Part of an ongoing series revisiting graphic novels and collected editions from days gone by....

Wolverine has never been one of my favorite characters in the Marvel Comics stables -- largely because I think he's overused, and because he's always portrayed as just too good at everything he does.

That said, I kind of enjoyed The Jungle Adventure, an old stand-alone graphic novel written by Walter Simonson in 1990, in part because it removes him from the center stage of Marvel superheroics and takes him off on his own, to an unlikely setting, with an unlikely plot.

An attack on Broadway sends Logan on a solo trip to the Savage Land, a hidden region of Antarctica where dinosaurs, early humans and other weird creatures dwell. There, he finds his missing lighter -- a sentimental gift from Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. -- and, while delving into the mystery that brought him there, he settles in as the local tribe's new god, defeating their champion in combat, and taking the beautiful and statuesque Gahck as his mate.

He goes native for a while, hunting dinosaurs with the tribesmen and generally having a good time .... until a rogue tyrannosaurus rex apparently kills a young man from the tribe. Logan resolves to track it down and defeat it, devising a cunning (and wholly unnecessary) trap that utterly fails to trick the beast. Instead, and not entirely on purpose, he finds a way to fight the beast from the inside.

Yuck. Or at least you would think so, but this particular t-rex turns out to be a robot. A cyborg, actually, one designed to capture the primitive humans by appearing to eat them. A complex plan indeed! Who could conceive of such a thing, much less create such a cyborg and set it loose in the Savage Land undetected? And what is this person doing with all of the people who've already been taken?

Why, it's the villain Apocalypse, a reoccurring antagonist of the X-Men and X-Factor mutant teams. (Don't worry, that's not a big spoiler -- the villain's identity is revealed on the cover, for pete's sake!) In this adventure, Apocalypse is going off-brand, creating cyborgs out of cavemen for ... reasons. And he wants to make the best cyborg of them all with Wolverine!! (Cue sinister soundtrack.)

Would it surprise you to learn that Wolverine's lost and found lighter plays a pivotal role in his escape and eventual victory? Nah.

The Jungle Adventure is fun because it's weird, it takes place outside of the usual Marvel sandbox, and it doesn't really on cameos or crossovers to tell the tale. Simonson's story isn't spellbinding, but it carries the reader through 48 pages pretty quickly. Don't look for Shakespearean-level dialogue, though; it's a lot of caveman-speak, after all. Michael Mignola's art is serviceable without being spectacular; I detect shades of Frazetta in his depictions of barbarian women, which works well enough for this story.

All in all, The Jungle Adventure is a nice diversion. Sometimes, that's all I want or need from a comic book.