Dark Wolverine #85

 The Story: Wolverine calls a meeting with his wayward son, Daken, to request his help in taking down uber-baddie Romulus.  However, unbeknownst to the feral X-Man, his son isn’t necessarily on his side.  But is that actually part of Wolverine’s plan?

What’s Good:  The  Cover Was Ok, That's about it.

What’s Not So Good: This is by far the weakest Dark Wolverine issue since the character of Daken took over his father’s title.  The driving cause of this is easily the fact that it’s crossing over with Wolverine Origins beginning with this issue.  Despite the unnecessary convolutions in the life of Wolverine that Daniel Way has wrought over in Origins, Daken somehow emerged to be an interesting character when you separated him from all of that mumbo jumbo.  Now that this story has brought him back into the excruciatingly boring Romulus story-line, it seems we’ll have to deal with two months of uninteresting plots.  I’m being a little harsh here, really, but man, I love Wolverine, and Daken has grown into a favorite character of mine under the pen of Way and Liu, despite all odds.  The fact that we’ve taken a step back to wrap up the whole Romulus thing seems like a shame to me.  At least this crossover will tie all of that up and then we can move on to telling interesting stories again.

As for the art, Segovia is a decent artist, but he just can’t erase the fact that he desperately wants to be Leinil Francis Yu.  Look, I know that many great artists started out as little more than clones of artists that predated them (Remember when Bryan Hitch was little more than an Alan Davis copy?  And look at him now!), but that glaring influence on Segovia’s work only serves to distract from the story.   The plot here is also not suited to Segovia’s strengths.  It’s basically one long issue of Wolverine talking to Daken.  There are many artists that can make a talking heads issue really sing, but Segovia isn’t one of them.  That becomes all the more apparent with how he handles the pacing.  There are twenty-two pages in this comic book. Four of them make up two 2-page splash pages.  One of them is another splash page.  Except for the cliffhanging double-page spread (and I’m not even sure on that one), I’m of the opinion that none of the moments these splashes depict are deserving of such space.  If anything, it comes off as a cheap way to fill pages that I’d have expected to see in the 1990s in an Image book.  Do we really need to see Wolverine giving his homicidal son a stern talking-to in wide-screen?  I mean, really.  It’s a shame that regular penciller Giuseppe Camuncoli  couldn’t have handled the art chores.
 
Note!!: My Advice For All  Reader's Skip This Story Arc & Wait For This Story Arc To End.
 
3.0