Writing: Larry Hama
Art: Adam Kubert
What Went Down: Genesis and the Dark Riders have captured Wolverine, and they are planning to re-bond his skeleton with adamantium, so he can serve their master Apocalypse as a Horseman. This adamantium was harvested from the Wolverine villain Cyber, so there are concerns that Wolverine might reject it because it is an inferior grade.
In a vent up above, Cannonball is hiding with woman named Zoe who claims she is an Expediter. She’s an employee of Landau, Luckman, and Lake, an interdimensional law firm that appears in Wolverine and Deadpool a lot. In another part of the base, they see hundreds of sarcophagi filled with live prisoners surrounding a single sarcophagus with Apocalypse’s image on it. This obviously means that the Dark Riders are going to try to resurrect Apocalypse.
Wolverine’s skin starts to excrete adamantium because they are flowing too much into him. Cannonball tries to get Zoe to help him, but she teleports away. Cannonball decides to attack the Dark Riders. As the Riders beat him, Cannonball apologizes to Logan. Wolverine starts yelling in his tube, and all of a sudden rejected adamantium shoots out of his body, freeing Wolverine and killing/wounding many of the bad guys.
Cannonball flies after Wolverine and picks him up. We don’t get a good look at him, but Cannonball tells him that they have to stop Apocalypse from rising. In a cabin in the mountains, Elektra and Stick sense Wolverine’s “fall.” Back in Genesis’ lair, Cannonball is about be killed by Spyne and Deadbolt, but Wolverine kills them both. He then uses Deadbolt’s glowing, severed head to lure Gauntlet into a trap. While Genesis fights Cannonball, they can hear the screams of the Dark Riders.
We finally get the reveal of the new, more savage Wolverine—part dog, part troll, all stupid. As Wolverine kills Genesis, Cannonball pries open Apocalypse’s sarcophagus, only to find that it is empty. Wolverine asks Cannonball to tell Cable that he’s sorry about killing his son, and then disappears. The issue ends with Elektra leaving to help Wolverine.
How It Was: Wolverine celebrates its 100th issue with a big, double-sized, character-altering story. Also, there’s a big reflective hologram thing in the middle of the cover. Now I can see where the writers were coming from with this one. Every reader and their mother was predicting that Wolverine would get his adamantium back in issue #100, so the X-office decided to do something different to surprise readers. And I can respect that; it’s good that the writers wanted to keep readers guessing. Hama even structures the villain’s plot to involve putting the metal back in Wolverine, right before pulling the old switcharoo.
And that’s where it all goes bad as the Wolverine creative team turns their eponymous character, arguably the most popular Marvel character of the time, into a giant troll with no nose, huge hands and feet, long nails, and no personality. This, to put it lightly, is terrible. Yes, all of the X-books had been dealing with Wolverine’s feral regression, and they wanted to make Wolverine even more tough and savage, but he looks absolutely ridiculous. This is easily the silliest looking version of Wolverine ever.
The whole story is a bit of misfire, especially since it focuses upon Genesis, who is supposed to be a Cable villain. There’s no real sense of weight or closure after Wolverine kills him because we haven't ever seen him in this series up to this point. I guess turning Wolverine into a Horseman is as good a reason as any to try to put the metal back, but it leads to Logan spending half the double-sized issue in a glass tube. And there is way too much exposition while he’s in the tube with every member of the Dark Riders chiming in for no reason. Zoe is little more than a plot device who disappears when Hama runs out of exposition, but Cannonball does get to shine by taking on a far superior force on behalf of Wolverine. Too bad the twist of Apocalypse not being in the coffin is a total anticlimax.
The parts that work best in this book are right before the big reveal of “new” Wolverine. When he’s stalking the Dark Riders and murdering them one by one, you can’t help but feel like Wolverine is the most badass hero there is. Also, the scene where Wolverine’s body spits out shards of adamantium is kind of cool in a ridiculous, WTF sort of way. It’s unfortunate that this leads to such a boring and silly looking iteration of the old Canucklehead because Hama does manage to get a couple of neat moments out of this particular issue.
C-
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