Customer Reviews

Weapon X: Days Of Future Now TPB (Wolverine)

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This gift from the 'wish list' of my nephew arrived, but did not give the identity of the sender.

As a result my nephew did not know that the gift was from his uncle.

This series and collection is an excellent epilogue to the underrated, and prematurely canceled, Weapon X line. It quite adequately finished up several loose ends involved with the series, and then, I guess, Tieri decided, what the hell, and projected where he would have wanted the series to go. He meshes his ideas in Weapon X with the ones established in Day of Future Past, to quite a great effect. So you get a real flow of where he wanted the story to go. As for complaints that the plot jumps around too much, with a limited amount of space available, the author fits quite a lot of material, and does describe the fate of every character invoked in the Weapon X series (which I'm sure was as much a point of the story, as the telling of the overarching plot), as he would have developed it. Quite frankly, it isn't difficult to figure out what happened between jumps, and those that find it so need to go back to reading pop-up books, or have their diapers changed.

Tieri does here what he does best. Taking old minor characters and expanding upon them, really fleshing them out, and working in the morally grey. His characters are never nice, and often have a gleeful joy of being scumbags, and this is no exception. This is the anti-Justice League with a sadistic kick to the testicles. The art, by Bart Sears, matches the style and tone of the writing excellently. I enjoyed every moment of it.

My only caveat to this graphic novel is that if you haven't read the Weapon X series, then you probably won't understand what is going on in this story. You might want to start by reading Weapon X: the Draft TPB, and then move onto this one.

Either author Tieri should have taken a left at Albuquerque or done something else radical, because in comparison to his usual brilliant work this is a sad and pitiful deviation. Set in a `Days of Future Now' netherworld, this book fails to capture the simple rawness of the short lived Weapon X series or the sophisticated despondence of the Days of Future Past. What it has is worn characters that are worn thinner, art that falls short of Sear's best, and a confusing, meandering plot that never should have been green lighted.

Though called Days of Future Now, in reference to Claremont's Days of Future Past, this possible future does not tie into Claremont's. It also diverges away from current X-Men continuity (is there such a thing anymore) and leaves us in some sort of grey zone as to what in the heck is going on.

I am sorry for Tieri that Weapon X got cancelled right as he was doing his best work, and I respect the fact that he was entitled to a final say on the project. If anything, this feels like he pulled out of his notebook what he wanted to have happen 100 or 200 issues into the series, and wrote these 5 issues. The problem is we don't have the intervening issues to help fill us in.

All and all, both Tieri and Sears hand in sub-par performances. Don't walk away from this book, run away and spend your money on Claremont's original Days of Future Past, or even one of the two graphic novels to collect Weapon X. Better yet, get Barry Windsor Smith's Weapon X. Just DON"T BUY THIS BOOK!!