Marvel must’ve hired someone new to write their Wolverine solicitations. This issue is billed as “the strangest Wolverine story in recent memory”, but if the guy who wrote the solicitations for Old Man Logan was describing this he’d probably tell us it was “the strangest Wolverine story ever!” or even “the strangest story of all time”, period. So, for starters, I appreciate the nuance of the solicitation. “The strangest Wolverine story in recent memory” is an excellent way to describe this arc.

This issue makes Jason Aaron’s Weapon X series 2 for 2 in my book, never having read the series before the previous issue. The dialogue pops, the villain is suitably diabolical, and the situation of Wolverine as a mental patient is an interesting one. We’ve often seen Wolverine as the mind-controlled prisoner of shadowy government forces, but this is a twist that brings Logan’s predicament closer to everyday reality. Even if they’re not as evil as the one shown in this comic, mental hospitals exist. For a moment, Aaron also points a critical finger at society and history when he has Logan ask what the point of the mental hospital is if the people in it aren’t getting better. Aaron isn’t about to launch into a treatise citing Michel Foucault or anything, but the informed reader gets the impression that Aaron is well aware of the history of mental patients indeed having been used in cruel experiments by more than one government.

The art is the best I’ve ever seen from Yanick Paquette. I always liked the guy alright when he used to draw Ultimate X-Men (his pencils were the best thing about that title for a few years running). But when all an artist can show you are drawings of preestablished characters in preestablished superheroic costumes–or else the same typically super-fit young people in typically tight/skimpy “street clothes”–there’s a fairly low ceiling as to how much praise you can heap. But in this story Paquette actually has the chance to show some range, and he proves he can be a very very good artist. The creepy artwork he shows here perfectly fits the story, and the angular panels at times really go well with Logan’s sense of disorientation.

Others have said that this issue was more or less filler. I disagree. I think we definitely needed another installment of this five-issue story before any big change happened. With this issue, we really sense the monotony and agony of Logan’s imprisonment. There’s a difference between writing “I was there for a long time. Every week was the same. I was sad”, and actually spending pages taking us through that stuff. Aaron gets us to empathize more with Logan, yet he intersperses Logan’s routine with glimpses of other awful things that happen at the asylum, so the story never feels as boring to us as Logan’s life feels to him. The issue also ends with a return motif to the same sort of scene that it began with; this circularity itself is pleasing. So far it seems that Aaron has designed this story’s structure with great care.

You can feel slight echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and echoes of Flowers for Algernon; so while this storyline isn’t the most original concept, there’s enough weight behind it to make it definitely feel worthwhile to me. My only concern is that there are three issues left, and yet by the end of this issue it seems that Logan has suddenly overcome a lot of adversity, already. To me it seems way too soon for Logan to have “woken up”. Who knows, though: maybe the next issue will open with Logan having gone back to “sleep”, only now his captor has more information about him, and the story will progress from there. Either way, Aaron’s definitely earned my trust not to prejudge this story, not only because it’s “strange” but because it’s really well thought-out.