By Benjamin Morin — It’s a time of change for the X-line. With the revelatory wrap-up of writer Jonathan Hickman’s run earlier this month in Inferno #4, the line seems to be adjusting accordingly, moving into a next era that so far looks a lot like the previous era but just more. As part of this next era’s opening salvo, comes the twin series X Lives/X Deaths of Wolverine, beginning this week with X Lives of Wolverine #1. This is a weekly series consisting of two alternating titles that are telling one big story. Sound familiar? It should. With this structure, one is immediately reminded of the grand genesis of Hickman’s run with House of X/Powers of X. Though grand in evocative concept and iconography, however, it remains to be seen if this new Wolverine-centric series will set a brand new course for the X-line, or just be a self-contained time travel romp centered around the X-Men’s safest (at least sales-wise) character. If this first issue is any indication, it’s going to be the latter. This one reads like a decompressed storyline from the usual X-Force ongoing, complete with that book’s same creative team, writer Benjamin Percy and artist Joshua Cassara.

The inciting event in X Lives of Wolverine #1 is very much in the vein of Days of Future Past, Age of Ultron, or any of the myriad Wolverine time travel stories that have been written over the years. Only this time, Logan has been seemingly tasked with protecting an endangered Xavier throughout time. This issue is primarily rooted in the night of Xavier’s birth, during which Logan must protect the Xavier family from the ever encroaching threat of a mysterious body-hopping monster. Xavier is in it, but everything about this book feels like a pretty familiar Wolverine story.

Almost right from the start, though, this is an action-packed issue, as it should be if you’re going to stake a weekly comic book around Wolverine. As soon as Wolverine arrives in the past, he’s thrown into the thick of it as the assault on the Xavier mansion begins. What follows is a bare knuckles brawl (or, I guess, clawed-knuckles brawl? idk) through the mansion as Wolverine tries to figure out who’s behind the threat while also preventing any harm coming to the family. It’s a bloody and gritty issue fully realized by the art team of Cassara with colorist Frank Martin.

The art will be familiar to readers of X-Force, and that’s not a bad thing at all, since that book looks great. Indeed, from the opening pages here one feels right at home with their visual style for the issue. The page layouts keep the action kinetic and you feel every blow struck. The colors also add another layer to the experience as the muted palette of the mansion and its inhabitants becomes drenched in crimson as the battle progresses. 

Parallel to the main action are two other plot lines, one following Omega Red (that fucking guy) and the other retracing how Wolverine ended up in the past. Omega Red’s presence has been woven into Wolverine’s tale in both his solo series and X-Force, so picking up his thread here feels natural. It’s a good choice. The Krakoa era is all goodwill between mutants, but Omega Red has sort of flown in the face of that just by being the absolute worst. What role he plays in all of this is still unclear but it seems he will be a key player, especially with the ally he makes near the end, and setting up a clear and threatening antagonist is in this first issue is a smart choice that lends the whole series momentum.

The scenes seemingly leading up to Wolverine’s venture into time are where the issue does stumble for me. For all it’s postulating on the nature of time and history, it never quite achieves the level of grandeur it thinks it’s going for. We’re still completely in the dark as to why we’re sending Wolverine throughout time and also to the nature of the threat he’s facing way back when. This is just the first installment in the weekly series, but besides a dope action set piece, there’s surprisingly little to get invested in here. It leaves one with more questions than answers. It also feels like a continued move in the absence of Hickman to install familiar X-Men qualities to the new Krakoa era. We saw it in the X-Men main title with the creation of a steady, main X-Men team, and we see it again in this series, which is just Wolverine slashing stuff, taking damage, and slashing more stuff. It’s almost as if the X powers that be said, okay Krakoa got the people back, now let’s play it safe.

For a book that’s so evocative of the House of X/Powers of X debut, this one is just not that interesting, not even close. We’ve seen Wolverine’s time travel misadventures before, and X Lives seems to be setting us up for just another such journey. That’s not to say that it can’t be good fun, but for all it’s set dressing that evokes the most popular and shocking X-Men series in memory, this book just reads like the start of a new X-Force arc that’s going to be weekly. Again, this is all just off the debut of one half of the series, next week’s X Deaths could add another level to the whole story, but at the moment X Lives is a safe and average story backed by some great art.

Overall: Leaving readers with more questions than answers, X Lives of Wolverine #1 feels like more of a big jumbled fight than the start of an event that’s going to really matter. But we shall see. 7.0/10

REVIEW: X Lives of Wolverine #1

X Lives of Wolverine #1
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Joshua Cassara
Colorist: Frank Martin
Letterer: VC Cory Petit
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Price: $5.99
THE BIGGEST WOLVERINE STORY OF ALL TIME BEGINS HERE! WEEK 1 - Logan. James Howlett. Weapon X. The mutant best known as WOLVERINE has lived many lives under many identities and in many places, but never before has the fate of the future been so entwined with the past! Fan-favorite eras of Wolverine's saga are explored anew, along with never-before-seen episodes as Logan must travel to various points in time to prevent the death of a key figure in mutant history. But these LIVES are only one side of the story… Be here for the start of the time-shredding saga across all of Wolverine's history and future yet to come
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Ben is a comic buff and film fanatic. A journalism major by day and a comic reviewer by night, he avidly consumes all forms of sequential art. On Twitter, he goes by @BiglikeBen.