Dreams

• Writer - Greg Rucka
• Penciler - Darick Robertson
• Inker - Darick Robertson
• Inker - Tom Palmer
• Colorist - Studio F
• Lettering - Virtual Calligraphy
• Lettering - Rus Wooton
• Ass't Editor - Warren Simons
• Editor - Axel Alonso
• Editor in Chief - Joe Quesada

Summary

  Logan, spending the night in Cassie's bed, is deep in a dream. In the dream, there is a red finch. A voice calls out to Logan to "kill me ... kill me again". Logan is seen tearing his claws through a piece of clothing. He stands completely naked in a field littered with dead bodies. Logan looks up, and the red bird, perched on a branch, tells him "Nice work". The bird flies off, and Logan give chase. A voice can be heard telling Logan that he looked thirsty.

  Logan is now wearing fisherman's clothing and fishing off a boat. He tells Nightcrawler, who was on the opposite end of the fishing line, to be quiet or he'd scare the fishes away. nightcrawler tells him that they already were, as people in the shape of fishes were swiming away. A storm comes, and the bird steals Logan's hat. He gives chase to a wooden cabin. Inside, Mariko Yashida was preparing dinner, and tells Logan to get dressed, for he was naked. A mysterious man tells Logan to wear a black tie clothing because "...we're civilized people here". Logan opens his closet, and picks a black tie suit. Inside his closet, a foaming Logan was hiding behind the clothing, who, with eyes glaringly red, leaps out with claws extended.

  A the dinner table, Logan asks Yukio who the mystery man was. Yukio repeats to Logan that she had made chili for dinner. She tells him that she loved him, and to kill her later. The mystery man comments on how good the chili is, while Logan comments how he couldn't reach his chili. The man, whose size now encompasses the entire room, asks Logan whether he was hungry or not.

  Logan is now crouched over the dead carcass of a fawn. In his hands is flesh from the deer, and blood is seen running from the corners of his mouth. He looks toward a nearby tree, where a black cat was watching him intently. The cat jumps on top of the deer, and looks curiously at Logan. Logan smiles as the cat sticks its tongue at Logan. Logan picks up the cat, and lays down on his back in a bed. A knocking sound can be heard. The cat jumps off, and Logan looks over to the window. The bird is at the window, and asks Logan whether he was thirsty.

  Rogue, serving Wolverine some beer behind a counter, tells Logan that "What's good for the goose is good for the gander". Logan takes the mask off his yellow/brown costume. Rogue asks him why he drinks so much. He tells her that it always hurt, and Rogue understands completely. Behind him, men and women in black sunglasses were fighting each other. Logan tells Rogue of his past, where during the 1920s when prohibition was in effect, he supplied liquor from Canada to the East Coast. As he drinks down another beer, Rogue gives her a box of matches, saying that a man told her to give it to him. He looked up to see that Rogue's eyes had been blackened. She tells him that the man had did it to her. Logan gets up and approaches the man, whose only reply to Logan was to make noises resembling Logan's claws being unleashed. Frustrated, Logan hits the man in the face, shattering it. Logan, with claws extended, looks up and sees the bird looking at him. He tells the bird that he didn't hit the bird that hard. The bird flies away.

  Back in the bar, Logan bangs his fist on the table to ask for another beer. A one-eyed cyclop was tending to the bird, who tells Logan that it had gotten to the bar first. As Logan waits, a bright light is projected on Logan's face. As he struggles to look, a man points at Logan. Logan complains about the light, and tells the man that it hurts his eyes. The man reminds Logan that he had two eyes, which confused Logan at first. The man corrects himself and says six eyes, to which Logan replied "six of one". As the two sit at a table, Mariko is grabbed from behind by a hairy arm. The man makes the strange noise again. Mariko calls out to Logan, only to have a beastly version of Logan kidnap her. Logan yells her name. The beastly Logan and the human Logan starts yelling out names of women who had significance in his life. The beastly version yells out the name "Rose". The human Logan is stunned. The beastly Logan pops out a set of claws, and runs it through Logan's chest. Logan tells the animal Logan that he couldn't feel a thing. The animal Logan slices Logan in his face. Again, he tells the animal Logan that he couldn't feel a thing. He leaves the cabin under the protest of the beastly Logan, who told Logan that he forgot one name.

  Outside, as a naked Logan once again pursued the bird, he runs into Jean, naked, in the snow, who tells Logan that she's cold. He tells her that he had no heat. As she moved seductively closer to Logan, she begins to talk about a coal burner and the process of how the coal is processed, then burnt. She warms Logan up as she licks his ears, and embrases him. The two share a kiss as the snow melts around them while the bird watches. As Logan looked at her intently, she tells Logan of a story about the history of the phoenix. Behind Logan, men in black suits and sunglasses approached him. Logan and Jean snuggle up again. Jean asks whether Logan was even listening. Logan tells her about the Chinese Phoenix. He is grabbed from behind by those men, as she tells Logan that he wasn't listening, nor did he ever listen to her in the past.

  Logan finds himself in a dark cell, where the mystery man was making the strange noises again, singing "Snikt-snakt paddy-whack ... give a dog a bone" as he slid a red bowl with a bone through the bars on the cell.

  Morning, as Logan walks into Cassie's kitchen, where Cassie was preparing coffee. She asks him about his sleep, and whether he had any dreams. As Logan takes a sip of his coffee while reading the newspaper, he tells her no.

Summary

  Wolverine #12 is a single-issue story. That mirrors the structure of Rucka's first arc, which also had a one-off story acting as an epilogue. Presumably this is intended to set a pattern.

  Anyway, "Dreams" is exactly what it says on the tin - a story which simply follows Logan's dreams for the night and presents a random jumble of images from Logan's subconscious which we're invited to make sense of.

  I'm not usually that keen on these types of story, which are often little more than a corner-cutting way of doing character development by numbers. Why dramatise somebody's inner conflict when you can just point the camera at it?

  Rucka's approach is more oblique than most, however, as the issue swiftly rambles off into surrealism. Very loosely, the thread of the story is Logan pursuing a red and yellow bird which is clearly meant to represent Phoenix. However, the story is packed with random jumps, irrational scenes and non-sequiturs. Scenes stabilise for a page or two at most, and even then don't make any literal sense.

  It's an exercise in subtext, where the point is to work out what all of these things mean to Wolverine and what significance he might attach to any of this. The roundabout approach certainly avoids it being excessively obvious. The downside is that unless you have a reasonably good knowledge of Wolverine's relationship with some of the characters namechecked here, it isn't going to mean a great deal to you at all. There's some obvious stuff about Logan keeping his animal side suppressed (at least sporadically), but there's also a whole load about his past lovers, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Rogue which will fly over the heads of readers who don't know the background. And if you do know the background, it's debatable whether you're going to learn anything here that you didn't already know.

  Darick Robertson returns on art, and does his usual excellent job on the character. His layouts contribute to the tension between semi-coherent scenes and complete confusion. There's a page incongruously inked by Tom Palmer which I assume is an art fix - it's the one with black blood all over the place, despite this being a PSR+ title. Quite why anybody would bother to sanitise that page given the rest of the issue, the mind boggles. But then, the mind boggles at a lot of things at Marvel these days.

  An interesting book up to a point, and it does capture the randomness of dreaming better than most stories of this sort. But I'm not convinced that there's any particularly unexpected insights lurking in here.

  Rating: B