3 out of 5

The trend with heavy hitters on big league books seems to be a good solid couple of arcs that take up about a year – these would be the arcs where the writer is given free-ish reign to be themselves to make for fan appeal – and then a slow crumble into DC / Marvel normality, holding on to the shreds of what we know about the writer – their humor, or their bitterness, whatever.  Compare this to your people who are in the trenches eternally – such as Bendis – people who live for year-round plotting of men-in-tights… it’s a bit different of a pitch, a bit different set of stories.  Bendis is your universe architect, and after letting a Greg Rucka play around with his character-driven, female-centric storylines, maybe it’s a Bendis, or maybe it’s an editor, or maybe it’s Rucka himself, wanting to play in the larger sandbox, who slowly lets the big, bad comic world trickle in and suddenly their dialogue, their style is mapped to something a little bit sillier.  You stick with it because it harkens back to their earlier arcs, but something has definitely changed.

And your writer, generally, is off that book around the time you start losing interest, ’cause the marketing guys know what they’re doing after all.

Rucka’s run on Wolverine might not be affected by crossovers, thank god, and I can see him in the latter half of his 19 issue run, but there is a definite line that gets crossed about midway through things from solid stories about Logan, about how Logan fits into the world, and then a story about the world around Logan, which is the first step outside of our writer’s brain and into the playground.  Thankfully Rucka left / was taken off the book right after concluding this tone-shifted arc, but it’s enough of a downward swing at the end to remind you that there’s no “cannon” to this stuff… and that Rucka’s greater Wolvie stories will be brushed off or forgotten by X fans because man, they just don’t jive with the world, and Wolvie’s already got his feral side figgered out and blah blah blah.

But also, let’s be fair – Rucka can get cheesy.  And his take on Wolvie as the wandering lone gunman gives him several opportunities to get cheesy.  It’s his fallback device.  And something I’ve seen him only very recently divest himself of as he’s gotten more comfortable with the grey elements of humanity – sex isn’t always pure or dirty, violence not always calculated or sloppy – these are things you’d think he’d have known, having fiddled with the crime genre, but I think they’ve been concepts he’s had to teach himself to write, and Wolverine was actually a nice book for exploring this, as Logan is the master of the fan-favorite grey area.  (Punisher, yes, but he’s a vigilante, whereas Wolvie plays for a team…)

If you just gave me the first 11 issues of Rucka’s run, which traces his destruction of a woman slavery ring and a drug ring run by a surprising figurehead – without an amazing bar-conversation-with-Nightcrawler issue in between, analyzing the what’s and why’s of Logan’s decisions (which the fans took Rucka to town for, for wasting time, but I thought this was an excellent issue that humanized Wolverine in a way we don’t often get) – I would tell you it’s awesome.  He stuffs some subplots in there with a woman FBI’er who falls for Logan, and that’s where some of that cheese is, but it adds a good chase element to the story.  After a wordless dream issue, which attempts to do the same analyzation thing but in surreal style – and I’m sorry, it’s a great concept but it just falls flat and uncomfortable – we get our “Return of the Native” arc, about a female Weapon X survivor who Sabretooth is hired to hunt down, who Wolverine starts a feral fling with…  It’s possible this was plotted out a while beforehand, as it plays into the Rucka strong-female thing, but the inclusion of Sabretooth and Weapon X takes you out of the realistic vibe Greg had worked for the first part of run, and though the story is given ample room and 7 issues, it feels stuffed in.  It also – and I hate playing continuity guy – but it also feels ignorant of a billion Weapon X stories in the past, like, hey, look, here’s another one, no big whoop, and so fails as a contribution to pop culture as well, making us sad at the end of Greggy’s blip on the book.

Yesh.