The first arc of Wolf was not very good, so the fact that Wolf #5 feels like a completely different series is a positive. Unfortunately, the new Wolf commits the same key mistake of the original by not bothering to establish itself in any way. Wolf 1-4 did not ever give us a clue to who Wolf is as a character and what the rules might be to the urban fantasy world he inhabits. We are informed that Antoine Wolfe is a gritty detective but we never see him detect, his client is a racist who never displays any racist behavior, and so on. Issue five jumps five years ahead and then proceeds to immediately ignore characterization in favor of wild plot developments. Wolf #5 is not without its charm as Ales Kot maintains his knack for pacing and humor, but even at its best, one can't really find much reason to care. There are two central plotlines going on in Wolf #5. There is the story of Anita, the resident werewolf and potential anti-christ living with a horribly accented Vampire and searching for the missing Antoine Wolfe. Also the tentacle face former porn star and current stoner Freddy is around contributing very little to the story or to society. The other plotline follows Wolfe through his time in captivity where he is daily drained of blood by an undead woman he hooked up with in Iraq (talk about your crazy ex-girlfriend, am I right?). This plotline remains entirely inexplicable for now as no clue is given to why or how Wolfe was imprisoned (some reference is made to Gibson the supposed racist from the last arc but he never made much sense either so it's not particularly helpful).
While these two threads are connect, they are divided by having entirely clashing tones. Anita's story is comedic and angst-ridden, like a trippy YA novel while Wolfe's is pure supernatural horror akin to a John Constantine story. It feels in this aspect, and a number of others, that five issues in, Kot is still unsure what he wants Wolf to be. It's not that the story needs to fit into any pre-existing category, but it needs to establish some sort of constant tone so that we can form some sort of connection with the world and the characters. Wolfe's predicament is horrific in a surface-y sort of way, but there's no reason to really care about what happens to him. Similarly Anita's journey of self-discovery is undermined by her complete lack of sympathetic characterization. She's an angry teen werewolf who seems to be rebelling against... something.
In place of characterization and plot development we have a number of Ales Kot standards that are, for lack of a better term, too preachy. We have two instances of characters discussing their sexuality for no apparent reason other than to show Kot's worldliness. Similarly, one sequence seems to exist just so Kot can nod to the legitimacy of polyamorous relationships. Kot also continues the theme of criticizing racism without actually showing any. Wolfe's undead mistress and kidnapper remarks how easy it is manipulate racists without telling us how or why. One can't help but admire Kot's recent dedication to spreading his own political and social beliefs, but he would have been better served to write a newsletter than shoe horn it into his supernatural thriller.
Taking over art duties from Matt Taylor is Ricarod Lopez Ortiz whose pencils are somewhere between the cartoony energy of Looney Tunes and the scratchy expressiveness of Sean Murphy. It's a style that makes up for its sparse boring backgrounds with memorable expressive characters and facial expressions. Characters vibrate, bounce, and jump through the air in kinetic bursts of scratchy motion lines. A scene of the afore mentioned Freddy rolling a join with his tentacles while reading a book and drinking lemonade is instantly memorable and funny for its pure ridiculous spectacle. Sadly Ortiz's excellent work is a bit out of place here as it over-emphasizes the comedic side of the story and robs the more horrific moments of most of their power.
To put all this simply, Wolf is a messy concoction of half-baked ideas, mismatched tones, and odd plot-devices. I might be inclined to say that Wolf would improve as it got underway, but as a fifth issue, I can't help but see this as an indication that the series isn't improving and won't anytime soon.
Score: 2/5
Wolf #5 Writer: Ales Kot Artist: Ricardo Lopez Ortiz Publisher: Image Comics Price: $3.50 Release Date: 1/20/16 Format: Ongoing; Print/Digital
And that’s exactly the fun and innocuous humor rampant throughout the entire issue. Anything from the creative world of Pendleton Ward is saturated with the goof (def: frequent incurable sillies) and clever puns; even taking the time to call out the overkill, just the type of self-awareness that makes satires so entertaining.
Issue two plays out like a caper. After the risks and rewards are established, Magekiller hurries through -- or outright omits -- the mundane details of the setup. Rucka and Carnero give us a montage to show our heroes competently working their way into the assignment, dispatching targets with ease. But then, an inevitable complication waltzes into the picture.
We pick up on the 4th of July as our raging hippies have been duped and their leader has launched warheads across the land on the behalf of Les Cordes. It’s spun further when the leader is killed so that they can pin it on a woman of color. From there we check in with Banning and his new friends as they flee the area. We get some more insight into Banning’s family life and how he got away from his stalker, but then also a bit of visual backstory on Will when he panics over seeing his hometown in flames. Like I said, there are a lot of twists to the story in this issue and I’m not even scratching the surface.
'The Bride' is a one-shot story that begins, as always, with Usagi travelling the wilderness in search of tranquility and virtue. He happens upon the chaos of what appears to be a bandit attack on a travelling procession, the only survivor of which is the titular bride. Discovering she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer and betrothed in marriage to another brewer from the local town, Usagi decides to escort her down the road to avoid further dangers. His assumption that the bandits were attempting to kidnap and ransom the bride proves to be a possibly fatal miscalculation as the two are stocked by a group of assassins.
The art continues to be amazing. The things that Tradd Moore experiments with on this issue are different. I don’t know if they all worked, but they were interesting and it shows his desire to grow the visuals of the story and of his style. There is a great page in which we see both Delilah and Petra’s side of the conversation, but it’s just flipped perfectly. It’s a little device, but it’s a great one that ultimately creates a page without gutters and the character’s themselves become the panel frames. The art just continues to be amazing. The coloring is also the biggest compliment to the artwork. Felipe Sobreiro knows exactly how to color for Moore’s pencil work and frankly makes it look really fucking good. Sobreiro is the architect to the look of the world with his coloring because that’s where a huge part of the style comes from.
Within that framework, Remender is able to balance an emotionally-weighty and tragic narrative with a genuinely exciting, lightning-fast paced and violent conflict, and against a sense of malicious levity. The last part comes thanks especially to the dialogue of Davey Trauma, a deeply unlikeable, Millennial-speak obsessed character who I once hated for the wrong reasons, and now hate for the right ones.
The first follows a naked woman who a taxi driver found in the middle of the road. He brings her back to his place for some odd reason and dresses her and feeds her before heading out to work. It’s clear that the driver’s family is either dead or living somewhere else. The story itself seems to be following Lorelei, the naked woman in the road. You can guess what she might be from the title.
When last we left our main character (I believe his name is Matthew or Mark...but all the characters look the same and have similar names so for the purposes of this review, I will call him Roy), he was learning the wonders of new ethnicities while dealing with the disastrous fallout from a solar flare. Roy is obsessed with the first non-Caucasian he has ever seen and tries repeatedly to communicate with her. Poor Roy doesn't understand the concept of skin color, race, or language barriers which is going to make for an awkward relationship (the narrator, Roy from the future, informs us they are married).
In the first issue we see a young woman killed by something on the set of a horror film after shooting has wrapped for the day. After that we meet a Private Eye that’s just gotten worked over by the mob he owes money to. Shortly afterwards he’s approached by a new client. An attractive woman in red that of course can’t rely on anyone else and needs someone to find her husband. Genre trope alert. After the usual back and forth is out of the way our P.I. takes on the case to discover that monsters are real and our dead girl in the beginning has come back to life as a werewolf.
The story isn’t perfect. But it is rather entertaining. The P.I. tropes are heavy-handed, but they surprisingly work with the horror setting that’s going on. This feels like classic pulp which is both good and bad. That means that a lot of the dialogue is dated feeling, but not terrible. It also means that if you love classic comics that you’re sure to love the hell out of Monster World. For me personally I could see all its faults, I could see the excess of dialogue used in order to fit the pulp/P.I. mold and yet I still really enjoyed it. I found the mixture of the two genres to be an interesting fit and I want to know about the world and see the mystery of the story unfold.
That’s what made me stick with this book, crazy looking devolution-ed animals and plants. I was tentative about the political and anti-religious ideas Remender was putting forth, but at least the world the comic took place in was cool. Well, unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough to save the rest of the issue. Over the past few years I’ve become a pretty big fan of Remender’s works, reading all of his ongoing comics, which I’ve praised highly, but this one feels off. When I read one of his books I look for the wild imagination that has captivated me so many times before. 
Houser and company are not perfect. There are a couple jokes in this issue that run a bit overlong, the villain/villainous forces don’t get a ton of definition, and the art is a bit uneven at times. Having said that, this book is hopeful without being cloying, self-aware without being cynical, and brings back that feeling of joyous wish fulfillment that created the best classic Superman stories. Faith is happy being herself, and that makes her a delight to read about. It certainly also doesn’t hurt that the creators are perfectly happy giving her cute things to do (like defending puppies from being shot)—she just knows that it’s kind of bullshit that the biggest crime she can stop at the moment is a puppynapping ring.
After work Isley and Quinn are talking at a bar, supposedly one where super-villains can just hang out. Quinn traded her modest lab tech outfit for her more traditional costume, showing off for the male readership I guess. The discussion is continued about why Isley wants to have a normal life, leading to Quinn being jealous, maybe because she can’t just walk away from her own life, like that. Suddenly another woman at the bar begins getting harassed by some biker guys and Quinn and Isley leap into action, immediately beating the shit out of them for their blatant sexism. Isley even uses a new pheromone that she created that causes men to be attracted to each other, and leaves the bikers making out with one another (what a laugh!).
Finally inside the Mega-Block, Judge Dredd looks for any signs of authority in a place full of people who go by usernames, kick puppies (seriously), and believe anyone with a uniform of any kind can enforce the law, which seems to be a concept with a definition that changes with every individual. they’re met by the 
Things are gearing up in 
On Kit’s side. They’re going to a dance to clear their minds. School dance tropes are acknowledged and then ignored which was again fun. That’s the great thing about the writing, its self-aware and realizes exactly what it’s doing, but still makes it fun while it’s doing the exact thing it’s making fun of. This issue in particular had the most jokes going for it or at least the most jokes that struck a chord with me.
The villainous messiah Gill is one aspect of Street Fighter that loses a bit in the transition from game-based foe to comic antagonist. It is almost entirely impossible to take Gill seriously. Through (mostly) no fault of the artist, Gill is a laughable menace. He's painted half-blue and half-red, split down the center of his mostly nude body. He wears his golden hair like a 70s disco god. And his dialog is so unsubtle in its religious fervor one can’t help but wait for a punch line that never comes. One thing I will criticize the artist Joe Ng for on this front is the absurd, inaccurate musculature wrapped around Gill's body. I know the guy is meant to look powerful, and I know he isn't exactly human. But the oblique muscles on abs on lats on... unidentifiable lumps look strange beyond the character's basic design. At one point Gill seems to flex his clothing off before bumping a space rock like a volleyball. It is very silly. Ng's probably dealing with the twin limitations of the source material and the UDON house style, trying to give us an intimidating figure. And to his credit, he's a gifted illustrator.
The (dis)parity between Gertrude’s jaded desperation and Happy’s annoyingly buoyant optimism, for example, is wickedly at odds here, and it really adds a new and fun dynamic to the story. In a way, it makes me think of the difference between comic fandom’s reaction to comics that are geared mostly at children but consumed mostly by adults and my own: abject excitement vs. resigned exasperation. And yet, Young and his team present that contrast in a framework of a legitimately entertaining riot of a story, which, while trussed-up as such, eschews the simplistic moral platitudes and maudlin sentiment of other visually-similar books, for an unrepentant, even willful sense of gallows glee. It’s a frolic through Fuck Yous, and I love it.
Visually, this was the strongest chapter of Jump in a long time. Not only were Murata and Oda in full form, but Kubo (as has been usual lately), Tabata, and Horikoshi all had thrilling chapters of their stories this week.
The origin of Nexus is recounted in the four parts. The first part concerns Nexus’ father Horatio fleeing with his family into a black hole. When Nexus’ family passes through a vision of Nexus and into the black hole, the reader will know why this story couldn’t be told in a normal comic book.