Continuing a brief series of reviews of the revived Atlas Comics line...
Wulf 1: I sat looking at the cover to Wulf (add ‘the Barbarian’ if you wish) for some time before hitting on why I found it as pleasing as I did. It certainly wasn’t the artwork on the cover, which was another mildly amateurish action shot (Seriously. Take a look and ask yourself: where are the hero’s feet? Where does his right leg join his body? That policeman in the lower left: where does his left arm begin?).
Then it struck me: it was the logo. And it pleased me because the logo on the new Wulf book is, near as dammit, the logo from the old Wulf book. No drop shadow, and a bit of extra Photoshop effect trickery, but the old logo nonetheless. I can’t find out who drew up that original logo, but I’d take a flyer on it being Gaspar Saladino. The keeping of the old logo grants the new book a little borrowed bonhomie; of the three new titles, Wulf has more of an emotional link to the originals.
Getting past the cover, we see that this is written by Steve Niles, who had a major hit both in comcs and film with 30 Days Of Night, which were both pretty impressive. There are a lot of wordless sequences in Wulf, but that doesn’t mean Niles hasn’t put the work in. What he’s produced is remarkably gory; the antagonist makes himself known by clapping his own head in a kind of bonce-only iron maiden, and pretty soon that’s neatly cut in two by Wulf himself. Somehow the bad guy - who goes by the name of Sanjon, which we know because of some astonishly stilted dialogue between him and Wulf (“I think you’ve spilled enough blood today. Don’t you…Sanjon?” “No. No I don’t…Wulf”) - jumps into a puddle that magics him from his native Generic Doomed World to present day New York, then Wulf has a go at following but slips back, dragging with him another old Atlas character, Lomax NYPD. And that’s about it for the first issue.
It may be that I’m being unduly harsh, as there were 0 issues of the initial offerings and there’s a strong chance that Generic Doomed World and its inhabitants, and the mystic puddle, not to mention the Fringe from Grim Ghost, were explained more fully therein. I think, though, that a recap may have been a good idea for those of us who didn’t see those preambles .
Nat Jones’ art is perfectly serviceable, with the reservation that at times his composition can be a bit off – on the opening splash there’s a shot of Wulf manfully riding out on a horse, but the placement of his shield make sit look as though he’s on some weird horse/wheelchair hybrid. In fact, that shot gave me entirely the wrong impression of what Wulf would be about; for a while I thought it would concern a world filled with bizarre primitive animal/machine cyborgs, jousting for control of a sort of Dark Narnia.
On the whole, this is the best-looking of the Atlas books, though it’s so unremittingly dark. There isn’t a panel that isn’t all moody shadows or close-ups of manly men with teeth so gritted they could pass as a clear road in a snowfall.
So, that’s Wulf, nee Wulf The Barbarian. As the issue ends with a splash panel of Wulf brandishing a sword in the face of Lomax NYPD’s gun, there’s a good chance the second issue will open with Wulf getting his brains blown out, which if nothing else would be an original way to continue the series.
We may see.
Next: Phoenix.
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