You know how every Marvel book opens with a standard caption explaining the concept of the book?  "Bitten by a radioactive spider, etc, etc, Spider-Man"?  Well, imagine having to write one for Wolverine: First Class, and having to explain the title.

Here's what they came up with: "Kitty Pryde wants to become one of the mutant super hero X-Men, but she'll have to survive as the original member of Wolverine First Class."

Uh... no.  Because, point one, she is already an X-Man, and point two, nothing in the story actually suggests that Wolverine's been specifically assigned to teach her.  But nice try.

What the blurb does make clear, though, is that this is a Kitty Pryde and Wolverine book, with the emphasis firmly on Kitty Pryde.  The stories are from her perspective, and the main focus of the book has been her attempts to figure out Wolverine and connect with him.  It's an "odd couple" book, playing with their relationship in a way that would only work at this point in continuity, when Wolverine was more of a curmudgeon, and Kitty was a naive child.  Not that they actually had this sort of relationship in those early issues - Wolverine was actually mellowing by that point.  But they could have done.

I'm not quite sure who this book is aimed at, mind you.  Come to think of it, given the content of this week's X-Men: First Class, I'm kind of confused about the target audience for this imprint generally.  But let's start with Wolverine: First Class for now.  It's set in early 1980s continuity and seems to assume at least a broad familiarity with the characters.  The basic idea of this issue is that Kitty throws Wolverine a surprise birthday party in an attempt to get on his good side, unaware that Sabretooth always attacks Wolverine on his birthday.  That's an odd thing to bring up in a title like this, since it comes from a handful of stories in the late eighties.  It's the sort of thing you do in a series aimed at hardcore fans. 

On the other hand, the book is clearly targetted at a younger audience.  And that poses some problems, because an all-ages Wolverine doesn't make a great deal of sense.  After all, his main weapon against the bad guys is to cut them up with his claws.  This book ends up in the odd position that Wolverine has to use his trademark claws somewhere in the story, but can't use them in a fight.  And so you get odd sequences of Wolverine chasing Sabretooth with his claws extended, and then retracting them to belt him on the chin.  I can't see a way around that, if you're going to write Wolverine in a child-friendly way, but it perhaps raises the question of whether the character is suitable for that kind of story in the first place.

Still, there's a lot to like in this book, as it captures the tone of early eighties X-Men stories while adding something of its own.  Van Lente is writing Kitty emphatically as a teenage girl, playing up her dance classes and her normalcy, and using them to irritate Wolverine.  The basic gag is the incongruity of the two, and it works fine.  It's nice to see Kitty actually having some sort of social life with the local kids - after all, she did go to those dance classes in the original stories - and it's also amusing to note that Van Lente is desperately trying to give Mariko Yashida a bit of backbone, which she singularly lacked in her early appearances.  (She was pretty, demure and Japanese, and that was about it.)

Longtime X-Men fans with a liking for the early eighties will enjoy this.  How well it'll play to more casual, younger readers - who are presumably supposed to be buying it too - I'm not quite so sure.  But hey, it works for me.

Rating: B+

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