Savage Wolverine #4 - Too Savage To Be Awesome

Disclaimer: Yes, I know I didn't review Savage Wolverine #3. Yes, I know this disrupts the flow of reviews. But don't blame me. Blame God for not dedicating a day for reviewing comics. If you're going to bitch about this, please note that I'll respond by deleting your bitching in all forms. That is all.

We like to pretend that discovering ancient secrets is as awesome and exciting as Harrison Ford led us to believe in every Indiana Jones movie. We think it’s all exploring hidden temples, surviving ancient traps, and killing a few Nazis in the process. The reality is probably a billion times more boring. I imagine real archeology is like watching a couple of dead flies decompose in slow motion. You dig through piles upon piles of dirt, fine jack shit 99 percent of the time, and are lucky to recover artifacts that aren’t completely decomposed. It’s right up there with Snooki’s gynecologist in terms of jobs I don’t want.

Wolverine isn’t an archeologist, but he has a way of attracting shit that wants to kill him and sometimes that leads to discovering ancient secrets. It doesn’t lead to it very often, but for a guy as old as Wolverine the law of averages has to catch up at some point. And it caught up with him in a very painful way in the pages of Savage Wolverine. He’s been fighting along-side Shanna the She-Devil, trying to escape an unforgiving island of savage cavemen that may or may not be racist by uncovering ancient technology on an island. It has been eventful and entertaining so far, even with the somewhat random appearance of Amadeus Cho. And while there are no Nazis, I’m sure Indiana Jones would be right at home in a setting like this.

Part of the charm of Savage Wolverine has been a return to basics. Wolverine is no headmaster of a school or leader of a team here. He’s just the lovable savage brute we know and love, surviving in a dangerous wilderness full of dinosaurs, cavemen, and death. There’s no bullshit about his past, no ninjas, and no piss poor love triangles. Throw in Shanna’s rack and there’s very little reason not to enjoy this book on the surface, but it’s been dragging a bit lately with this whole ancient artifact bullshit. Frank Cho has been building towards some answers for the past few issues and is this the issue we finally get them? Well, I’m here to get drunk and review comics last I checked and since I’m currently low on booze, that leaves me with one option!

In Savage Wolverine #4 we get a nice glimpse into a ritual that for once doesn’t involve human sacrifice to appease goat-headed gods with a thing for the blood of virgins. Instead, it involves actually saving a life. In this case, that life belongs to Shanna the She-Devil. In the previous issue, her rack was not powerful enough to save her if you can believe that. She sustained an injury that…well, killed her. But if that at all worries you or your penis, take comfort in the knowledge that Marvel never kills hot female characters not named Jean Grey and keeps them dead for long. But do to that, Cho convinced the chief of the savages to save her in a ritual that involves Man-Thing. Or at least it looks like Man-Thing. Cho is as confused as the readers. And seeing as how Cho himself also randomly appeared in this story without an explanation, I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised when we don’t get one. Yet still, an explanation would be a damn good thing to have at some point.

For now, an explanation takes a back-seat to bringing Shanna back to life. Marvel knows that it just can’t let a beautiful woman with a great rack just go to waste. But in order to bring her back to life, she has to bath in some strange green liquid that comes gushing out of that thing that looks like Man-Thing. There’s a joke about the healing properties of semen in there somewhere, but given all the inappropriate comments I’ve made about Shanna’s breasts I think I’ll hold off.

The important part is the ritual works. It revives Shanna so that she’s as good as new and back to being exceedingly bonerific. However, the whole resurrection-by-glowing-water ordeal comes off as both bland and a blatant rip-off of the Lazarus Pit from Batman. Only this comes off as much more disconcerting because it involves shit that oozes from something that looks like Man-Thing. Hell, for all we know that green stuff is his semen and Shanna just got the most twisted bukakke in history. While it’s nice to see Marvel avoid killing another character, it comes off as both bland and unoriginal.

Things get even less creative as Cho keeps Shanna from lashing out at the savages who killed her. They also have a long and somewhat unnecessary conversation where Cho explains how she ended up alive again. He also reminds readers of why calculus class sucked ass in school because he spends some time just surmising the output of the ancient machine that’s supposed to be the central focus of this whole damn arc. We don’t learn much about it other than it powered the dampening field that knocked out the SHIELD aircrafts and has the power of three H-bombs. That’s about it. Cho didn’t have to reinforce another Asian stereotype to prove it, but he did anyways and it still doesn’t tell us jack shit about this alien gizmo. I bet Indiana Jones would have probably figured this shit out by now.

Unfortunately, Wolverine is no Indiana Jones. As such, he probably hasn’t figured out how powerful the ancient machine is or that Shanna is still alive again. All he knows is that he’s pissed off that someone killed another hot chick before he had a chance to bone her and having already been tormented by his failure to taste Jean Grey’s pussy, he’s not going to let this stand. So still armed with some explosives and an intent to blow up the machine, he makes his way to the temple. He meets some armed savages along the way who attempt to slow him down. But this is a Wolverine who is pissed off and cock-blocked. They might as well try to keep an army of stoners away from a pool filled with Twinkees and cookie dough.

The savages may know this on some level because after all their best warriors are dead, they keep trying to stop him by attacking him with giant killer gorillas. It’s exactly as awesome as it sounds. In a land that is basically a glorified Jurassic Park, why not throw a little King Kong into the mix? The savages somehow have tamed these giant apes and they don’t much care for cock-blocked Canadians so they rip into Wolverine. Because if a bunch of determined savages aren’t enough to stop a pissed off Wolverine who just saw a hot chick die, shouldn’t a bunch of oversized apes be able to succeed?

The short answer is no. The long answer is something that PETA supporters will probably be disgusted by because Wolverine does to the giant apes what he did to the savages. Hey, at least you can’t claim he treats humans and animals differently. He shows them the same sort of savage brutality. He’s all for equality in that respect.

But what makes this sort of brutality all the more enjoyable is just how detailed and drawn out it is. While this issue may not have provided many answers about the machine and blatantly ripped off Batman, it does continue a general theme of putting Wolverine in battles that just allow him to be his badass self. It’s the kind of bloody brawls he just doesn’t fight as often anymore because he’s too busy rubbing elbows with the Avengers or running a school named after a woman he never got to bone. That sort of action is one of the best selling points in Savage Wolverine and this issue maintained that at the expense of apes and savage cavemen.

Once Wolverine is done ripping through angry natives and gorillas, he’s pretty roughed up. We even get some nice internal monologue that helps detail what happens when you’re attacked by three angry gorillas (might be handy information if you’re planning a trip to the zoo with a drunk). But he moves forward, driven by the anger over Shanna dying before he could see her naked. He reaches the temple and the strange alien machine, which he intends to blow up. Shanna, having learned from Cho why that is a shitty idea, manages to reach him just in time to stab him in the stomach to prevent him from detonating the device. That’s right. Wolverine gets stabbed again and this time by a hot woman. I don’t know why, but something about that is extra satisfying.

It seems like all is well. Wolverine didn’t blow up the alien machine (which looks like a fancy box mind you) and Shanna lets him know she’s still alive. The stab wound I guess is just extra reinforcement. But it seems as though this should be the end of it. Then the Hulk appears. No really, that’s what happens. The Hulk just fucking appears. I had to wait to sober up a bit to make sure I wasn’t reading this issue after taking too many hits of LSD. But apparently, this is how the comic ends. The Hulk appears out of nowhere, just like Amadeus Cho did a couple issues ago. We don’t get an explanation. We don’t even get a clue. We just know the Hulk is here and shit is likely to be smashed in the next issue.

I’ll need more than a few bong hits to make sense of this comic. I’ll probably also need a few to try and ignore the blatant parallels between the Lazarus Pit in Batman and whole resurrection bit with Shanna and Man-Thing blood. Since I’m low on weed, I’ll still do my best to break it down and it comes back to there being too many fucking blanks to fill in. This issue had some entertaining (and violent) moments that PETA supporters will bitch about, but in terms of overall plot it is still akin to that stoner buddy of yours who lays passed out on your couch and refuses to watch anything other than reruns of Scooby Doo. It just won’t move forward and even when it does, it comes off as something we’ve already seen before in one too many Batman comics.

But beyond the Batman parallels, this issue just threw too much shit into the pot without letting it cook. And I’m not just talking about the Hulk’s appearance at the end either. Man-Thing (or something that looks just like it) showing up early on raises more than a few eyebrows and not much of an effort was made at giving an explanation. The same can be said for the machine, which Cho tries to break down with his science-babble. And if you flunked 11th grade physics, it’s probably not going to make this machine that’s at the center of the whole damn plot any less mysterious. We still have no fucking clue what this machine is. We know it’s what caused the SHIELD ship to crash, but beyond that why the fuck is it such a big deal if it doesn’t even melt the faces of Nazis?

Despite these flaws, this issue still retains some of the elements that helps make Savage Wolverine a solid book. It’s still Wolverine at his most basic, kicking ass in the jungle and getting roughed up in ways that would paralyze anyone else not named Chuck Norris. The battle against the natives and the giant apes was classic Wolverine-style brutality. It was well-crafted and the internal narration definitely added something extra special to the bloodshed. If you only read those portions of the comic, it’s still worthwhile. But in terms of the overall story, it’ll have you both scratching your head and rolling your eyes in ways no amount of bong hits will help.

Savage Wolverine may be one of the few X-books right now where Wolverine isn’t an insufferable douche-bag. It has a lot of appeal, but it has a lot of fucking holes in it as well. Aside from reading a Wolverine you don’t hate and Shanna’s rack, this issue didn’t add much to that appeal. Savage Wolverine #4 fell short in way too many ways to be awesome. I can only give it a 2.5 out of 5. I’m okay with leaving some things to the imagination. A peep show in Amsterdam or my parents wedding night come to mind as good examples. But that shit just doesn’t work for a comic. For this series to be awesome, some of those blanks need to start getting filled in. There’s just only so much power that Shanna’s breasts have. Nuff said!

Savage Wolverine #1 - Jungle Loving Awesome

What is it about the untamed wild that gives some people huge boners? I know people who will wake up at four in the morning, put on loin cloths, grab a hunting knife, and run into the woods giggling like ten-year-old girl that just stole her older sister's tampon. They say it's liberating, being able to escape from civilization and enjoy a simpler existence. Then they have to take a shit and they run back to the nearest working toilet as fast as humanly possible. So while they'll rave on and on about the wonders of nature, when it comes to giving up the ability to shit in a toilet and not have to wipe their ass with dry leaves that's a deal-breaker.

I'll go on record as saying the hippies, the environmentalists, and Ted Kazinsky are full of shit. Civilization is awesome. I like sitting in an air-conditioned room eating food I didn't have to kill with a bow and arrow and shitting in a toilet. I would much rather saw my legs off and dive head-first into a pool of dog piss than go camping in the wilderness. And anybody who wants to bitch about how civilization has dehumanized us needs to either start shitting on trees or shut the fuck up.

That said, some people actually thrive in the wild. These are the kind of people who could be dropped bare ass naked in the middle of the African Serengeti and three weeks later, he's made every lion his personal bitch. You don't come across too many people like that these days, but in comics these guys aren't just more common. They embody that wild style of wild nature that gets us in touch with our own inner shit-throwing primate.

Of all the characters who would thrive in a jungle and treat it as a weekend in Vegas, Wolverine is the ultimate wild man. He doesn't just survive in the wild. He makes it his personal mission to make every single predator's balls shrivel off and make every potential prey shit themselves in terror. But lately, he hasn't been able to get in touch with his wild side. He's been too busy blowing the Avengers, screwing over the X-men in Avengers vs. X-men, and trying to fight the urge fuck a teenage Jean Grey. But as part of the Marvel NOW! relaunch, Marvel is attempting to get Wolverine back to his roots before he was the unofficial man-whore of comics. As part of a new series by Frank Cho, the Savage Wolverine promises to ditch the whole "I want to fuck the redhead" or "I want to gut Cyclops" plot and puts him back in his element. For a guy who already looks like he took a bath in Rogain every day since he was two years old, it's the perfect change of pace.

The tone is set in Savage Wolverine #1 with an all-too familiar scenario. Some dipshit, civilization-loving assholes think they can fly their fancy, high-tech gadgets into the Savage Land and not have something go horribly wrong. That’s like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day while working in a Chinese coal mine and expecting not to get lung cancer. In this case it’s a couple of SHIELD agents investigating an island with an insanely creepy mountain-sized sculpture. They’re tracking some mysterious energy that they’re hoping to investigate. They’ve also got Shanna the She-Devil with them, who is acting as a guide while also saving them the need to bring porn on the mission. But seriously, when has approaching an islands with a creepy face carved into a mountain ever led to anything other than disaster? For that reason, it’s hard to feel bad for the SHIELD agents when their aircraft starts going down. Maybe they just expect too much from dangerous islands that don’t have giant signs that tell them to stay the fuck away.

Enter our old friend Wolverine. Unlike the dipshit SHIELD agents who thought they could bang karma and get away with it, he wasn’t stupid enough to fly a high tech jet into the Savage Land and expect it not to crash. Instead, he just wakes up in the middle of the Savage Land without any memory of how he got there. He was either tricked or he went on one hell of a bender, or maybe a little of both.

But this apparently happens eight months after the SHIELD agents disappeared. There’s really no lead-in as to how he ended up here and maybe that’s for the better because it means Wolverine can get right to channeling his inner animal. That becomes somewhat necessary because he’s immediately attacked by Jurassic Park style raptors when he wakes up. In the Savage Land, that’s about as common as getting beat up in a mosh pit at a Metallica concert.

In addition to killer raptors, it’s also a guarantee that a visit to the Savage Land will also land you in the crosshairs of some hostile Neanderthal types with a lot of pent up aggression and no internet access to harass total strangers on message boards. But Wolverine decides to get proactive for once and hunts down a group that happens to be carrying one of the wounded SHIELD agents, most likely for human sacrifice or for a Hannibal Lecture style feast. Wolverine opts to not ask politely and proceeds with cutting them up like strips of bacon at a Five Guys. It’s brutal. It’s bloody. It’s violent. It’s just what you would expect from a book with the word “savage” in the title, no more no less. There’s some nice narration in here as well that helps make it a little less bland, but it really doesn’t add much to the scene.

After Wolverine completes his casual slaughter, he finds out from the dying SHIELD agent the location of their crashed ship. He gives the agent a proper burial so he doesn’t have to go through the indignity of being shit out by a T-Rex and then makes his way to the crashed ship where he finds a few various notes and a clear sign that these SHIELD agents were too incompetent to guards against an army of cavemen. But while he’s trying to figure out why SHIELD would want to visit a place where stepping in dinosaur shit is a real concern, he’s confronted by the one person who wasn’t stupid enough to get roughed up by cavemen and that person has an awesome rack.

It’s Shanna the She-Devil and she has to first stab Wolverine with a spear before she recognizes him. I’m guessing that’s not the worst thing a woman has ever done to him so it’s probably an easy thing to forget, especially when she’s wearing a loin-cloth bikini. I try not to take too much pleasure in Wolverine getting horribly wounded, but given what a massive douche he’s been since Avengers vs. X-men this scene still put a smile on my face.

Once the awkwardness of having stabbed Wolverine wears off, Shanna explains why a couple of SHIELD agents were stupid enough to visit the Savage Land. It’s actually exceedingly predictable, almost to the point where King Kong could probably sue. They suspected there was some ancient technology on the island and when they got to close, they encountered a disruption field that caused their ship to crash. After trying to be Bear Gylles for a while, they attempted to sail away only to get attacked by sea monsters. So it’s basically your standard vacation package to the Savage Land. Both SHIELD agents ended up captured, but they still suspected that there was some ancient technology in the mountain that they could use. They were planning to reach that technology with a very low-tech solution that involved blowing shit up.

It’s a story we’ve seen countless times before and parodied even more. A group of civilized people have their civilized gizmos fail them and they end up in a very uncivilized part of the world. Sometimes they end up being sacrificed or eaten. Sometimes they train monkeys to be butlers. Sometimes they make it into a porno. It’s a very basic and very clichéd plot. While it fits nicely with a Wolverine story, nobody with a handful of brain cells will find it too groundbreaking.

The premise may be basic, but it still involves blowing shit up so that means it has both the promise of explosions and more pictures of Shanna’s rack. So there’s still plenty of reason to follow this story. Wolverine and Shanna quickly work out a plan that involves finishing what the SHIELD agents started, minus the part where they got killed by cavemen. They intend to blow up the base of the mountain and use the ancient technology to call for help. However, this is still the Savage Land. That means there are a long list of creatures looking to maim them. That includes a hoard of Pterodactyls. Before they can even entertain thoughts of blowing shit up, they have to fight them off in another visually stunning yet predictable scene of jungle slaughter.

Part of that predictability involves Shanna demonstrating the toughness of a hardened jungle woman with PMS. She beats Wolverine to the punch in terms of recklessly attacking the Pterodactyl hoard. It forces Wolverine to shove her out of the downed aircraft, while probably copping a feel in the process (no straight man would blame him). Shanna doesn’t like this because it leaves them out in the open and vulnerable. And once again, a woman is shown to be right while the man is shown to be stupid because one of the Pterodactyl’s grabs Wolverine and flies him up high in the air before dropping him. Perhaps it’s another lesson for Wolverine in how to better deal with women, aside from boning them and hitting on the ones that are married. But again, it’s rather predictable. The comic ends with the prospect of him hitting the ground head first in a way that would turn most people into a blood stain on a T-Rex’s foot. But he’s Wolverine. You know he’s going to survive. So don’t expect to be biting your nails off wondering how this shit is going to play out.

I didn’t originally intend to do a review of Savage Wolverine when I first heard about it. Then after a few drinks and a few bong hits, it finally dawned on me. I said to myself, “You know what? This is just what Marvel comics needs! A book where Wolverine isn’t being a total dick cheese to Cyclops or playing the part of an Avengers groupie! Now where the fuck can I get more of this pot? It’s awesome!” After reading the first issue, I can say with or without a bong hit that this comic succeeded in delivering a welcome change-of-pace for Wolverine. But is it compelling enough to make a whole series out of? That’s something that’s difficult to answer even with a bong hit.

I enjoyed the issue. But Frank Cho really didn’t bring anything new to the table. The premise of the story has been overdone more than Joan Rivers’s face. Someone tries to explore the Savage Land, they crash land, and they get roughed up by a group of jungle savages that still shit in pots. That shit hasn’t just been done in Marvel comics before. This is shit that’s been done in every King Kong knock-off for decades. So if you’ve seen even some of those, including all the porn parodies, you won’t be surprised at all by what you see in this comic.

It was still awesome in that we get to see Wolverine going back to basics, surviving on his animal instincts and crossing paths with a hot jungle chick. The team-up between Wolverine and Shanna is definitely the most compelling aspect of this comic. It’s a team-up that makes perfect sense. She’s a tough, hard-nosed woman who is more at home in the jungle than Charlie Sheen at a Columbian whore house. Wolverine is an equally tough, ill-tempered brute who gets along better with angry animals trying to kill him than his own fellow X-men at times. Fuck, this is the perfect theme for either a porno or a new reality show on Bravo.

This first issue may have been basic and predictable, but it successfully established the conflict and set up the partnership between Wolverine and Shanna. Now it’s not yet clear if that partnership will include the exchange of a few bodily fluids down the line, but it is clear that there’s a story to be told here. Savage Wolverine #1 may not have a novel concept, but Frank Cho still makes it entertaining enough to be enjoyable. I give Savage Wolverine #1 a 3 out of 5. This comic didn’t change my opinion on camping or the whole back-to-the-wild bullshit that hippies love to whine about. Maybe I would find it more tenable if a beautiful woman like Shanna tagged along, but I know it would still go downhill the moment we ran out of toilet paper. So I’ll be leaving the survivalist shit to Wolverine and the idiots preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Nuff said!