverine in this months X-Force traveling to an alternate universe and getting fried....

.....like chicken and in no condition to fight for the next issue of that book.

A nice Harvey Dent, but wait! he ain't licked yet!!

Mr. Logan is now a member of the Two Avengers teams now let's see whats doin' with this
fine character over in those teams...

Oh, it looks like they're having their own crossover called Fear itself where the Avengers are duking it out with evil Asgardians armed with enhanced weapons provided by Odin and here we have The Wolverine with his new prickly look courtesy of the allfather.

And in between all that he has a little downtime for a sparring lesson with the immortal Iron-Fist in The New Avengers.

The Wolverine even manages to find time to make a cameo in the Spider-man event Spider-Island where (I kid you not) Radioactive bed-bugs are giving people in NYC spider powers.

I know They're just comic books but if publishers want people to keep reading their books, there has to be at least an attempt to have the story make some kind of plausible sense.

Here's a little example of what I'm blathering about:

When Dick Grayson became Nightwing in the New Teen Titans, Chuck Dixon over at Detective Comics had Grayson confront Batman about his decision, they argued, Dick handed in his resignation and left the Bat books for a long while.

If DC took today's Marvel approach to editing, Richard Grayson would be Robin, Nightwing, The Red Hood and Batman in 3 separate books.


I don't have all the answers and if you read my blog with any frequency you know that I am no wordsmith, but when you deal in the hyper fantasy world of superhero storytelling, it's important that in between the impossible abilities and epic battles there should be some semblance of an editorial plausibility that the gives a character...well character.

Otherwise Just write it into the story, make Wolverine immortal, give him the ability to clone himself, teleportaion, put him on every Marvel book and call if a day.