I should write about Dune this weekend, but I’m re-reading it now, so maybe next week. See the movie!
In the meantime, I’ve been catching up on the current X-Men comics in trade paperback—I’m about halfway through Dawn of X. I’m really appreciating these characters for the first time in a long time in the new situation established by Jonathan Hickman. Hickman’s previous Marvel work left me kind of cold: he upped the stakes in The Fantastic Four and The Avengers to such a huge and abstract scale of action and stripped out a lot of feeling. But with Marvel’s mutant characters, I think he’s done a great job at reinterpreting their entire relationship to the shared universe while also shedding a new light on the emotional interrelationships of the numerous characters that have populated the mutant part of the Marvel universe.
The “New X-Men” popularized by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and John Byrne in 1975 were for me and many other young adults and teenagers a major reason to keep reading comic books through high school and college. Claremont’s scripting looks impossibly wordy and often pretentious today, but at the time, his approach felt so fresh: importing of the narrative style of soap operas (numerous subplots boiling away in the background, more complicated romances and rivalries between the protagonists, slow reveals of the past of various characters) and some of his sharpening of the premise of the mutant books to focus on prejudice against mutants and ideological disagreements between them about how to cope with that antagonism.
And in that mix, Wolverine really stood out for so many of us who were reading at the time. I remember thinking when I first picked up the New X-Men, around issue #101, where Phoenix made her first appearance, that he was an especially interesting character, and as time went on, he grabbed me as much as many other fans.
The obvious thing that compelled attention was that he had adamantium claws that came out of his wrist. There just wasn’t any way for him to be written in a conventional Comics Code-compliant way where he didn’t injure or kill some of his adversaries. Sure, he could cut through metal doors and robots, he could batter force fields and near-invulnerable characters, but the basic idea pretty well required somebody getting cut. Particularly once they threw in, “and he has animalistic rages sometimes where he can’t really control himself”.
To my surprise, Claremont went there. Relatively discreetly at first. Wolverine “tags” Magneto in one battle in a way that makes it clear that he’s laid three long gashes along Magneto’s back. Then Wolverine off-screen takes out a guard in a villain’s fortress where it would simply be disastrous for the infiltrating X-Men to be spotted (they’re rescuing captive members of the team). There isn’t much ambiguity about what’s happened: Storm and Nightcrawler both look disgusted and aghast and Storm mentally compares him to a merciless leopard. Even more famously, when Wolverine is the only X-Man left standing in their first encounter with the Hellfire Club, this happens:
So part of the thing that made the character an instant sensation in his X-Men appearances was simply that feeling that you were watching creative people get away with something. It was like watching the first two seasons of Saturday Night Live where you weren’t entirely sure what the joke was in a skit where John Belusi screamed in pain while urinating in a public bathroom but you were sure it wasn’t allowed, so it was funny simply because it felt transgressive.
But I have to give Wolverine’s stewards credit, because they had a really steady hand when it came to making him more than just a hyper-violent bad ass. You might say that Wolverine paved the way to the really terrible Rob Liefeld-ish comics of the 1990s where lots of steroidal superheroes with big guns and ammo pouches and swords pranced around on tiny misshapen feet saying tough-guy dialogue, but Wolverine himself got a much more layered character development laid down at his foundations long before that bad creative era. Claremont and Byrne kept Wolverine mysterious: we learned his real name only after some years, not because he had a “secret identity” but because he didn’t especially trust or respect his teammates for a long time. We knew almost nothing about his background: it came out in slow, small, almost incidental details. He spoke and read Japanese fluently! He used to visit prostitutes in Calgary! He was a secret agent for Canada and maybe other countries, too! In fact, he was found by a Canadian engineer involved in a secret project to form a Canadian team of metahumans, and when he was found he was basically living in the wilderness like an animal, with no memory! His adamantium skeleton and claws weren’t his mutation, they’d been fused into him in an experiment he didn’t remember. He could smoke cigars and drink like a fish because his body healed so fast that it didn’t do him any damage at all! He liked to go into the woods and stalk animals, not to kill them but to get close enough to touch them gently! He was in love with Phoenix, aka Jean Grey, and in some ways understood her better than Cyclops!
There wasn’t any rush to give him a “secret origin”—that took years and years of character development. Unlike a lot of Claremont’s other characters, who eventually became overcomplicated, sprawling messes of accumulated events and backstories, Wolverine stayed fairly spare for a long time—and other writers like Frank Miller kept to the same discipline, only adding a bit here and there. Wolverine is the single greatest example of a comic-book superhero who doesn’t depend on a secret origin that grants him some ongoing motivation. Even when they finally did pull the trigger and lay out most of his background—born in the late 19th Century and leaving his home under tragic circumstances, a soldier and spy in both world wars, living among the Blackfoot Indians, developing a long-standing antagonism to the mutant named Sabertooth, and eventually having adamantium fused into his skeleton because his rapid healing would allow him to survive the experience (but the pain led to some amnesia)—it was all fairly layered and in the end, surprisingly consistent and coherent, for the most part.
Yes, sure, there have been a few bad ideas along the way, there always are in long-running serials. Like that he fights the personification of death whenever he’s badly injured so that he can come back to life or that there are whole bunch of guys with claws like him going back to a sort of founding patriarch. His healing factor eventually became ridiculous—in Dawn of X, there’s a scene where he gets cut cleanly in half and one of his allies picks up the two halves of his body and mashes them together so he can begin healing more quickly. Prior to Hickman’s relaunch, the character went through some fairly silly gyrations in the now-conventionalized “big event” of dying and eventually being resurrected. And because of his Batman-level popularity, he ended up being on just about every super-team in the Marvel Universe. Once upon a time, if Marvel wanted to try and get some attention for a new title, they’d have Spider-Man guest-star, but somewhere along the way, Wolverine took on that role.
The character also got lucky in his film adaptation. I would have said he had a high chance of looking campy or ridiculous in an X-Men film, but then Hugh Jackman slid in and made the character work astonishingly well (though even he couldn’t save the woeful solo Wolverine films except for Logan, which is pretty much the best superhero film ever).
As I’m savoring the other characters in Marvel’s sprawling mutant sub-universe, rescued from a bad interval of corporate neglect when Marvel didn’t own the adaptation rights and wanted to promote the Inhumans as replacement mutant-non-mutants, I have to say I’m savoring Wolverine especially. He’s still a remarkably stable idea of a character despite hundreds of terrible imitations and knock-offs in the years since, despite the meme-ready silliness of some of his archetypical dialogue and styling. He’s one of the few really classic comic-book characters whose creation happened outside of the historical frames and sourcing that other predominant characters came from. I don’t have any desire to re-read his worst stories (and there’s a lot, some of which I’ve never read in the first place) but he’s definitely still comic-book comfort food when he’s in the mix and a writer has a sure hand for how to handle him. Maybe all the more now that he’s no longer quite the character who must be in everything and everywhere.