Wolverine and the X-Men, Vol. 1 by Jason Aaron

One of those reasons is that when the audience is meant to be asking things like “Can Edan Younge be trusted?”, “What does this say about destiny?”, and “Where does Quentin go from here?”, the audience is in fact asking things like “What is going on?”, “What on earth is going on?”, and “Seriously, what in the hell is happening now?” But it doesn’t work, for a whole range of reasons. Nothing about the story suggests that it’s intended to be obscure it’s structured as a slowly emerging puzzle which is meant to build to a dramatic revelation about Quentin Quire’s future. It’s over-complex, and in a way that ends up detracting from pretty much everything else it’s attempting to do. But it does take a ridiculously disproportionate amount of effort from the reader. I’m not going to say it’s unintelligible. Nobody replied to say that they had, but there were quite a few “thank god, I thought it was just me” responses. Meanwhile, I had asked on Twitter whether anyone else had read the story and understood it. It took me five read-throughs and 1,300 words of working notes.

I did eventually succeed in deciphering the plot.

But reading it in one go didn’t make it any clearer. I gave up on this arc in confusion halfway through issue #5, resolving to have another go when the final issue came out. Difficult, because it is difficult to know what on earth the story is meant to be in the first place. It is difficult to know what to say about the first volume of Jason Latour’s Wolverine and the X-Men run.

Wolverine and the X-Men, Vol. 1 by Jason Aaron