Wolverine Noir is another entry in the Marvel Noir series, this one pitting Jim Logan against the Bowery in the 1930s — not the best place in the world at not the best time.
The action is triggered by the appearance of Mariko Yashida, an obviously well-off young Japanese woman, in town, she says, to take care of some business for her father. Logan’s partner, Dog, decides to do the legwork, and then disappears. Logan has to find him — there’s a dark and tangled history there, and a debt. And of course, there are layers of deception — everyone has secrets, and sometimes it seems as though the secrets have secrets. Regrettably, the final revelation is
pretty much unbelievable.
Needless to say, in keeping with the noir cast of the series as a whole, there are no sparks of light here. Regrettably, Stuart Moore’s script is fairly heavy-handed with the dark edge, to the point of excess — even Sam Spade ran into a decent person every once in a while. Don’t look for Logan to do the same. (Well, there’s one possibility, but she’s one of the first corpses to turn up.)
The graphic work is marked by a few dramatically abstract frames that are too rare to make the book a visual delight. The empahsis in C. P. Smith’s graphic work seems to be murky, unresolved, which fits the story thematically, at least, but it’s rather odd that most of the clarity comes in flashbacks, or at least that’s the impression one comes away with. There is as little resolution in the drawing as there is in the story as a whole.
Wolverine Noir is not the worst comic experience I’ve had lately, but it does little to make me think that taking the Marvel superheroes back to the 1930s was necessarily a good idea.
(Marvel Comics, 2010) Includes Wolverine Noir #1-4.
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