Review: Wolverine reference books
It’s fascinating to see the same material presented in competing books, approached in entirely different ways. DK Publishing, the successful home to the various character-specific Ultimate Guides, offers up Wolverine: Inside the World of the Living Weapon (200 pages, $24.99) while Pocket Books, which has been home to the Marvel novels, gives us The Wolverine Files (160 pages, $40). The former is written by DK mainstay Matthew K. Manning while Mike W. Barr, not a writer normally associated with guide books or Wolverine, handles the second book.
Both detail the character’s background, his friends, his foes, his greatest capers, and a look at his deeply fractured psyche and tortured soul.
However, Manning’s book gives readers a far more detailed accounting of the backgrounds of the characters and storylines. Taking a chronological approach, he offers up overview of specific eras followed by key issue spotlights plus long looks at the key people in his life, both the good and the evil. Interspersed are also short bits regarding how the stories fit in with the overall publishing program at Marvel along with some insight into the creators and their efforts. As a result, this is a far richer, and cheaper, reading experience.
DK, known for its hyperkinetic layouts, tones things done here and makes each spread easier to read, with nice call outs, and judicious graphic selections showing the great range of art styles employed through the years.
If this book is to be faulted, it’s in not providing enough information regarding the behind-the-scenes work that led to these stories and events. For example, why did Bill Jemas decide that 2001 was the time to finally provide Logan with an origin? Also, Wolverine’s unusual friendships with Jubilee and Kitty Pryde are given short-shrift and both deserved more space.
Barr’s approach is the more creative, with files, reports, letters and memos from the people in Wolverine’s life summing up the man’s background and career. Written from the point of view of Nick Fury, Natasha Romanov, Jasper Sitwell and others, it has varied voices which make for a different reading experience.
The book is more cleanly designed, resembling a S.H.I.E.L.D. case file with tabs along the edge to replicate the look of a report. There are margin notes from Fury and sections are redacted to give it that “declassified look”. The profiles of people and places read not too different from a Marvel Handbook page and the art skews to the works from the last decade and could have benefited from material culled from earlier points in his publishing career.
While a more varied read, it’s also not as complete a dossier and for $40, it should offer a lot more, especially with the competitive book.
If both books are beyond your wallet, Marvel competes with their licensees with [[[Wolverine: Weapon X Files]]], a 64-page comic book for a mere $4.99. Head writer Jeff Christiansen and his ten colleagues have the advantage of the files being the most up-to-date given the shorter schedule for a comic versus a book. The Handbook pages follow the traditional format and scream for a redesign and the pick-up art is hit or miss.
Want more Wolverine after seeing the movie this weekend? You have plenty of options.
Marvel has had varying degrees of success with the direct-to-video efforts but the program continues and there’s little surprise that the most recent offering featured Wolverine, given the release this week of [[[X-Men Origins: Wolverine]]]. What is odd is that Lionsgate chose to release the video 
in January, too late for the holidays and too early to capitalize on the Fox feature.
All eyes are on what J.J. Abrams and his team have done to reinvigorate public interest in 
. The reason the franchise, created by Gene Roddenberry, needs any attention at all is the result of inept studio focus during the 1990s and beyond. To Paramount’s management at the time, [[[Star Trek]]] was a cash cow to be milked dry as often and in as many ways as possible. Any care about creativity was a lucky happenstance, not by design. Therefore, they let [[[Star Trek: Voyager]]] limp along on their UPN network only to be followed by the even limper [[[Star Trek; Enterprise]]]. The film series, featuring [[[The Next Generation]]] characters, kept hitting the reset button until [[[Nemesis]]], which had a disinterested director foisted upon the series at a time it really needed to improve its game given the critical drubbing the television version of the franchise was receiving.
In our world, there are costumed champions fighting the good fight against costumed evil doers, done in public and for our entertainment. We call them professional wrestlers but given their names, attire, and storylines, they truly are comic books brought to life. Unlike comic heroes, though, these players age and fade away, to be replaced by a new generation with new names, not retreads.
. While everyone made a big deal about Mickey Rourke’s comeback performance, the film itself was the real revelation. It felt like a documentary, entirely shot with handheld cameras, sparing in its soundtrack, and unflinching in the portrait of an aging star who seems good at only one thing. If anything, the movie is a bookend to [[[Rocky]]]. While the Sylvester Stallone film ended with the once-in-a-lifetime championship bout, [[[The Wrestler]]] ends with a rematch of two former warriors 20 years past their prime.
In the 1970s, Chris Claremont was arguably the first comic book writer to advance Stan Lee’s style of writing for the Marvel super-heroes, delving deeper into his characters and exploring what it meant to be born a mutant in a world that feared the different. As a result, much as everyone glommed onto [[[Spider-Man]]] in the 1960s, Chris’ [[[X-Men]]] in the 1970s became the new standard for popularity.
covers the first sixteen episodes from the two-part pilot “[[[Night of the Sentinels]]]” through “[[[Whatever it Takes]]]”. Volume two starts with “[[[Red Dawn]]]” and ends with “[[[The Phoenix Saga]]]” Parts 1-5.
The concept behind 
had never been attempted on television before and the CBS series about a covert government operation taking on; well, impossible, cases became a smash hit. Guided by the steady Peter Graves, Greg Morris and Peter Lupis, the series received awards, acclaim and most importantly, ratings. Early on, the show was also headlined by Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, but they left after three seasons. In stepped Leonard Nimoy, Lesley Ann Warren, and Sam Elliot for the next two seasons but by spring 1971, the show was beginning to feel tired.
Hollywood’s hottest dynamic duo, Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci have named Bobby Cohen as president of Kurtzman/Orci Prods, according to 
Spring is in the air… and lots of actors are finding work.
