On 1994's Wolverine: Evilution by Ann Nocenti, Mark Texeira, John Royle and others

A long time ago, I somewhat facetiously titled a blog post "Ultimates 3: The worst comic book ever?" I was likely being far too hasty, as there were, at the time as well as now, just so many bad comics I had never even read. 

I was reminded of that fact recently when I read 1994 over-sized one-shot Wolverine: Evilultion—the subtitle of which I swear is real, and not a typo on my part. Not because Evilution is that bad, of course, although it is a very badly made comic. 

No, rather because it's simply an X-Men comic from the mid-nineties, making it one of the many, many comics that I had never read, and thus, as far as I know, it is simply the tip of the iceberg of what might be some truly terrible comics (I generally don't read comics that I'm pretty sure I won't like, which is why I've only read a handful of comics featuring Wolverine from that era). 

For the record, I don't think this is worse or even as bad as Ultimates 3, but it did remind me of just how many really bad comics are probably out there (And Evilution is from Marvel, one of the premiere superhero publishers, rather than, say, Image, or any of the other many small publishers that tried their hand at the genre during the '90s boom years!).

Anyway, this is a pretty bad comic book, and it's bad in a particular sort of way that I think it could probably be used in some sort of How To Make Comics class as a textbook, the professor pointing to various aspects of it and passages from it as negative examples, of what not to do when trying to tell a story in comics. 

It's written by Ann Nocenti, which, based on her reputation and the relatively few comics of hers I've read, sure sounded promising to me. As for the art team, the first credited artist is Mark Texeira, who handled the layouts. The book was penciled by John Royle and inked by Philip Moy and Andrew Pepoy. 

If I had to diagnose what exactly went wrong with the creation of this book, some 30 years after it was first published, I would guess that it was created using the "Marvel method" and that the point at which it fell apart was when Texeira was laying it out, as what now seem like the most egregious mistakes have to do with what is being shown when (Although maybe the most blame should be reserved for the editors, three of whom are listed: regular editor Suzanne Gaffney, group editor Bob Harras and editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco...?)

Essentially, whatever one might think of the plot or characters or conflict, it's the storytelling that seems most obviously, glaringly wrong to my eyes in 2025. 

The book is all but devoid of establishing shots, and, when they do occur, they sometimes do so after a character has already arrived at a particular location, so the reader is never really introduced to the settings. Curiously, where establishing shots might be used, we instead often see tight close-ups of Wolverine's head. 

We get these also in place of panels that would now more commonly be used for a character's narration and, oddest of all, during early scenes wherein Wolverine is apparently traveling to the small New York town that most of the action is set in. 

From my experience with the X-Men cartoon from around this time, I imagine that he hopped on his motorcycle to get there, but we never see him doing so, just tight, background-less panels of his face as he travels. Imagine a scene in a film where the director frames a scene of a character riding a motorcycle such that all you saw was his face, and never the motorcycle. 

That would be weird, right...? 

Also, we'll get images of Wolverine, sometimes in action, sometimes just standing around, interjected at random in the narrative, at the pace of about once a page.

I imagine the artists really, really wanted to draw Wolverine, and getting the popular star on the book on every page makes sense, but they do so at the expense of the storytelling. There are also several instances where a character is having a conversation with Wolverine, but he's the only one in the panel, the other character's dialogue coming in balloons whose tails point off-panel.

Finally, Texeira and/or Royle show little diversity in their character design. The book is filled with blonde, white young people, and some of them look so much alike that it sometimes took me a moment (or, in one case, the entire book) to tell if, say, this blonde teenage girl is supposed to be the same blonde teenage girl as the one who co-stars in the book.

These are deeper concerns than the style of Royle's art in the book, which was not to my personal taste, either. I mean, we expect certain things from mid-90s books, and certainly Marvel's X-Men seems emblematic of what one thinks of when they think of "'90s comics," but there isn't really any of the expected excesses.

There are a few panels in which Royle's big, body builder-looking Wolvie has humorously dainty feet, for example, but I think that is more a matter of style than any sign of deficiency. Typical of the era, though, we rarely see his feet; in several scenes they are obscured by a curious cloud of ground fog. (There's only one real example of really wonky anatomy, on page 10, when we get a full body shot of Wolverine, and his torso looks too long and his legs too short....Oh wait, there's also a bit in the climactic action scene, but I'll mention that when the time comes.)

The script itself feels somewhat Vertigo-esque, with its focus on religious concerns, the supernatural and the environment; Nocenti had, of course, just been working for DC's mature readers imprint, attempting a Kid Eternity revival with Sean Phillips that lasted 16 issues between 1993 and 1994. But it's Vertigo-esque paired with what otherwise feels like an episode of the X-Men cartoon, the two aesthtetics wedded to one another with the violence of a car accident. 

The original comic book had a cardstock cover and glossy interior pages and sold for $5.95 at a time when the Wolverine monthly was just $1.95, apparently denoting that it was meant to be something special. 

There's a little poem on the inside front cover discussing the pollution of the environment and ends with the line, "We are going the wrong way." (At the bottom of the page, it notes that this story takes place before X-Men #25, published a year previous, whatever happened there...Oh, wait, I just looked it up, and that appears to be the issue that Magneto pulled the adamantium out of Wolverine's body. So that note is probably there to explain why this issue's Wolverine has his normal metallic claws, rather than gnarly bone ones.)

The first page is a splash, revealing a young blonde boy holding aloft a severed head pouring blood from its neck, while a huge Wolverine face emanating action lines is seen in profile in the background, and a big blue "Stan Lee Presents EVILUTION" is super-imposed over one of Wolvie's mask wings.

A younger little girl opens a door, calling for Jimmy, and understandably freaks out when she sees him with the bloody head; his ranting probably does little to calm her: "I met a man in the woods-- --with the face of God! Wanna meet him?" As she starts to cry, he reveals that it is a fake head and stage blood, and that he was "just funnin'."

Meanwhile, at the bottom of this second page, pink narration boxes over the bust of Wolverine tell us that he's in a waking dream. 

In the dream, he is gigantic, looming over the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant with his claws out and his thighs disappearing beneath the horizon. He's wearing a strange necklace (And his blue shoulder pads, by the way, look bigger, thicker and pointier than those worn by football players; one might reasonably ask why a guy with a healing factor needs such armor, but then that's like asking why Wolverine wears a cowl shaped like his hair. The answer is because someone—the artists, the audience or perhaps Wolverine himself—must think they look cool). A missile heads straight for his chest.

He rears up with sweat on his brows, in a bed in a darkened room (Where isn't clear; I assume the X-Mansion in Westchester). One of those weird, super-tight close-ups shows a sliver of his figure in full costume, as he narrates: "I don't believe in all that psychic garbage about visionary dreams...But...well...what the heck. It can't hurt to visit the town with the twin towers."

Cut to "Some faraway garbage dump at the edge of a rural shantytown," where a pair of young boys (Is one of them the boy from the first scene, given that their faces are the same? No, as it will eventually turn out) find a cannister that looks like the one that blinded Daredevil and created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, open it up, and play with the sickly-looking green glop found within.

Back to a background-less close-up of Wolverine's face in profile and then, in the panel below that, a rare establishing shot, showing what looks like a downtown street, tiny buildings in the background dwarfed by impossibly huge cooling towers. The perspective of the panel is pretty screwy; if one ignores the buildings in the background, it looks as if the town is built right up against the towers. If one takes those buildings into account, the towers look too big, something on the scale of the Death Star or similar sci-fi construct. 

This is Prescott, which Nocenti's narration tells us is "a seven-mall, three-church, ten-saloon kinda town..." (Seven malls! That is so many malls!) A town that is "Complete with bored, restless, frustrated teenagers."

Suddenly we are inside some sort of teen hangout with a juke box and kids dancing in the background. In the foreground, two busty girls are talking, one of them a blonde with a huge pair of opaque pink sunglasses who the other girl refers to as "Boom Boom." 

This is our introduction to the other character on the cover, a more minor X-Men character whom I have heard of, but who I don't remember appearing in any of the X-Men movies or cartoons I've seen and I don't think I have ever actually read anything in which she appeared. (UPDATE: Wait, she was in Nextwave, a series that must now be memory holed due to the malfeasance of its writer. Does that count as the real Boom Boom, though...? After all, the whole cast were basically just written as standard Warren Ellis characters... Anyway, I read that.)

Based on what I see in this comic, though, it's hard to tell what, exactly, differentiates her from Jubilee. Both are teenage mutants with big pink glasses and whose super-powers seem to be explosive light shows; Boom Boom's powers are repeatedly referred to as "fireworks" in this comic, too, which I was sure was Jubilee's deal. Checking her Wikipedia entry later—and asking about what differentiates her from Jubilee on Bluesky—it would seem to be that her energy powers are more akin to time bombs than fireworks, as there is sometimes a delay in the explosions she creates...?

We won't see a full body shot of her until the page after she's introduced, but in addition to the big glasses and a pair of high heels, she's dressed in a tight-fitting mini dress, with cut-outs exposing her abdomen, hips and cleavage. (Wait, she is a teenager, right?)

She's trying to ignore her friend, and listen in on the conversation of Jimmy, the boy with the bloody head from the opening scene. He's holding a primitive-looking idol and ranting to two other kids about modern progress, and how, "Ultimately, we'll die by machine."

"That's why we're the Devos," he says. "Our gang is for devolution! We gotta drag the human race back to before cars and computers and iron lungs and missiles..."

I'm not sure what's playing on the juke box Jimmy is leaning over, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a particular new wave band from Akron, of which he must be a fan. 

The scene in interrupted by another close up of Wolverine's bust, his thought cloud telling us that he's asked Professor X for some time off to visit Prescott, "the town in my dreams," and that Xavier told him that X-Force's Boom Boom has "been known to hang out there."

Scan appropriated from The Real Gentlemen of Leisure's much shorter and punchier blog post on the book.

Boom Boom approaches Jimmy, whom she calls by name (Does she know him? Or did she just overhear the other kids call him that?), and he stammers when he sees her (Because she interrupted him? Or because of her revealing dress?). She seems to roofie his drink, then asks about the idol, before walking away. His drink mysteriously splashes soda all over his face (After learning a bit more about Boom Boom online later, I guess the little white round object she dropped in his drink wasn't a pill, but an energy time bomb).

Then there's a page I couldn't make sense of. 

The narration boxes talk about Silvo, who was a little boy when the Wright Brothers first flew, and an old man when America landed on the moon, although he didn't believe the reports of it on the TV and then the nature of television. There are four panels of art running alongside the narration. The first shows a shack, the second shows three boys faces; one looks delighted, another is terribly distressed. The third shows the boys silhouettes in the foreground, a bright TV screen emanating light in the background. In the fourth, the distressed boy collapses backwards. And the fifth is yet another close-up of Wolverine's head with no background, thinking to himself, "Humph...looks like a normal, peaceful American town like any other." (The comic won't show us what Wolvie's seeing until the next page, though.)

(After finishing the book and re-reading the parts I didn't understand, I think Silvo is supposed to be the dead man who figures prominently later on, and the collapsing boy is one of those from the earlier scene who found the environmental waste and smeared it on his face; here he is in the process of dying from it, as will be made explicit later in the book.)

Wearing a little backpack, Wolverine stands upon a hill overlooking the power plant and thinks about how he heard something about a threat to close it down, while popping one set of claws (This is the panel with the wonky anatomy mentioned previously, by the way). These he suddenly whirls to drive into the trunk of a tree directly behind him, narrowly missing the head of an older, white-haired Native American man, who apparently snuck up behind him, then sat down cross-legged at the base of the three.

The man tells Wolverine he had a vision about his arrival, and then the scene jumps to Jimmy again, somewhere outdoors, and talking to a disembodied voice that appears in tail-less thought clouds. The voice instructs him to dig, and he does so, until an extremely buff ghost appears, telling him to "Get a woman."

Instead, Jimmy keeps digging, until his shovel makes a "KEK" sound and he says, "A coffin!"

Halfway through the page, the scene shifts to Germany (!), where a little blonde boy that looks just like Jimmy is in some kind of museum as someone off-panel talks about "the tip of a metal spear that pierced the side of Christ...And so called the Spear of Destiny... ...It was stolen by Charlemagne and then by Hitler... ...Each man who possessed it believed that he rode the crest of fate itself."

The boy steals the spear, which is really just a small spearhead attached to a bit of shaft. It will take a few more pages to explain, but apparently the boy is at the museum with his father, a Mason who brought him to attend the meeting to learn about Mason stuff.

Meanwhile, the narrative checks in on the other players. The old man talks to Wolverine about their dreams ("'Dream' is a white world...what you call dreams we call reality"), and how the government is threatening to shut down the plant, and an idol that was stolen from a local museum and something old and evil awakening in the forest. Boom Boom, now dressed in the costume seen on the cover (which also has a cleavage cutout), sees a newspaper article about the stolen idol, which is the one that she saw Jimmy with at the teen hangout. And Jimmy stops digging up the coffin long enough to read the newspaper, in which he sees an article about how the green goo from earlier in the book killed one of the kids who found it.

We're then introduced to a new character, a mustachioed man in a suit at a podium, giving a speech to a crowd about the economic importance of Gycon's power plant to their town of Prescott. He says the plant is apparently being shut down because of "one old man", referring to the Native American man hanging out with Wolvie, whose name is actually Red Water Fall. It's a threatening-sounding, vaguely racist, or at least impolitic, speech:

The old man doesn't understand... Just as his people did not understand a hundred years ago. It is now as it was then--when two cultures clash, one must relinquish. 

There is a natural progression, an inevitably to change. People must adapt to our ways-- --or perish.

In a classroom at Prescott High School, the students are dissecting frogs. A blonde girl who looks so much like Boom Boom that I'm unsure if it is meant to be her or not (Does she live in Prescott? Or just hang out there...for some reason...?), stands up from her table, saying "EEEEK! Forget it...I'm not going to do it."

Meanwhile, that little psychopath Jimmy has perfectly removed his frog's tiny heart, and it's still beating, which his teacher lauds him for (Are frogs dissected while still alive in high school biology...? That's not dissection, it's vivisection, isn't it? We only did some kind of big worm at my school...)

Friday night in the woods, some teens dance around a big red pentagram painted on the ground, chanting "We're the Devo's! [sic]" and "We're the chumps!" One of them says "We can't wake up no corpse" mid dance move. A coffin containing a body wrapped up like a mummy is leaned up against a tree (and partially covered by the narration box reading "Friday night, the woods"), and chickens hang by their necks from ropes in the foreground. Jimmy tells his gang to shut up, and then one of them notices the body has disappeared, as there is now only wisp of smoke in the coffin/crate where the wrapped-up body was.

Boom Boom, in costume, sneaks into Jimmy's house, looking for the stolen statue, and uses a "light bomb" on Wolverine, who has snuck up on her. After an argument over whether or not she's a little kid in over her head, Wolvie drags her out to the woods, showing her another red pentagram, this one surrounded by various dead animals, all wrapped up in phone cords and dripping blood.

Boom Boom finally agrees with Wolverine to leave whatever's going on up to him, and says she'll leave town—"Okay... I'm gone... I'm history..."—but she actually returns to Jimmy's house, this time finding him in the dark, surrounded by a halo of light, his eyes glowing and a grin of bright teeth on his darkened face.

He addresses her as Boom Boom, so either they do know each other, or perhaps the heroes of X-Factor were more well-known to the civilian population of the Marvel Universe in 1994 than they were to 17-year-old Caleb, and he tells her that the stuff with the statue and the animals? Well, "It's a boys' club. For boys only. Wanna join?"

She agrees, and the next panel is the most superfluous image of Wolverine in the entire book. It's an image of half of his head, just randomly juxtaposed between two panels. He's not doing anything, or saying anything, or thinking anything. There's just an image of Wolverine's face on the page there for some reason.

When the scene finally does return to Wolverine, he is being instructed by Red Water Fall, who tells him that he's going to go inside Wolverine's vision to look for clues and asks Wolverine to protect his body as he does so. He then drops onto his back and closes his eyes.

Are we nearing the climax? God, I hope so...

Jimmy takes Boom Boom to the nuclear power plant to meet the other Devos and to discuss her initiation. Ground fog envelopes Wolverine's feet at the ankles, and menacing silhouettes come out of the trees, Wolverine picking up the scents of "nine, ten--a dozen men!"

Before the other boys and the muscular ghost, who has appeared and addressed Boom Boom and the Devos, Jimmy uses a scalpel to take a wild slash at a chicken, eliciting a long, arcing gush of blood, the panel juxtaposed with Wolverine doing something similar with his blades to one of the attacking men. 

During the few panels of violence, Red Water Fall, whose name seems to have changed to the simplified "Red Fall" in the narration, has a vision in which he sees a huge spear flying towards a figure tied to a huge cross in the distance, the cross perched atop a cooling tower. A few panels later, we get a close up of the figure on the cross, and it's not Christ, but a seemingly nude Boom Boom, the border of the panel terminating just before where her nipples might be, keeping this book all-ages, I guess.

When the real, non-visionary Boom Boom makes a big pink explosion to free the other animals that the Devos had gathered for sacrifice, Jimmy pronounces his disappointment in her: "She is weak, weak and forever a girl!"

Then things get weird. Jimmy goes home, his thought clouds telling us that they made Boom Boom surrender between panels. He eats some chocolate chip cookies with his mom before an image of TV set on the table, half-melted as if it were made of ice cream. He notes that he has bloody feathers on his bomber jacket, but it's drawn and colored as a green liquid. His dad confronts him: "Come on son, who melted the television set?"

They argue. Apparently, Jimmy's dad is the head of the nuclear power plant, the mustachioed guy we saw giving a speech about the old Native American man earlier, and he wants his son to inherit and run the plant someday. He doesn't seem to be aware of Jimmy's anti-progress Devos beliefs.

Back at the plant, we see that Boom Boom is tied up to pipes that form a cross, mirroring the crucifix-like pose of Red Fall's vision, but here she has all her clothes on (She has lost her big, dumb glasses though). 

Finally, the next morning, it seems that whatever Jimmy and the Devos have been up to, it's starting to have some effect on the modern world, beyond resurrecting the buff dead guy. A man in a phone booth notes that the phone in melting. At Jimmy's house, just as the other blonde boy presents the tip of the Spear of Destiny to Jimmy, the engine in Jimmy's dad's car starts to melt. 

Father and son repeat their argument from the previous night, at greater length and at greater intensity, and they end up exchanging blows before Jimmy runs off, returning with his gang to the plant, where Boom Boom is still captive, awaiting being sacrificed.

Nocenti than engages in one of those passages that seemed not uncommon in the '90s, wherein the writer rattles off a list of phenomena related to some supernatural goings on, the art team not quite keeping up as they attempt to provide visual images to match her verbal imagery.

And in the natural world...

A flock rises, and heads south months too early...

A few towns away electricity shoots out of a socket... ...looking for appliances to power...

Call it unholy, call it unnatural-- --it's impossible to name but somehow things are just wrong.

This goes on for a few pages, with technology melting and people and animals acting weird, the panels interrupted only to check in with the captive Boom Boom and the ranting Jimmy, preparing to sacrifice her using the Spear before the body in the crate, and images of Wolverine posing (as, indeed, every page of the book seems interrupted by an image of Wolverine).

After hearing Boom Boom's "EEEEEEK", Wolverine prepares to go into the plant, tarrying a bit to have an argument with Red Water Fall/Red Fall about whether or how badly to stab the Devos and some stuff about tests and culture clashes (most of this plays out in a splash page, in which we get a rare full body image of Wolverine, one of those that reveals his dainty little feet).

He ultimately enters the power plant straight through one of its walls (!) and then he retracts his claws to punch and kick the kids around with a "THAK" a "KRUP" a "SPAK" and so on. With the Devos down and Boom Boom freed, things finally seem to be winding down—but there's till the ghost to deal with! Now boasting a size and musculature like that of The Incredible Hulk in the '90s, he engages with Wolverine. 

"Can't kill the dead, wild man," the ghost says, grabbing Wolvie in a bear hug from behind. In the weirdest-looking bit of anatomical drawing in the whole book, Wolverine seems to fold like a lawn chair at the shoulders and thighs, allowing him to kick his attacker in the head. "Then I guess I'll die tryin'!" he retorts.

As it turns out, he does not, in fact, die tryin'. Red Fall knows the Spear can kill the dead man, and after some wrestling, Boom Boom finally gets it into Wolverine's hands, and he proceeds to stab it into his undead opponent's side, and he dissolves into mist, promising to be back. ("Wow! He's gone," Boom Boom says. "Too bad his stink ain't," Wolverine grimaces.) 

On the final page, Jimmy starts to apologize, but Wolverine dismisses the Devos over his shoulder as he walks away with Boom Boom and Red Fall, apparently leaving the Spear of Destiny behind (or maybe it dissolved with the dead hulk?). A church bell starts to ring, and we see an image of the power plant in the distance, a sign noting that it's closed and condemned in the foreground. Red Fall tends his garden. Wolverine regards a church in the distance, disgusted that the same men who he saved the sleeping Red Fall from and the Devos were attending Sunday church, "like nothin' happened."  "Sometimes I can't stand the human race," Wolverine says over his cigar. "Maybe that's why nature created mutants!" Boom Boom grins and shrugs, and one of them laughs in big block letters as they walk off into the sunset...er, maybe it is sunrise, since it's Sunday morning. Fin. 

Woof. 

So that was rough, but I survived. If you refuse to take my word for how badly made this book really was, or think that perhaps I was exaggerating at all, it has been collected, in the pages of 2023's Wolverine Epic Collection Vol. 7: To the Bone. I was unable to find a copy in either of the local library systems I have access to, but I did find it on Hoopla, and Evilution itself is, of course, available on Amazon's Comixology, if you don't mind supporting a Jeff Bezos venture. 

(And, because I read it electronically, I was unable to scan any images to illustrate this review, which is too bad, as so much of it needs to be seen to be believed. I did try my best to seek out images of the interiors online, but found relatively few, and only used the one showing off Boom Boom's dress and apparent roofie-ing of Jimmy. I don't think there are very many images of the story online in the first place, but also my search was frustrated, as Google, for example, kept assuming I was looking for Wolverine + Evolution, not Evilution.)

Anyway, I think I'm going to go read the latest collection of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy to help me recover from this...