Hey Bub

So I finally got around to reading "Wolverine: Origin" despite all the bad things I had heard about how it was received. X-Men is the main comic title that I read. I enjoy the story-lines thoroughly and I find that each of the characters have been developed extremely well. Usually each has a contradiction in their life that seems impossible to overcome, but drives the story line. Cyclops doing everything he can to be a great leader/Xavier's protege but failing, Nightcrawler being a monk but looking like a demon, Wolverine's introverted personality ruining his relationships.

Wolverine also happens to be one of my favourite characters (come on, beer swilling, cigar smoking, canadian badass who beats villains to a pulp with no weapons?) so this line intrigued me. However, Wolverine's true past has also been shrouded, adding to the appeal of the character. We know he was working for the Canadian government, and Alpha force before that, and Canadian special forces before that. A life in Japan was in there somewhere, but other than that it was anyone's guess. Many argued that revealing/creating his past would destroy his character and for arguably Marvel's most popular personage this seemed like an awful idea. It's one thing to ruin a character like Boom-Boom, but Wolverine? Come on!

After reading the six issues of the title, I found myself extremely disappointed. The story certainly had potential but was nowhere near developed enough. There is a huge jump in time around issues 3 and 4 and he just sort of transforms from a sickly Canadian rich kid to the Wolverine we know now out of left field. The entire story takes place in 19th century Alberta and the effort made to recreate the type of dialogue used at that time was just subpar. The artwork also leaves much to be desired. I would think that for a project that bears as much influence as this one, Marvel would have gotten the biggest names in the business to work on it.

It hasn't affected the line of X-Men that much, other than Wolverine reverting to his 8-year-old self for a while in astonishing X-Men, but seriously it does fall very short of what it could be. Even if they had saved it for a few years until the comic market picked up again, I'm sure it would have been much better.

But hey, at least it's not as bad as the movie. Pretty close though.