X-Men: Original Sin TPB

I'm just not feeling the X-books as much as I have in recent months. In this installment of the X-Men: Legacy title, we get some flashbacks to Wolverine's early days in the X-Men. Mike Carey and Daniel Way reveal that Logan's memory problems were actually caused by Prof. X. It seems the Prof was trying to free Wolverine from Romulus' control, so he gave Wolverine the chance to break free from his past and become the hero he had inside. It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately I still think Romulus is stupid, so this whole trade suffers. I really don't care about Daken either, I think he weakens Wolverine as a concept (Two kewl guys with claws! But one has tattoos!)

The villains of the piece are Sebastian Shaw and Miss Sinister, both of whom come off pretty well here. I'm surprised to see Miss Sinister speak with slang and abbreviations, she seems more like a mastermind-type, but clearly she's a flunky. Shaw is great, as usual. His physical powers are always a great contrast with his scheming nature. Wolverine's takedown of him was well staged. Overall, there is just too much unnecessary stuff filling out pages in this collection. Why even introduce the new Hellfire Club? Why introduce Wolverine's monk-buddy only to have he and his family burned alive. There was a lot of running around in this trade that didn't seem to accomplish much. I guess the big status quo change is that Wolverine and Daken are going to team up to take on Romulus, but we know Daken stays bad, ditches his Dad, and joins the Dark Avengers anyway. So what's the point of all this?

I really like both artists for this, Scot Eaton handles the X-Men pages and the Wolverine: Origin issues get some nice moody pencils from Mike Deodato. Both guys draw hot ladies and roided up dudes, so they fit for the book, but they both work best as super-hero artists too. This only features two actual costumes (Miss Sinister and Wolverine) so they don't get to flex those muscles much. With that great cover flashing back to the Uncanny X-Men I would have really enjoyed some more story dealing with that old team.

Average