Mocle’s dead, or in jail, or sick, or busy, or something, so I took up the reins of Longbox Diving this week to tell you all about comics that you should dive into longboxes to get. Wolverine comics, to be specific.
Oh, shut up, before you even start. “But blah blah blah he’s not as cool as the Young Masters or Aztek or Volstagg or some other character whose relative obscurity makes me feel like I have room for some personal stake in tracking their use over the years, blah blah blah sniktbub or whatever.” Yeah, whatever is right. I’ll throw you a bone, though. This is a Wolverine run by some of the brightest lights in recent comic book history, all of whom were firing on every cylinder. And it’s not one that gets a lot of love anymore, when even The Evolutionary War inexplicably has a $75 hardcover collecting dust at your local shop.
The title sort of gives it away, but click the cut to get the details, so you can look smarter than your friends.
I’m not sure how much weight Archie Goodwin’s career carries in the current fan era. Most of the younger people who know of him know of his brief tenure as Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, when the position was a revolving door. Or the editor who brought Star Wars to comic books, in one of the most unexpected reversals of fortune Marvel has ever had. Or the editor who commissioned the first English versions of Akira, or the works of Moebius. Or the guy who was behind the creator-owned Epic line. Or they know him from the fawning accolades of his fellow professionals, all of whom seem to sound fairly starstruck by just the memory of the man. “Your favorite writer’s favorite writer,” something glib like that. Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale based their take on Commissioner Gordon on him. But Goodwin was also a writer, and he wrote well.
Rewind to 1989. The true size of the speculator bubble has not yet been revealed, and comics are ascending in cultural ubiquity. At the forefront of this, the X-Men. This was well before the days of eight “core” X-books. The only real option on the table for X-Men stories was Chris Claremont’s stuff in Uncanny, which had the team believed dead and living in exile in the Australian outback, a situation both preceded and followed by circumstances too exhausting to summarize. And if the X-Men were the tip of the ballooning comics market’s spear, then Wolverine was the tip of the X-Men. His ongoing solo title split decisively from Uncanny X-Men, detailing the man called Logan’s side adventures in the scumhole east Asian nation Madripoor. Title notwithstanding, his adventures weren’t even as himself — he was the honorable one-eyed brawler Patch. Chris Claremont and Peter David guided him through the seedy yet Code-approved underbelly of things, as rendered by John Buscema. Then: Goodwin, Byrne, and Janson.
Look at that cover I posted above. Wolverine #17, the first issue Archie Goodwin wrote, John Byrne put down layouts for, Klaus Janson tightened up and inked. It says it all, right down to the solid, wrathful, eye-searing red of the background. The covers prior to this were mostly blues and blacks, night scenes that kept Logan out of his costume far more often than they put him in it. No such theatrics here, just the implicit, lurid promise that whatever you thought of the past sixteen issues, this was where things got violent.
For seven issues — Wolverine #17-23 — the Goodwin/Byrne/Janson team rampaged through Madripoor and Central America, positioning Wolverine as a comic-book answer to the ripped and oiled machine-gun action heroes of the day. Schwarzenegger and Stallone, after all, didn’t have mutant healing factors or adamantium skeletons, and they wouldn’t have looked half as cool with that bizarre mask. This arc is a wrecking ball of a thing, a story that smashes through politics, drugs, war criminals, Acts of Vengeance, and alien gods with equal aplomb. Sometimes the art is more Byrne than Janson and sometimes it’s more Janson than Byrne, but Byrne’s theatrical superheroics and Janson’s masterfully imprecise line textures were interlocked, perfectly suiting a tale that’s half super-bodied heroism and half sludge of the zeitgeist.
Like I said, the plot of this thing is something you could steal from just about any action movie made in the back half of the 1980s. The balance of power of Madripoor is threatened by a CIA-spoiled Central American warlord wanting to import super-crack for his own nefarious purposes. Wolverine objects for a number of reasons, and ends up invading the country, along with La Bandera, a teenage revolutionary superheroine. They fight Tiger Shark (after all, one of the few ways to kill Logan is to drown him), the Nazi cyber-Joubert Geist, and so on. It all ends in spectacular carnage, as it must.
What makes this little set a gem, though, is Goodwin’s perfect sense of tone. The story of these comics has its share of melodrama, to be sure, but it’s astonishingly poker-faced the rest of the time. There’s a world-weary cynicism in the way that Logan cuts through the politics of the place and the time; adamantium claws won’t stand up against the CIA. When La Bandera wins, compromise is so swift and instant that it doesn’t even appear on-panel, just her dazed apologies. (The twist ending to Geist’s tale, too, is both savagely cruel and beautifully understated.) The political outrage is subtle and hides in corners and between panels, but it’s just heavy enough to weigh down the super-theatrics and pull them into the territory of a particularly dry James Bond riff. Goodwin’s Wolverine doesn’t fight to change the world — he just does what he can where it affects him. But then, he’s also the best there is at what he does.
