Wolverine

I had, like most kids, enjoyed comics, but outside of a Spider-Man, Superman, Batman or Hulk, I kinda just let comics pass me by. My mom would occasionally let me pick one up here and there. I mostly remember those being Marvel Team-Ups. I had an issue where Spidey and The Beast teamed up. At the time, I had no idea who The Beast was. As far as I was concerned, he was big, blue and had claws, so he had to be the bad guy. Later, I found out who The Beast was and discovered that, much like the majority of citizens of the Marvel Universe, I was a Mutant Bigot.

In the summer of 1987, I had purchased issue number three of Justice League International. Later on in life, that run of the Justice League would have a major impact on me and my sensibilities about comics and superheroes. JLI was also probably among the last successful "fun" mainstream superhero comics ever published. Current attempts to create fun superhero books tend to fail pretty spectacularly, or are just dumbed down for "kids".

But at the time, I still was only semi-interested in comics, and had no clue how much Keith Giffen and Kevin Maguire would mean to me in the future. Comics were comics and whatever. The comics elves churned 'em out for all I knew or gave a shit about. Then in October of that year, I went to a friend's house. Another kid who had been invited brought along a stack of X-Men comics. Seeing one of the covers (by Art Adams, another soon-to-be influence), I immediately wondered why Blue Beetle was getting shot. In my first ever encounter with Marvel vs. DC snark, it was quickly pointed out to me that the character in question was Cyclops, and Blue Beetle is a DC character and this was a Marvel book. Shortly thereafter, I was a complete X-Men nerd. Loved the book, loved the characters, and loved the concept. It was so different than any other comic I had ever read at the time (turns out it wasn't). Weeks later, that same kid - our friendship forged in the fires of comic geekery - lent me the original Wolverine mini-series. It was the first time I ever realized that people made these comics, and that I bothered to learn their names. It was also the first time I realized that I wanted to make comics for a living.

The thing about this book that had such an affect on 9-year old me was the complexity and maturity of the story. It was dark, it was violent and sexual, and still had a morality to it, and it blew my tiny little mind. And the art... good lord, the art. My friend and I would spend entire weekends tracing the covers and pages and panels of this slick, dark, beautiful art. Chris Claremont had crafted a story to rival any action/crime movie I had ever seen and Frank Miller became a fucking god to me. There is no other comic I own that I have read as many times as this book. This was the greatest comic ever made.

Then I got older and found comics better than this.

Reading Wolverine for the first time in 1988 - even though the book had been published in 1982 - I was completely unaware of the impact Miller had already had on the comic industry. By this point, he had completely revolutionized Batman with his Year One story and The Dark Knight Returns mini-series, neither of which I had discovered yet, and did not know of his work on Daredevil. When I finally did read those, I could not explain properly just how let down and disappointed I felt in seeing Miller's art in DKR compared to the work I fell in love with in Wolverine. To a very ignorant kid, it was such a drastic change in styles, I just assumed Miller suffered a stroke of some sort and couldn't draw anymore. I was heartbroken. As for Claremont, I stuck with him. I remained a loyal X-Men reader until he got booted off the book. It never seemed right to me after that, and outside of a few dips back into the stream, I never fully immersed myself back into the mutant waters until Grant Morrison wrote the book in 2001.

Claremont even made a couple returns, but he'd completely given in to his indulgences and would choke the life out of his comics with his excessive dialogue, narration and thought balloons. But to see Miller's fine, beautiful rendering in Wolverine to the gritty, sloppy mess that was Dark Knight, I just didn't understand it. That wasn't art. That's not what I had learned about art. Obviously, within a handful of years, I figured out the true meaning of "style" and learned not only to accept different ones, but also to love and embrace them as well. Miller remains an all-time favorite artist in my mind, but not for his early work, rather the later style he adopted to do Sin City and beyond. Which brings me to the distorted nostalgia portion of this clunker of a review.

For a comic that I revered for so long, by creators I'd idolized for so long, how does it hold up to 32-year old me? Turns out, not that bad actually. Certainly, the story and plot are as juvenile to me now as it was mature to me then, but it's still really solid. I think the story is as well written and tightly plotted as any great action/crime movie from the 80s, and still maintains a level of maturity that no other all-ages comic really holds today, which is essentially why I loved it so much back then. Despite how heady I thought it was back then, it is an all-ages comic that any kid could read. It maintains the illusion of being "grown-up" while being perfectly attainable and acceptable for any kid. This is the kind of children's entertainment that should be a standard and a norm, not an exception. It is never "written down" nor is it ever white-washed. Claremont and Miller knew their audience was growing older, but also knew that they needed the story to remain accessible. They crafted the perfect comic book for 1982, and with some storytelling and art tweaks, it's still an exceptionally good comic for 2011.

Claremont is at his prime, his use of dialogue, exposition and thought balloons and narration captions are all kept at the minimum he's comfortable with. He allows Miller's art to breathe and move on its own. Claremont knows he's working with one of the best sequential storytellers in the business and lets him work his magic.

However, knowing what I know now about comics and how the sausage is made, I realize that the art that I fell in love with is mostly the responsibility of Joe Rubenstein, the book's inker. Apparently the style that Miller started with DKR and refined with Sin City is how he drew comics back then as well, relying on the inkers to do the heavy lifting and "finish" the art. Rubenstein has a classic, slick style to his inks, and brought that to Miller's roughs, the same way Klaus Janson heavily influenced the look and feel of Miller's Daredevil run. Miller loves his shadows and the energy behind his art is due to his fluid and loose style. Some of that peeks through in the course of the story, but it's mostly Rubenstein giving Miller's pencil lines a polish that I don't think he's ever had since. Also, of course also knowing what I know now, Miller was most likely drunk.

Ultimately, Wolverine is not the fantastic be-all and end-all of comics that I thought it was at age 9, but at a jaded age 32, the absolute quality of the work overpowers the inherent flaws of simply being an old comic. If you've ever been a fan of the character or the X-Men and haven't read the original mini-series, it's worth the time and effort to move past the clunkiness of it's storytelling and tropes.