The Four Color Media Monitor

The Colorado Springs Gazette writes its own sugarcoated coverage of Wolverine's soon to be taken trip to the dark world of the afterlife:

“The story opens where he’s already in hell, and we don’t really know how he got there or who put him there or anything,” said writer Jason Aaron. “Or at least his soul is in hell. His body is still running around on Earth, possessed by demons coming after people who are close to Logan.”

Oh, we know who put him there. Quesada, not to mention writer Aaron himself. And for what purpose? Nothing more than pointless zombie nonsense. As if that weren't bad enough, I see his body is being villified by targeting people he knows back on Earth, which'll make one wonder if he's better off dead, rather than resurrect and face a backlash from many angry humans.

In trying to fight his way out of hell, Wolverine will have to face all those foes he’s killed over the course of his very long life. Aaron, who was also the writer of “Wolverine: Weapon X,” says it’s an opportunity to put Wolverine in the middle of “a kind of horror story we’ve never seen before.”

Correction: a horror story we don't need to see. This is little more than a cardboard slosh through Wolverine's past, instead of looking forward to the future.

“Just having him in hell and facing all these characters is intriguing. There are the characters that everybody is going to expect to see, but there will also be a few that people aren’t thinking of.”

Wrong, it's a whole lot that people don't even care about. This is just the kind of farfetched nonsense that began to wreck Marvel in the mid-1990s.

The dark story might seen an odd choice coming as Marvel ushers in what it’s calling the Heroic Age, bringing in a bit of light after the civil wars, secret invasions and dark reigns of recent years. Not so, Aaron says.

“If you look at the Wolverine stuff I’ve done, one of the seeds I’ve been planting is that Wolverine is developing a sense of faith and hope,” Aaron said. That journey — to becoming a believer, a person with hope for the future — continues in the new story arc, he said.

“I’ve said all along this is my Heroic Age Wolverine story.”

Suuuurrre it is. If he's only going to face a hellish nightmare, I don't think he's getting neither rest nor joy, any more than the Hulk is. Then again, I don't think even those Marvel cast members whose stories usually work well in an optimistic light are getting any better treatment in the Heroic Age. Not Spider-Man, not the Avengers, not the Fantastic Four, not any of them. Peter Parker is still a galling slacker, the Avengers are treated pretentiously, and little is done to make the heroes inspiring and enjoyable. Nor is their any sense of continuity.

Update: USA Today's got its own superficial coverage, including the following, which I may not have noted yet:

Based in part on an idea that Aaron had pitched Vertigo Comics for a run on Hellblazer, the first story arc finds Logan's soul in hell while back on Earth, his body has been possessed by demons and is up to no good. Meanwhile, his friends and allies have been targeted by a mysterious group of villains, a storyline that continues to play out the next couple of weeks in the launches of both Daken: Dark Wolverine, written by Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu, and the Liu-penned X-23.

With the current direction they're taking, I fully expect this to be far more awful than it sounds. The first of these series should be a clear signal that any claim they're going to move to a more optimistic view is simply not true.

"We don't need to know anything about them, why they've done this to Wolverine, how they've done it, anything," Aaron says of these all-new antagonists. "We just know they've obviously got a serious mad-on for him and want to come after him and everyone close to him. So their story will unfold over the first couple of arcs as we find out their motivations and what they're really after."

When writer Aaron says we don't need any knowledge of the who's and whys, that's just a limp excuse for coming up with a lethargic story.

Labels: Avengers, dreadful writers, golden calf of death, marvel comics, msm propaganda, violence, X-Men