Issue(s): Wolverine #58, Wolverine #59
Cover Date: Aug 92
Title: "Monkeywrenching!" / "Unnatural resources"
Credits:
D.G. Chichester - Writer
Darick Robertson - Penciler
Josef Rubinstein - Inker
Suzanne Gaffney - Assistant Editor
Bob Harras - Editor

Review/plot:
These issues are drawn by Darick Robertson, who also drew the out of sequence fill in for issue #54. The writer is D.G. Chichester, and he uses the opportunity to continue seeding the Marvel universe with appearances of his character Terror. By publication date, Terror's own series started a month prior to these issues, but as i noted in the entry for Punisher/Captain America: Blood & Glory, Terror is a character that was originally created for a non-continuity imprint at Marvel but he somehow managed to make his way over to the real Marvel universe. His first issue is not an origin story, so it doesn't matter if he appears in other books first.

Wolverine overhears someone telling Professor X that an environmental group has kidnapped his daughter. Once again it's a new, made-up radical environmental group instead of one of the ones we've seen before like HOP or FORCE or Project: Earth. This one is called the Nature Defense League, or NDL.

The guy, a Mr. Barton Hoff, is a logging exec. I'm not sure how he knows Xavier. But he's vaguely aware that Xavier has "connections" that can help him. However, Xavier tells him that he's got "nothing extraordinary" going on. But Wolverine decides to do something about it, so he sniffs a lock of hair from the scrap book that Barton leaves behind and grabs Jubilee and starts to track down the daughter.

This is definitely an unusual set-up for either the Wolverine or the X-Men; it's not a normally storytelling engine for either of them to just have people show up at the mansion and ask for help. I'm not sure if Xavier was really giving Barton the bum's rush or if he would have done something about this even if Wolverine didn't take matters into his own hands. I'm not sure that Xavier should be helping wealthy logger CEOs specifically, but getting the X-Men back into the business of helping humans might not have been such a bad idea.

Anyway, Wolverine gets on the trail and eventually runs into a real fanatic environmentalist. The guy winds up impaling himself on a metal shard.

Later they go to the morgue, and that's when they meet Terror.

Wolverine apparently knows Terror. Terror's super-power, so to speak, is the ability to wear the body parts of dead people and experience the sensations of those parts. So Wolverine has called Terror so that he can see through the eye of the fanatic that fell on the shard.

Note that despite knowing Terror, Wolverine apparently doesn't think much of the guy.

Terror observes that Barton's daughter, Alice, is being held at a cult-like ceremony. Before they can investigate that, though, they're attacked by a bunch of weirdos.

Terror gets chopped in half by a pair of saw-wielding dwarves.

But luckily they are in a morgue so there are plenty of spare parts for him to repair himself with.

Wolverine is less lucky, and he takes a spike to the chest.

It's worse than it seems, because those spikes explode after a period of time. But Terror is able to get Wolverine into the water underneath a frozen lake, which delays the explosion until the spike can be pulled out. And then he goes undercover to infiltrate the environmental group. So, for the first time ever, here's Wolverine after a shave and a haircut.

He then joins the NDL, who turn out to be a "regular" environmental group separate from the enviro-cultists. They are protesting logging by chaining themselves to bulldozing equipment. When the radicals show up, they try to incite the protesters into more violent action. They all refuse, but Wolverine endears himself to the cultists by attacking the NDL leader.

Terror and Jubilee are able to follow from a distance thanks to a spare ear that Terror carries around.

You have to love the NDL guy just cheerily waving them off after watching a zombie-faced guy pull an ear out of his pocket and attach it to his face.

Alice is located and the fight with the cultists continues. Wolverine's hair starts growing back during the course of the story.

Meanwhile, Barton Hoff tells NDL that he'll give up logging the area if they'll return his daughter, who of course they don't have. But Wolverine arrives at the end to give him a lecture and tell him that he'll be keeping his eye on him.

Lucky it's not Terror saying he was keeping the eye.

Odd story. A bit different of an unusual tone for the Wolverine series. But, for a fill-in, Chichester and Robertson give us quite a bit: Terror, close-shave Wolverine, and those terrifying dwarves.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This takes place after Wolverine #60-65. Wolverine does mention the death of Mariko from last issue (which was not "last issue" storywise). See the very top of the entry regarding Terror.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

This issues are what its about- Terror is a friggin' awesome character I had no idea he had a series but I remember these issues now.

Agreed, Shreck is cool. And I think they should have revealed Deadpool as his son;)

Jesus Christ at Jubilee's "YAAGG!" mouth! You could drive bus through that!

I'm not liking the suggestion that Xavier might not have helped rescue the girl if Logan hadn't gotten involved. The X-Men have been helping save normal humans from non-mutant threats as late as X-Men 229, when they saved Jessan Hoan from the Reavers. As late as X-Men 235, we saw Maddie helping with the Flying Doctors Service. Besides, the rationale about keeping the X-Men's secret is ridiculous- the only person that needs to know about a connection between Xavier and the girl's rescuers is the girl's father and he already suspects.

Chichester was obviously very fond of Terror. He was something of a pet character, popping up in various series that Chichester worked on in the early 1990s. I really didn't mind, though, since Chichester gave him such a wonderfully deadpan, macabre sense of humor.

attaching a sonar tech's ear shouldn't give him sonar locating abilities!! it prolly shouldn't even give him really good hearing. it might give him tinnitus.

i am now regretting reading this instead of working on the d&d recap like i'm supposed to be doing...:P

I remember bying those issues in real time and being a little weirded out bc I has no idea who Terror was and never read anything else with him.
Back then I was the right age to like the cover with "cool shaven" Wolvie but I remember a friend of mine laughing at it and thinking it was ridiculous (and he wasn't even into comics).
Really weird how the threw in the occasional appearance of Terror, gave him a series and never did anything wirh him or his background.
Ghost Rider and related titles were hot at that time, he definitely would have fit in better there than Wolverine and DD and might have found more of an audience.

Originally, Terror was indeed "a friggin' awesome character." Unfortunately, Terror as approved by the Comics Code, and as drawn by anyone other than the late great Jorge Zaffino, is considerably less so.