Collects Wolverine (1988) #159-176 and Annual 2000-2001.
It begins with a series of unsettling dreams, but Wolverine's nightmares soon become reality: The Weapon X Program, the sadistic agency that implanted his Adamantium skeleton, has returned! Accused of killing a senator and imprisoned, Wolverine is "rescued" by Weapon X - but what's really going on? Which other faces from Wolverine's past are being targeted for forcible recruitment? And what is the disturbing secret of Weapon X's new director? Plus: Wolverine faces Mr. X, a martial-arts master with a fetish for death and an obsession to become "the best there is;" battles his dead mentor Ogun; and deals with the threats of Mauvais and the Wendigo! But can a powerless Wolverine defeat the team of Sabretooth, Omega Red and Lady Deathstrike? Guest-starring Alpha Flight and the Beast!
The Return of Weapon X is collects two of the best Wolverine stories: The Best There is and the Logan Files, along with some other related arcs.
It introduces the telepathic, deranged fighter Mister X, puts life back into the clandestine organization Weapon X (which starts off the monthly Weapon X series), and finally brings in one of the major characters from Origin in a cameo.
Any fan of action comics, and some minor knowledge of X-men, would enjoy this collection.
But for Wolverine fans, this is a treat and a must-have/read!!
I like slumming it sometimes. And having read X-Men from Issue 1 for a number of years, I like seeing where the various authors' imaginations have taken them.
This is a really bad book. It's not quite as irredeemably awful as his run on Deadpool, but Frank Tieri writes all of these books with his dick. Every character is a melodramatic ball of testosterone quoting action movies and sitcoms, using pop culture references as though merely mentioning Seinfeld or The Simpsons constitutes a joke.
The first story involving Wolverine teaming up with someone whose family was massacred by The Brood, in order to wipe out a particularly violent set of The Brood, has some promise that it doesn't quite deliver on. Still, it's not nearly as terrible as every other issue in the collection.
All of the characters have early Stan Lee disease where, in order to create conflict, every character overreacts to every statement, and then violence ensues. It didn't age well in the 1960s, and it makes no sense in the early 2000s.
Don't waste time reading this. There are thousands of stories with Wolverine in them, and while I'm sure there at least a few of them that are worse than this, I can't think of them off the top of my head.
***
Original Review:
It took less than two pages for me to realize this was going to be an absolute garbage fire of a story. Dreams, nightmares, mysterious past, hideous cliche-ridden dialog, inconsistent art. The most useful thing you could do with this $45 gigantic trade paperback is use it to kill pests or hold open a door with busted hinges.