This is going to sound like a quite negative review, but that's mainly because when one's trying to discredit something that's being almost universally hailed as a great work of art, you have to argue the negative. Star Wars is a great movie, but if you're going to argue about why it isn't as good as Empire Strikes Back (which I'm not sure I would; this is just an example), then mostly what you're going to do is point out the first movie's flaws. I give this issue a 2 for story, a 3 for art, and rated it a 3/5 overall; but I'm a very hard grader, so I'm reasonably pleased with an issue that receives those ratings from me.

But I find it more than a little troubling that people seem to be buying Marvel's propaganda that this is a (or even "the") "character defining" story of Wolverine. The characterization of this story is incredibly shallow. It's like watching a five-year-old mash with action figures or something. Moreover, the Wolverine we're seeing is a completely different take than the one we're used to--so how can this be something like a "character defining" run if the character's never been defined along these lines before?

I find that the reveal of this issue does hold up, but with some reservations. What would make Wolverine stop fighting? If he inadvertently killed all of the X-Men. Great answer. Really great answer, even. But based on the presentation here I find it completely unbelievable that Wolverine could have killed the X-Men this way. The justification is that his friends would hesitate a moment, which would give Wolverine all the edge he'd need. Maybe for the first one or two or three X-Men that would be the case, but I find it too unbelievable that no one on the team would pull out all the stops to protect themselves after they'd seen that Wolverine had gone berserk (something they've all witnessed him doing in the past, to an extent, so it wouldn't be a complete shock). The X-Men have restrained Wolverine before. Most of the X-Men have stronger powers than Wolverine, or powers that can be used from a distance. Or they could have simply movedto higher ground in the cases of Storm and Cannonball. It's unbelievable to me that Wolverine could have massacred the entire team as shown. If devote much thought at all to the idea, beyond taking it at face value, it falls apart. But if Millar would have included some other villain whose presence suppressed mutant powers, then I could see Wolverine easily using his claws to kill everyone. But that isn't the case. Instead Millar is almost completely devoted to shock value, not anything close to logic, even within the realm of a fantasy super hero story.

Worst of all is the idea that Jubilee (as "Bullseye") would have lasted the longest against Wolverine. Jubilee, the least experienced, possibly least powerful, member of the X-Men, is said to have lasted "ninety minutes" against Wolverine. Why? So that Millar can give us the shot of Wolverine killing Jubilee at the end. Fine--but why say that the fight with Jubliee/Bullseye took "ninety minutes"? Answer: because it just sounds cool. There's no attention to detail here; it's just "Make every panel and story development sound and look as cool/shocking as possible, without thinking about...much of anything really." Millar says that the fight took ninety minutes because at that panel, at that part of the story, the thing he wants to do is make the fight seem "epic" or something. So he says that the fight took ninety minutes, even though if we look back on that statement after the reveal, it's completely unbelievable that the fight would have taken that long. Even if it really was Bullseye, the fight almost certainly wouldn't have taken that long. But against a (soon bleeding) Jubilee...?

The art, on one level, is absolutely wonderful. McNiven is hugely talented and deserves all the acclaim he's getting. Rating the art within any given comic book, however, means not only an estimation of raw talent but also an evaluation of what the artist does with that talent, and McNiven's huge talent here is not used to the best effect. There are far too many one-panel pages. This may be a storytelling problem--if Millar told McNiven to do so many full panels, though the classic Marvel way is for the artist to draw the pages before the full script is added in--but on paper I think it counts as an art problem too, because it's a problem with the visual that's on the page. No 20-page story needs this many full panel pages. It's extremely cheap. Turning the page to find one panel of art is a technique for shock value, but there's also the risk of shocking the reader by causing him/her to think "Ugh, I paid for this and here's another wasted page of almost zero story development". The pages on which Wolverine discovers that he's killed the X-Men do deserve to be a two-page spread. I think that's more than justified, and a good moment. But the amount of other pages in which there are only 1 to 3 panels, and little to no dialogue on them, seem very forced. It's very clear that this issue was paded. Somewhere in here there's a MASTERFUL 6-page flashback story, but this narrative was decompressed so that it would fill an entire issue. Think decompression doesn't matter? If Watchmen, for example, was decompressed this much it would have taken about 1,500 pages to tell the story. A 1,500-page Watchmen would not have been as good as the 200-odd-page version we've got. And this issue of Wolverine would have been considerably stronger were it less than 10 pages. As it is, the whole production seems forced and padded.

My other issue with the art also stems from the storytelling. There's too much blood here; the gore is not used effectively. Millar and McNiven are simply out to shock us and make us behave like disgusting, cheering Romans watching people get massacred by lions in the Collisium. What's my problem? What would I have done better? Easy: hold off on most of the blood until we see Jubilee and the other X-Men killed. That moment of realization would have meant even more if the issue had not already habituated the reader into seeing so much blood on every page. You can still give the impression of a VERY violent fight between Wolverine and the villains without showing so much blood, and then the reveal is even more effective when you show the X-Men slain and piled on top of each other in a bloody mess. Again, as it is, everything in this regard feels very cheap.

In the end, I'm not going to spend any time talking about why Barry Windsor-Smith's Weapon X, or most of Claremont and Hama takes on the character from 20 years ago, are much superior to Millar's take (even though they are considerably superior; and if you don't think that Wolverine has ever behaved as a pacifist before, you're very wrong--he often held back). I am enjoying this run and probably will read most of the concluding issues. My point is that this story isn't very good. It's okay. It's very fun, but it isn't considered or well thought-out. Elements of this future world seem completely random (future Wolverine's family as, basically, akin to a bunch of hicks from the 1800s; Venom dinosaurs; a team-up with Hawkeye in the Spidermobile), but that's part of the fun. What I'm afraid of is that all this fun inadvertently cheapens and disgraces, in a fundamental sense (dis-graces), characters whose history and characterizations have been very rich. I wouldn't go quite as far as to say that Millar and McNiven are insulting the characters, but I think that Marvel, as a group of people who should respect their properties better, insults Wolverine by billing this run as "character defining". That phrase in the solicitation really bugged me; it will have the effect of misleading impressionable readers who otherwise might search out the many better Wolverine issues out there. Though those stories don't have as many full-panel spreads, as much blood, as much swift killing, and might take longer than five minutes to read. :-/