Wolverine (Vol. 1) #4

"Honor"
Published: December 1982
Writer: Chris Claremont
Penciler: Frank Miller
Inker: Josef Rubinstein

What's Going On?
After pulling his shit together at the end of last issue, Wolverine decides to take the fight to Shingen.  And by that, I of course mean running directly at Shingen and going with the stabby-stabby Wolverine neither attacks his enemy head-on, nor does he sneak his way toward his target.   Instead, he terrorizes Shingen's illegal businesses for all of two pages before sending Shingen a message, announcing his attack.  While that conflict approaches its natural conclusion...

...Yukio and Mariko do their best to come to terms with their concepts of honor.  Yukio tries to redeem herself for betraying Wolverine by saving Mariko's life.  After Shingen's death, Mariko is faced with a choice.  Does she honor her evil father and try to kill the man who murdered him, or does she honor the good man who killed a bad man?  Hint:

It looks like Wolvie starved himself to fit into that dress

Art!
The art in this series went downhill as it progressed.  It's still Frank Miller, so the bad isn't wretched, but his work is inconsistent.  The battle scenes between Shingen and Wolverine?  They're very cool.  But there are so many odd instances in this series.  Wolverine looking like an emaciated corpse in his wedding invitation?  That's awful.  The odd proportions of this shot are less obvious, but equally bad.

I'm still not a fan of the sparse page layouts, either.  Regardless, I would gladly take Miller's stylized choices over almost any other penciller's work in 1982.

Writing!
There are moments that I really like about this issue, and there are moments that stick out, especially in hindsight.  While there is something bad-ass about warning your enemy that you're coming for them --- letting the terror build with the anticipation --- it doesn't really feel like Wolverine's particular style of bad-assery.  Neither does spending the time to ruin Shingen's criminal network.  I suppose you can argue that Logan took this approach to force Shingen to face Wolverine as an equal, in honorable combat...but that ignores the fact the their last "honorable" fight, in issue #1, involved Shingen poisoning and manipulating Logan.

The supporting characters get a little space in this issue for some well-timed growth.  I really liked Wolverine's reaction to Yukio here, and it's a damn shame that the complexity of their relationship was never (I think) addressed in their future meetings.  It was nice seeing Mariko be more than a damsel in distress for a change, too.  Claremont never went to any great lengths to give her a definite personality before, but I really liked the potential of her trying to kill Wolverine to avenge her father.  It doesn't happen, of course, but the fact that it is something that is even considered --- especially since she obviously would not stand a chance if Wolverine wanted to defeat her --- gives her more credibility as a character Wolverine should be with.

Retrospectively Amusing:
- I love the shot of the X-Men receiving the invitation to the wedding for many reasons.  As a married man, I find it utterly hilarious that Wolverine sent the X-Men a wedding invitation that was completely blank on the outside.

The fact that theirs is a very formal and high-profile wedding makes that even funnier to me.  While Colossus' Cosby sweater is pretty amusing, too, I find it amusing that Nightcrawler is apparently always in uniform.  What's the matter?  Was Miller afraid that the audience wouldn't recognize him in a T-shirt?