- Name: Logan, James Howlett
- Code Names: Wolverine, Weapon X
- First Appearance: Incredible Hulk #181 (Nov ’74)
- Powers: Enhanced senses, healing factor, claws
- Teams Affiliation: X-Men, Avengers, Alpha Flight, X-Force, Defenders, Fantastic Four, Weapon X
About
It’s almost a parody how much little boys want to be a cowboy. It isn’t founded in any sort of reality, it is just a dream of a life of freedom. It is an ethos that bad men will get their due and that life is fair. Even if the good guys are gruff and unpleasant, they are still the good guys. It is far from a unique trope, the idea of a ronin, a wandering samurai without a master works the same way. So does the idea of a knight riding across the countryside looking for adventure, or the idealized version of a pirate. It is just off center from the hero, it’s the rogue, the smuggler, the mean man with a heart of gold. It is an incredibly malleable idea and it shouldn’t shock anyone that it is the basis for one of the most popular characters in pop culture history.
Logan was a lot of things before he was Weapon X, but very little of it matters. He was born in Alberta, Canada in the 1880’s with the name James Howlett but was forced to abandon it all when his mutant powers first emerged. For years after he wandered, from living in little quarry towns to the wild with a pack of wolves, his old life was over. He was no longer James Howlett, only Logan. When World War I began, Logan enlisted in the Canadian Army. He would continue to fight wars, both in and out of shadows for decades. After years of killing Logan had had enough and tried to numb himself with booze and drugs, though his healing factor never let him truly check out. It was on a cold winter night after binging on vices that everything changed. Logan was tranquilized, kidnapped, and taken to hell.
That hell was the Weapon X program, a state-sponsored program to create the ultimate killing machine. Logan was tormented, his mind shred to pieces. He was made feral, savage, more beast than man. What they did to his body, however, took the anguish to the next level. Because of his mutant healing factor, Logan’s skeleton was covered with adamantium, a nearly unbreakable metal. So too were his claws, turned from bone weapons to razor-sharp tools of destruction. He had no memory of his life before entering the tank at Weapon X, or maybe he had someone else’s. All he knew was that he needed to escape. Relying only on his senses and his animalistic drive, Logan butchered his way through the facility and into the Canadian wilderness like a feral Wolverine.
Logan was found by James and Heather Hudson, a couple with ties to the Canadian military. They nursed him back to health and helped him regain some semblance of humanity. When he was well enough, Logan was asked to join them on the Canadian mutant super team known as Alpha Flight, a job he willingly accepted. If he didn’t know what he was, he could at least fight on the side of the angels. He gained notoriety on a solo mission battling the Hulk and a Wendigo (the indefinite article is important). Though he couldn’t take down the green goliath, the battle caught the attention of Charles Xavier who offered to change Wolverine’s life.
Xavier was forming a new squad of his X-Men and wanted Wolverine to join. Logan was dissatisfied with his stuffy government job and thought the private sector might be more up his alley, a slight Department H would not soon forget. Wolverine’s devil may care attitude and his causal relationship to murder left his new teammates uneasy. He clashed with the hot-headed Thunderbird and the tightly wound leader Cyclops, though he found a close bond with the jovial Nightcrawler and a mutual respect for the regal Storm. While his teammates might question his methods, none could challenge his combat prowess. After all, he was that best there is at what he does.
The X-Men took a trip to Japan, a land where Wolverine felt at home. He had muddled memories of a life in this place, he spoke the language fluently, and the culture of the samurai deeply resonated with him. There he met Mariko Yashida, the daughter of a Japanese businessman with ambitious underworld goals. She was the only woman able to take the wild beast inside Logan, she challenged him and he loved her for it. They began an intercontinental romance, but Mariko’s father, Shingen, had no plans to let his daughter marry a gaijin, an outsider. Shingen forced Mariko to marry a Yakuza enforcer named Noburu who would beat her if he thought she stepped out of line, something Wolverine could not abide.
Logan traveled to Japan and confronted Shingen, against Mariko’s wishes. He challenged him to a duel for honor, no mutant powers, just simple practice swords. In a previous life, Logan had trained with the blade, but Shingen was a master. The fight was an exquisite dance but Shingen acted as a man without honor. Unbeknown to Mariko, Shingen struck to kill and Wolverine had no choice but to defend with his adamantium claws, and act she saw as shamefully dishonorable. Dejected, Wolverine spent his days with a bottle of booze and a wild woman named Yukio, trying to discover who he really was. He discovered that Yukio was actually working for Shingen, but she was compromised and killed Mariko’s husband Noburu leaving their relationship mixed, to say the least. After learning this, Wolverine vowed to prove his honor to Mariko and stop Shingen’s reign of terror.
Again he challenged Shingen to a duel and again they battled fiercely, but this time it was Logan’s claws against Shingen’s blade. Shingen was good, but Wolverine was the best. He killed the old man, knowing that Mariko would be honor bound to kill him. Mariko lifted her father’s blade from the ground, the honor sword of the Yoshida Clan, and presented it to Logan. She recognized that her father had brought dishonor to their family and she would work to bring it back, but she didn’t want to do it alone. The two were engaged and Logan, for the first time in his memory, was truly happy. Due to mind control based shenanigans, the engagement was called off but Wolverine and Mariko continued their courtship, even adopting a young girl who had lost her parents.
Through all this Logan continued to be one of the only constants with the X-Men, but even he needed a break. He often traveled to the island nation of Madripoor, where laws seemed like mere suggestions. He did this in secret, wearing an eyepatch that didn’t fool anyone and calling himself Patch. He was a peacekeeper in the land as he began to explore a long life outside of just being a superhero.
His past, however, still haunted him. He remembered a long history with the X-Men’s enemy Sabretooth, one of the few people in the world Logan feared. Glimpses of a life as a secret agent shot through his head, but not even Logan could tell what was real. One memory stood out to him, a woman named Silver Fox. They had a cabin in the Canadian wilderness together, their initials carved on the tree outside, and she was brutally murdered by Sabretooth as a grotesque birthday present. Of this he was certain. His other memories were unclear, flashes of a life he might have lived. This was deeper set when he discovered that Weapon X had implanted many fake memories, dreams within dreams, in his mind. Logan didn’t know what he had done in a past life but he knew that it wasn’t good and he knew he was getting better.
Wolverine’s darkest days weren’t behind him as the Hand struck Wolverine in the one place he couldn’t heal from, his heart. They poisoned Mariko was blowfish toxin and made her face a slow, excruciating death. Mariko didn’t want that, she wanted to die with honor and dignity and asked Wolverine to make it quick. He often said that it hurt every time his claws tore through his skin, but the pain would never be more agonizing than this.
Lost and confused Wolverine would be struck another blow when, in a fit of madness and rage, Magneto tore the adamantium from Logan’s bone. He barely recovered but realized that his healing factor was kicking into overdrive, pushing Wolverine to a more feral state. He left the X-Men for a time to center himself. The loss of his adamantium would last years until Wolverine was brainwashed by Apocalypse into becoming his Horseman of Death. The ancient mutant also restored his adamantium and Wolverine returned to the X-Men.
Marvel’s merry mutants weren’t the only ones interested in Logan’s skills. Captain America was looking to reform the Avengers after they briefly disbanded, but he wanted something new. Though more bloodthirsty than his other recruits, Cap recognized Wolverine’s potential from their days serving in WWII. He brought him onto the team and Logan became a long serving Avenger. He respected Cap’s trust in him and stood by the Avenger’s when they were forced underground after the superhero Civil War. He would serve on the team in some capacity for the rest of his life.
The Scarlet Witch created a reality where everyone’s greatest wish came true, and for Logan, the wish carried back into the real world. He remembered everything. His whole life came flooding back to him, including a memory he had long since forgotten. Her name was Itsu, they were in love and she was carrying his child before she was assassinated. More than that he learned that the child was still alive, but he had become something dark.
His name was Daken, mongrel, a sociopathic killer who hated his father and the threat he posed to his throne. You see, Daken was groomed by a man named Romulus to become his successor. Romulus was obsessed with wild, feral mutants. He saw them as living weapons and the true heirs to the kingdom of Earth and spent years crafting Logan into his perfect tool before he escaped Weapon X. Logan wanted desperately for his son to avoid the same fate and ended Romulus’ plot. He knew Daken couldn’t be saved, he was never going to be a good person, but he could give Daken the choice of who he wanted to be.
At the same time, Wolverine was asked by Cyclops to form a mutant wet works squad called X-Force. He was uncomfortable that his team included many young mutants, including X-23, a female clone of Logan who had just escaped a life as a weapon. Wolverine, however, saw the value in a preemptive strike and continued the team on his own terms even when Cyclops told him to shut it down.
The divide between the two men would eventually tear the X-Men in half. Wolverine saw the X-Men becoming increasingly militaristic and it didn’t sit well with him. For years he did the dirty work so no one else would have to bear that guilt, but now children were being trained to kill if needed. This was something he couldn’t abide. It wasn’t Xavier’s dream to him, it wasn’t the mission that turned him from killer to hero. He left the X-Men’s island nation of Utopia to form the Jean Grey School and took many X-Men with him. Though he wasn’t much of a teacher, or principle, or someone who had any business running a facility for children, Wolverine found some peace in creating lives instead of destroying them.
That choice became very personal when one of his students, Genesis, was captured by a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants led by Daken. Daken threatened to destroy the Jean Grey School and everything Wolverine had built just to prove to his father that he couldn’t be changed. On his way to stop Daken, Wolverine received a message from his future self. He had to put Daken down or he would kill every student in the school. Logan met his son on the field of battle. Daken was good, but Wolverine was the best. He imagined what life would have been if he had been there for Daken if he even knew he had a son before he was grown. He could have been a good father, he knew that. Maybe if he was there, Daken wouldn’t have become a monster. But maybe didn’t matter, the reality was that Wolverine felt no choice but to drown his son in a shallow pool of dirty water.
Shortly after that, Wolverine was infected with a virus from the Microverse that shut down his mutant healing factor. For the first time in years, Wolverine felt the specter of death looming over him. He wanted to make sure that if he died, it was in a good fight, for a good reason. He learned of a plot to restart the Weapon X program, and Wolverine knew he had to stop it. He found his way to a place called Paradise and saw that they planned to implant adamantium in these new super soldiers. He destroyed the facility, but in the chaos, was covered in molten adamantium. He made his way outside, and though his body was in excruciating pain, his mind was clear. He looked out into the sunset and knew that no matter what evil he committed in the past, he had done more good. He lived a good life, and that is all anyone could ask for.
Now the grave is empty, though we know not how. Wolverine is alive again, but he hasn’t rushed to rejoin his companions in the X-Men. He stole a semi full of beer, stabbed a frost giant, and took an Infinity Stone. He is a man on a mission, walking through the Marvel universe to some unknown end. One thing is clear, Wolverine is back and badder than ever.
Must Read
For all the bad stories he has been in, and there have been many, Wolverine has been in some of the best. His first mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller stands head and shoulders above them all. It is a synthesis of two amazing creators. Claremont writes just enough before getting out of Miller’s way and letting him do what he does best, draw ninjas and awesome fights. It is a classic for good reason and even if you hate Wolverine you owe it to yourself to read this. It is cheaper than most books that came out this week at $3.50, and it is a ton better.
Ranking
Wolverine is overrated. Wolverine is one of the best characters in pop culture. These two statements are seemingly contradictory but both are true. He has the potential to be the greatest character in comics, however, his popularity is his downfall because Wolverine has been in more terrible stories than any other X-Men character. Because of that, it is nearly impossible to separate a well written, nuanced Wolverine from Lucky Jim the SNIKT-Bub Man. Original flavor Wolverine is better than Old Man Logan but the sheer volume of bad Wolverine stories means that he must go below a Magneto. I think pound for pound Wolverine is a better character than Emma Frost but I can’t in good faith put him above Nightcrawler who is delightful even when poorly written. That makes Wolverine the new number 4 in the Xavier Files.
Wolverine requested by Patreon supporter Retcon X whose new X-Men inspired EP you should check out. Thank you for your support! If you have a request for how about you send it below? If you want to cut to the front of the two-year long line, we have a Patreon you can support Xavier Files for just $1 to get a line cutting reward.
Make sure you check out my podcast BATTLE OF THE ATOM. It’s where Bish & Jubez creator Adam Reck and I talk about every single X-Men story that ever existed and rank them from best to worst. Episode 25.INH is up and we talk about a night out with the guys and gals. Make sure you subscribe to any of the following platforms (or others, I’m not picky) Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS.
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Next week we look at the life of Cecila Reyes! See you then!
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Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
