With Age of Revelation nearly here, Wolverine #13 takes a one-shot route with its tale. The big hook? Wolverine becomes a mob boss straight out of The Godfather! It’s an original concept, plus it suits Wolverine, a man who has lived in many timelines. Why can’t he dress up like a 1920s gangster and pop the claws?
As far as one-shot tales go, this issue gets in and gets out fairly quickly. It opens with Wolverine drowning in his sorrows after Mastermind pretended to be his mom, so he needs a distraction. Enter a phone call for a favor decades in the making.
Writer Saladin Ahmed takes a good six pages to get to the point post phone call, however. While it’s a fun idea to ruminate on his connections to people’s grandfathers, it shouldn’t take so long to get to the action in a 20-page comic. The dialogue is written well, but more could be done to move things along.
Drinking his problems away. Maybe try therapy?
Credit: Marvel
Once set up in gangster clothes, the story goes into full Oldboy mode with baddies trying to take him out. The twist is he can’t kill them, or else it’d be war between families. Those lengthy six pages do enough to make the rules make sense, and the fighting is well done.
Martin Coccolo does a bang-up job with the art, letting loose with Wolverine taking out a hallway of goons. That fight ends up with Wolverine getting severely charred, but for him, that’s another Tuesday. The final page features an old-school Italian place and plenty of respect for Wolverine in a nice full-page splash.
At the end of the day, this “fill-in” style story is good, but it feels like it fills out a 12-page story at best. Plot-wise, it could have used more, be it conflict, surprises, or twists. Laid out plainly, it’s two meetings with gangsters sandwiched around a fight scene. It’s not bad, but it’s not going to go down in history as some great adventure.
Wolverine #13 delivers a stylish gangster-flavored one-shot that scratches the itch for something different, but its thin plot and slow start hold it back from greatness. While Coccolo’s art shines and Ahmed nails Wolverine’s voice, the issue feels more like a novelty than an essential chapter, an enjoyable side dish rather than a main course.
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