It’s almost impossible to remember a time when Weapon X wasn’t part of Wolverine’s back story. It’s become pretty ubiquitous, featured prominently in the X-Men movies and cartoons. After watching the “Hulk vs. Wolverine” dvd (see “…consumed all new #37″), where it yet again plays a role, it really spurred me on to break out the old Marvel Comics Presents (issues #72 - 84) where the “Weapon X” story originally appeared.
I was never, and really I’m still not much of a Wolverine fan. I find the character all right, but at this stage he’s gotten pretty convoluted, or at least his back story has. He’s a pretty good character, but unlike, say, Batman, he’s got little versatility. But if any part of Wolverine’s origin deserves to stick, the Weapon X story is it. Rereading Barry Windsor Smith’s 13-part opus, it truly is a great piece of comic bookery. It takes advantage of all the strengths of comic book storytelling and weaves an immeasurably fascinating tale about the torturous process of turning a virtually unknown mutant named Logan, grafting adamantium to his skeleton and brainwasking him to make him a controllable, if still savage, weapon.
I enjoyed Smith’s work on the story back in 1991 when I first read it, but I don’t think I ever truly appreciated how talented an artist he is. Each panel is brilliant, each illustration so masterfully calculated, and his omnipresence on the story (writer/artist/letter) makes it if not personal, then at least uniquely envisioned. I’m sure at that time, within the less than notorious “Marvel Comics Presents” Smith had near autonomy in creating it and it’s truly and concretely focussed.
While I briefly glimpsed at the back-up stories that accompanied “Weapon X” in the title, and despite some interesting names, none of them were really anything worth mentioning (a couple really disappointing Steve Ditko stories, and an unfortunately dry Shanna story by Gerard Jones and Paul Gulacy were most notable). I can happily dispose of these comics, but getting a trade of “Weapon X” is mandatory.
Dark Claw Adventures - by Ty Templeton and Rick Burchett, two of the most prominent creators on the “Adventures” line of younger readers comics from DC, they hit the tone note-perfect. In terms of drama, this issue delivers, surprisingly, but still I can’t get past the fact that the amalgamation of Batman and Wolverine is just… lame. 
Magnetic Men featuring Magneto - this book, like “Magneto and the Magnetic Men” before it, just keeps reaching for something decent in terms of storytelling and the spirit of the amalgam mergers but it’s always out of grasp. This one winds up leaning heavy on the sophomoric melodrama before losing its balance and pushing it full throttle into campy, over-the-top shenanigans. It’s a painfully cheesy read which only through sheer perseverance did I make it through (but the question is why did I bother?)
Generation Hex - mixing the Gen-X team of young mutants (popular during the late ’90’s) and Jonah Hex’s bizarre adventures in the old west, this one, written by typically inventive scribe Pete Milligan and with some uniquely intriguing and visual art by Adam Pollina, had promise. But under the weight of the hokum cornball of the Amalgam universe, it’s not very good at all. Early in the book I thought the “mutants in the old west” flavour might actually play out in a manner that would ignore the Amalgam conceit and generate its own sensibility, but it just didn’t happen. Pollina’s art, though, is solid.
One book Aden did have, though, was Green Lantern/Silver Surfer: Unholy Alliance, a prestige format special from the then Green Lantern creative team (Ron Marz and Darryl Banks) that immediately preceded the DC vs Marvel/Amalgam nightmare. GL/SS is an unfortunate book, in that it happened at a time when Kyle Rayner *just* took over as Green Lantern. As such his character wasn’t very well known or very well established. He didn’t really have any nemeses at that time, except the shadow of his predecessor, and thus Hal Jordan/Parallax is the main villain alongside Thanos. In the years since its publication, Hal Jordan was seeking redemption as the Spectre, then resurrected to his former glory in the past four years. Anyone picking this book up without really knowing the early Kyle Rayner days will be highly confused. The Silver Surfer side of things is really negligible as it’s truly a book about Kyle’s manipulation by Thanos and Hal’s manipulation of the Silver Surfer (given that Marz was pretty focussed on GL at that point, it’s really no surprise). The overall tale is fairly simplistic and weak, and, to be honest, boring. It ends with a hinting at the birth of Access, the character who accidentally merges the DC and Marvel universes, but that’s one page of a cardboard box with light shooting out of it, and were you to read it as a stand-alone (as it was meant to be) that visual is totally nonsensical. But whatever.