• • Comic Book Reviews
• January 19, 2022

X Lives of Wolverine #1 Review

Written by: Benjamin Percy

Art by: Joshua Cassara

Coloring by: Frank Martin

Lettering by: VC’s Cory Petit

X Lives of Wolverine is a book that is going to suffer from the way it’s being sold more than the content itself. This book is the only X-book furthering the X-story for several weeks. Most of them are delayed to the new relaunch, rebooting, or over. That sets this book up to fail. It’s trying to do what House of X/Powers of X did in its weekly release, but there’s a problem. That book was an event about all of mutandom. This is a Wolverine and X-Force book billed as an event. Wolverine and X-Force cannot carry an event while the other X-books are on hold, and feel worth the wait.

Marvel knew what it was doing by making X Lives of Wolverine, and next week’s sister book X Deaths of Wolverine, a release like House of X and Powers of X did. It built hype, but also expectations it can’t meet. The premise of exploring alternate timelines isn’t inherently bad. It’s an awesome idea, but it’s through a character who’s so predictable at this point. No X-Man has as many stories as Wolverine. Seeing his view of things makes what should be fascinating stories feel like every other.

This is just another time-caper story about Wolverine. He has two of these already. Wolverine spends half of this one fighting long-time-foe Omega Red in the past while nothing is explained of why or how they’re there. We’re here for answers about mutantdom and we’re not getting it. Instead, Wolverine broods over how he’s a killer in a time and place of peace. We get it, you’d rather be stabbing things Logan, why aren’t you doing that in your solo book?

Honestly, if this were just an arc of Wolverine’s solo, it’d be awesome. It’d be bringing some stakes to a solo title that doesn’t always have it. But when you place so much importance on a Wolverine solo, we ignore the beautiful art, Wolverine’s perfect characterization, and a cool premise meant for another character. As I read this book all I could think is, shouldn’t this be the X Lives of Moira X? No, instead it had to be the X Lives of Wolverine.

This is only the first issue of over ten as far as I know. It has a very skilled creative team behind it who can tell a good story. It may end up being great, it’s not bad by any means right now. But even if it’s great, unless it branches past Wolverine, it’ll just be another great Wolverine story. This is going to sound incredibly spoiled, and I’m not going to hide that. But we already have a lot of great Wolverine stories. It would have been really nice to read about someone else in an X-Men event.