Daken: Dark Wolverine: Big Break

Having conquered his first city in his quest for empire, Daken the dark wolverine next heads to L.A. . Here Daken wants to do the same thing, but a wrinkle in his plan appears in the form of a new super drug called heat. I did like the drugged out hallucination scenes in this volume, but they did seem about unnecessary at times. The art change for these scenes work, but I'd like to notable too many of them next volume.

Its hard to like Daken, the character, because he was such a lazy invention. Here, writer Rob Williams dives a little more into his psyche and its nice to see. The effects of Heat were a great surprise and the visuals were fantastic. The fight with the surprise guest star was underwhelming. The art overall was good and I liked the introduction of Agent Donna Kiel. She looks to be a good foil to Daken. Overall, this might be the best a Daken book can hope for, a decent read.

Daken sets out to Hollywood to make something of himself - unfortunately, "making something" to Daken means controlling yet more drug trafficking in another city from Madripoor to Los Angeles. But as he plugs in to the LA drug scene, tied inexorably with the movie industry, he finds a new drug called Heat is the only drug to affect him, beating his healing factor like nothing else before. The downside to the euphoria are the blackouts and, just as these start, someone is going around LA cutting up wannabe actors...Daken is a great character but I think in the hands of an inferior writer to Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu such as Rob Williams, he can devolve into a rather dull anti-hero, chasing drugs, money and power rather than something more interesting. And while the sub-plot of the mysterious murdering butcher of LA is mildly interesting, the cop character investigating the murders and Daken is more of a template character that many people who have read crime books or seen crime TV shows or movies will have seen before (think Clarice Starling).Ron Garney supplies art for the first of the four issues, a less talented artist picking up the bulk of the book though I did like his depictions of Daken's mind on Heat.Daken as a character is deeper than he is presented here and his actions, while villainous, are far from the complex charm of his earlier stories and I feel he deserves better stories than the one in "Big Break". For a better Daken story see "The Prince".