With all that trigger scent stuff behind her, Laura Kinney faces another invisible threat in All-New Wolverine #19. It’s marketed as a jumping on point, so for someone who hasn’t kept up with the former X-23’s tribulations, is it good?
All-New Wolverine #19 (Marvel Comics)
Remember the times when ordinary citizens would get freaked out by aliens dropping out of the sky? Now they just shuffle around and gawk, leaving themselves open to otherworldly pathogens ready to turn their organs into liquid shit.
Nick Fury makes the call to bring in the person best-suited to address this threat, and none too soon. If Wolverine can’t make something happen, and soon, the government will raze the whole area!
Is It Good?
Really? A simple quarantine wouldn’t be enough? You have to blow all the bridges like Bane and threaten to annihilate anyone exposed? I mean, never mind the fact that alien infections probably wouldn’t affect us anyway (you don’t get the same diseases your dog does, and he’s a lot more related than anything extraterrestrial would be). I guess if it’s good enough for H.G. Wells, it’s good enough for comics.
The story structure in All-New Wolverine #19 is a little iffy, too. It’s a neat idea — an unknown narrator runs down the situation so we can jump straight into the action. Problem is, this being pushed as a place where new readers can start, the whole thing feels like an extended recap until you finally realize, nope, that was all brand new. The device itself is fine, and points to writer Tom Taylor for wanting to break from the norm, so maybe this is more of a marketing fail. Either way, the end result is initial confusion.
And while we’re at it, let’s point out some questionable decisions by artist Leonard Kirk, like Laura’s strange little lip bite while being riddled by bullets. I don’t know if Ironheart’s disembodied Tony Stark head is supposed to be so creepy, either, but everything else is fine, if unspectacular. Michael Garland’s colors might be a little too bright for night scenes, but as this book likely has a larger than average young adult audience, maybe they are actually suitable.
Is It Good?
All-New Wolverine #19 is a fairly average introduction to readers who might be picking up the book for the first time, following the “Enemy of the State” arc, and that’s its true detriment. Failing to capitalize on a highly-publicized story and returning to business-as-usual will likely please the book’s core readers (and for it to make it 19 issues, there must be a good number of them), but it probably won’t entice any experimenters who just gave it a try.
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