Wolverine: In the Bones

So our hero Wolverine is off taking another one of his breaks from the X-Men, pondering what he’s done and what he’s going to do with his life in that usual “superhero having a reflective personal crisis” sort of way. He’s even running with a pack of wolves somewhere in Canada’s Northwest Territories. But then trouble, as it always does, comes knocking, in the form of his old enemy Cyber. And here’s where things start to get interesting. After Wolverine kicks Cyber’s ass (when they butt heads it makes a great CLONG sound) Cyber skulks away and gets possessed by a recently awakened primordial force called the Adamantine. Now you’ll probably know that Cyber’s skin and Wolverine’s skeleton and claws are made of (or, to be precise in the latter case, bonded with) adamantium, which is a virtually indestructible man-made alloy. Adamantine, by way of contrast, is a naturally occurring metal that is more the stuff of legend. Both are fictional substances, by the way.

The Adamantine doesn’t like adamantium, seeing it as a kind of blasphemy, so it has a mission to destroy it wherever it finds it. To do so it takes over Cyber and then goes around hunting other supervillains with adamantium in their body and possessing them. Names like Lady Deathstrike, Constrictor, and Romulus. Of course it also wants to possess and destroy Wolverine. To stop them, Wolverine has to team up with his daughter (X-23), Nightcrawler, and a teenage Wendigo that he is helping fight the cannibal curse.

I thought it was a good storyline from Saladin Ahmed, though in the end it falls back on the cliché about our hero just being made of stronger stuff and having personal reserves too great for the evil force to overcome. I get tired of that, and was actually hoping the Wendigo, as the anti-adamantium force in play, might have had a larger role. But I was still hooked enough to want to see what would happen next.

Graphicalex