Wolverine #64

When I read the contemporary portion of Wolverine, I almost seethe with jealousy for the author's inventiveness. He has set up a brilliant, escalating chess match between two opponents who obviously have not lived so long on luck alone. Mystique and Wolverine keep outfoxing one another with dance moves I never would have come up with, the kind  of crafty superpower uses that only occur to confident, seasoned mutants and damn good writers.

Would you walk into a bar full of soldiers and stab a nun? Brilliant. What if she were in the fortified Green Zone with an army protecting her? Brilliant! "Then I'll just commit a suicide bombing and get smuggled in as a corpse." Brilliant!!

The 1920s portion of the story seems like more of a wash; its point has not revealed itself to me yet. Just when the story has you on the edge of your seat, it hits the pause button and spends a few minutes pondering what Logan would look like in a fedora and distracting you with anachronism after anachronism. (Why is Mystique dressed like a 21st century lingerie model? How long have people been saying "off your rocker"? When exactly did they invent the Black & Decker electric drill?) The creative team has made me care so much about the chase that I do not care at all whether Mystique once robbed a bank in Kansas. Because Wolverine has only recently remembered his past, Bad Writing Crutch #47 (Two Characters Have a Long, Storied History That Has Never, Ever Come Up Before) seems less hackneyed than it would in other circumstances, but the attempt to give the current conflict weight by making it seem like the culmination of a century-long cat-and-mouse game does not seem to be working. No matter how many times Wolverine says, "It ends tonight. Finally. No more games," the author cannot turn her into Logan's Joker overnight.