Before reading Weapon X, I didn't have a fear of being jammed with cables and needles and wires and mechanical horrors from beyond the imagination of even the folks who made anime like Akira or Ghost in the Shell or Neon Genesis Evangelion. I... I really wasn't anticipating that Weapon X could be horrifying? Maybe it's because I know (who doesn't?) the story of Wolverine in the Weapon X program. It's simple! Wolverine is taken into a secret underground research complex, he has Adamantium bonded to his skeleton, he gets metallic claws (well, unless you take the retcon that he once had bone claws into consideration, which, um... how do I put it deftly... fuck that and fuck you), he kills some people in the underground facility and walks away. Then he fights Hulk and becomes an X-Men. It's that easy.
Except it's not that easy. No, apparently it's terrifying! Because I didn't know, before going in, that they made Wolverine into a lumbering remote-control cyborg man! I'm not even going to apologize for spoiling that because this is my way of venting, goddamn it. It scares me! It's a stupid fear, because it'll never happen, but as someone who hates the idea of threading things under skin in most any context, the way that they thread cables and wires and machinery into Wolverine just... it is very, very sad to think about. And I feel Wolverine is very justified in smashing up and murdering all those people who abused him so. (People who didn't even know he was a mutant until they dragged him in, so what the actual hell, get your shit together, assholes!)
Besides that, held together by haunting post-modernist nightmares as illustrated by also-author Barry Windsor-Smith - capturing the sort of taut technological horror that only people caught in the late-80s and early-90s evolution of the consumer computer market could conjure up - the story isn't extremely compelling. It spins its wheels a lot, and the layout of the dialog is singularly bizarre in ways I haven't observed before (reading sort of like a string across the page as apposed to the typical left-to-right, top-to-bottom format that I've grown accustomed to), making it something of a slog to read until the awaited and expected massacre.
The weirdest thing is the twist-ish ending, that sort of pulls a fake-out on whether or not Wolverine actually killed certain characters and... I didn't quite understand where it was that one thing started happening that would have seen it diverge down that path. Maybe I'm slightly dim (very possible), but it took me by surprise in a way that made me think "wait, what? Who? Why? What?"... while I assume I was meant to think, "oh, of course!"
The atmosphere of Weapon X is one very unique to its age, and even more unique to the Marvel brand as a whole. The gratuitous blood-spilling, the way mechanical tendrils and attachments are illustrated so compactly and so detailed, and the outright horrific use of tech-age body horror... these are elements that are married to a story that is made all the more tragic for their involvement, and it's unlike much of anything I've seen from Marvel or the X-Men - even basically knowing this story off by heart, as it has been repeated ad nauseam in film adaptations and animated segments and back-story snippets. I suppose its ability to surprise and shock, even with with an intimate knowledge of its scenario, is absolutely something to be applauded. Otherwise, I think this is more of a fascinating time capsule than any sort of classic Wolverine tale. I can wholeheartedly recommend it, but it has severe narrative flaws that can only partially be overlooked for the... and I'll say it again, I don't think I've used the word too much - sheer horror that it conjures up in my mind.
The horror of being turned into a mechanical puppet and being directed to kill wolves, naked, in the snow, with a computer stapled to my face and Ethernet cables threaded into my arms and spine. You know. That ol' chestnut.