If you like throwaway Wolverine stories, then this has been the month of your dreams.  On top of his three monthly titles, the last few weeks have already seen the release of two Wolverine one-shots.  And now we have X-Force: Ain't No Dog.  Nominally, it's a spin-off from the new X-Force title, but the lead story stars... guess who?  Correct.

What on earth is going on here?  Who could possibly have decided that the world needed six Wolverine comics in a single month?  (And that's before you count any of the team books that he also appears in.)  People have been saying for years that Wolverine is overexposed, but this is getting farcical.

Of course, you can't blame the creators for Marvel's scheduling diarrhoea.  So what have we got here?

Well, "Ain't No Dog" itself is a full-length story by Charlie Huston and Jefte Palo.  Huston is the pulp novelist responsible for the recent Moon Knight relaunch, which I rather liked.  Palo's name doesn't mean much to me; from the look of it, he likes his Frank Miller and his Mike Mignola.  The art is over the top, but pleasing enough in a rough-edged, highly stylised sort of way.

The story, though.  The story.  There's a token plot, in which Cyclops sends Wolverine to defeat a bad guy and recover the microchip in his head - an order which Wolverine takes rather literally.  But that's beside the point.  It's really just an excuse for Wolverine to slaughter people while assuring us that they're not innocent.

From the look of it, the idea is that we should revel in Wolverine's violent excesses, but find his impassive black humour a little disturbing.  It's morally ambiguous, do you see?  The problem here is that Wolverine's ambivalence towards his violent tendencies is not only well documented, it's been one of the key themes of his character for decades.  Even the current X-Force series has stressed that Wolverine doesn't want the rest of the team to end up as killers like him.  So a story like this, where Wolverine is blackly delighted by the whole thing, seems to miss the point of the character rather badly. 

There's also a back-up strip featuring Warpath.  This one's bland but serviceable.  X-Force is playing Warpath as a character who's willing to kill for the right cause, but who's troubled by the trail of bodies he's now leaving behind him.  Writer Jason Aaron duly makes that point at more length.  It's fine, and it does as much as could be expected from a fill-in story, which can only flag up the idea rather than advancing it.  The art is forgettable, but adequate, and the colouring helps add a bit of atmosphere.

Overall, this is simply a book we didn't need.  It's hard to imagine anyone so bereft of Wolverine and Warpath stories that they might actually yearn to own this, and the Wolverine story misses the mark quite significantly.  But on the other hand, Palo's art has its strengths, and the back-up strip's not bad.

Rating: C+

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