It’s Better To Burn Out: Daken: Dark Wolverine #21 Review

We’ve had some fun at Rob Williams’s expense here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives because to be truthful, I put Robocop on my pull list from back when Avatar was publishing Frank Miller’s Robocop – a Steven Grant written and Juan Jose Ryp drawn adaptation of Miller’s original script for the movie Robocop 2. And because of that, I kind of automatically get copies Dynamite Comics’s version of Robocop, and honestly? Rob Williams should not be writing Robocop comics. He probably shouldn’t be allowed to write the word Robocop.

And when it comes to Daken: Dark Wolverine, we kinda get it for almost the same reason: I put Wolverine on my pulls back when Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi were on the book about five years ago, and I started getting Daken by default. I mentioned the mistake to my local comic store owner, who knows me my name and asks me if I’d rather buy a couple extra books or get my comics from a Rite-Aid spinner rack while parents hustle their children away muttering “Don’t talk to perverts,” and wound up keeping it… even though I think that the term “Dark Reign” should only be used again when some comic geek biologist uses it in the name for a newly-discovered shit beetle.

So we’ve got a writer with some decent books under his belt – but some real stinkers, too – and a book born from the one of the longest and most irritating events Marvel’s produced since Maximum Carnage, and on top of it all? The book’s been canceled. So there should be nothing in Daken: Dark Wolverine to look forward to… Which is a shame, because it is a pretty damn solid comic book. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s interesting, and that’s enough.

If nothing else, Williams is sending Daken out with one hell of a bang. He’s taking the past several issues of Daken’s plot – Daken has been fighting an addiction to a drug called Heat that, in prior issues, burned out his healing factor – and used it to put him in a place where he feels justified in going on a collision course with Wolverine for one last battle… if not the entire Marvel Universe. Williams has tied together the plot elements from before the story was going to be canceled into a completely logical and compelling story… and a story that attacks the concept of heroics in the 616, both philosophically and physically. I don’t want to spoil anything, but all I know is that damn, I want an attack helicopter. And a rocket. I would think twice before launching it at Dr. Strange, but if I had a rocket, things would be different. But I digress.

What we have here is a story that calls into question cynical kill-em-and-bring-em-back comic book deaths, the motivations behind particular Marvel heroes, and, in fact, acts as a direct attack on everything the the Marvel Universe stands for. Hard to believe this is coming from a man who’s been fired from both of his books by Marvel Editorial! This book is entertaining and well-done, but it’s the equivilent of a DJ locking the studio door and quitting on the air. Only with a rocket.

The art by Matteo Buffagni, Andrea Mutti and Riley Rossmo (They’re all credited just under “Art,” I don’t know who penciled, who inked, who colored, who got coffee, or who offered had release to who) is… interesting. There’s not a ton of action on this book, and what action there is takes place almost exclusively as a hallucination, meaning that the action can look however the hell it needs to. And the facial expressions are… a little weird. There’s a tight shot of Daken’s face on a rooftop where it looks like his eyebrows are erupting from his forehead like he just told them they’re adopted, and a tight facial shot of one random passerby on page one looks like he’s in the process of giddily shitting his pants. It’s not bad per se, but it jumps out in a way that I found distracting.

Like I said, this book is not perfect, and it’s not about a character that has any kind of long-term future. And as the second-to-last issue of the book, it’s not like it’s got any value as a jumping on point. But as an interesting take on Marvel at large written by a dude who has nothing to lose, you could find worse this week. Check it out… if only you want to eventually see what happens when you shoot a rocket at Dr. Strange.