What's the commonality between these? Critically acclaimed talent exercising their creative muscle telling relatively continuity free stories with their characters of choice. Judging by the fact that Marvel now has over 52% of the market share as well as the fact that of the seven total recipients for the Eisner award for Best Writer, two of them are current Marvel exclusives (Ed Brubaker won in '07 and '08 and Bendis won in '02 and '03) and all of them with the exception of Alan Moore have done work at Marvel in the last five years.
In short - Marvel is kicking ass. And they have yet another book that's going to be added to the aforementioned roster with WOLVERINE: WEAPON X by Jason Aaron and Ron Garney.
If you're not familiar with Jason Aaron, he's the writer of SCALPED, which is a crime comic that takes place on an Indian reservation and is quite possibly the single best Vertigo book right now, one that might possibly end up in the same ranks as Y: THE LAST MAN, PREACHER, and THE SANDMAN. It seemed like before I had the chance to even pick up the trades and see what everybody was talking about, Marvel had already picked up the guy in an exclusive deal, having Aaron pick up scripting duties on GHOST RIDER and WOLVERINE.
The WOLVERINE storyline he was hired to write was a 4 part storyline following the Messiah Complex storyline entitled Get Mystique. During the Messiah Complex storyline, several forces struggled for the life of the newest mutant baby to be born since the catastrophic House of M event where the mutant count was limited to only 198 and mutantkind was rendered essentially infertile. With mutant extinction just on the edge of the horizon, it doesn't take Professor X to tell you that this mutant baby is pretty damn important. In the midst of the chaos, Mystique steals the baby and nearly kills it in an act of selfishness.
What is Cyclops' response to this? Find Mystique, wherever the hell she is, and kill her. No questions asked. Just Wolverine and nobody else.
The whole storyline was Wolverine tracing her steps through the Middle East. As he gets closer and closer to her whereabouts, we're treated to flashbacks of Wolverine and Mystique's relationship through the ages as bank robbers in the 1920's and the long history of blood, betrayal, and sex that has happened since. To further complicate matters, Mystique has been using her shapeshifting powers to impersonate Wolverine as she savages her way through the countryside, so Wolverine isn't exactly greeted with friendly cooperation in his search.
What resulted was a really fun and imaginitive story that has actually reinvigorated my interest in the character. Previously I had always thought that Wolverine was a big cliche, another Clint Eastwood persona: a strong silent tragic hero with a rough and tumble attitude, a guilty conscience, and a heart of gold underneath that's visible underneath the layer of piss and vinegar.
Aaron brought out a new angle on the character by understanding that a character that has lived for 200+ years has a rich and complex history, any of which you can draw from in flashback sequences or have other figures from his past come back to bite him, something which seems so obvious in retrospect. He didn't change the character, but he figured out new situations to elicit what makes him resonate. Quite simply, he seemed like a very reasonable pick to write the book after Millar's completion of the Old Man Logan storyline.
Imagine my surprise when Marvel had not only taken my suggestion, but they'd taken it one step further and created a whole new book for him. WOLVERINE: WEAPON X will be a long running series done exclusively by Jason Aaron and artist Ron Garney. In a CBR X-position interview, Aaron gave some hints about what to expect that got me really pumped.
The book will be relatively continuity free ("This is a Wolverine series for people who've never read the character's adventures, who don't know anything about his long and complicated history"), will jump from genre to genre ("The first arc is a gritty, black-ops espionage tale. Future arcs will range from horror to even sci-fi"), and will be pretty high in the violence factor ("If I'm writing it, chances are it'll be bloody. I'm disturbed like that").
My hypothesis? This run has "seminal" written all over it.
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