The Fractal Hall Journal

Wolverine gets a lot of stick, some of it deserved. Though I’ve never been much of a fan, there’s obviously something going on there because there aren’t many characters created specifically to fill a team role who go on to sustain not only their own books, but who can be deployed as a guaranteed sales-raising guest star. Whether or not this is a good thing is, as always, open to conjecture.

Core Genre: Wolverine is the super-hero version of the Man With No Name, an outlaw with a violent, uncertain past in line with the darker, more ambiguous post-Leone kind of cowboy. So I’m enclined to place him under Western, although considering his nationality that’s more of a North Western. The Frontier Fiction of Jack London, maybe.

Before the Jemas/Quesada/Jenkins/Kubert Origin, it was accepted that to give Wolverine a definitive backstory would kill the mystery of the character, and take the character with it. I’ve seen the series criticised by some for doing exactly that. I disagree.

First of all, the idea that Wolverine’s backstory is in anyway mysterious is wrong. From the very beginning his creator Len Wein intended for him to be a mutated wolverine, though thank fuck they didn’t follow through on that. Claremont and Byrne, the creators most responsible for shaping the character’s early days, also intended for the character to be old enough to have fought in the Second World War.

Of course, the readers didn’t know all this yet, but it wasn’t long before the gaps started to get filled in. Alpha Flight, Weapon X, a long history with Sabretooth, fighting alongside Captain America in the ’40s; not a definitive timeline, perhaps, but plenty of things to delineate his history. Heavy hints of wetwork for intelligence agencies. And as soon as we get into his solo series we have the Japan stuff, a bizarre story about a boy raised by actual wolverines, life with Silver Fox and her subsequent murder, and so on. Although how much of this come under the ‘implanted memory’ get-out clause is anyone’s guess.

Regardless of how much of this is later retconned or proven false, it shows how his writers have been playing around with his origins for a long time. Considering how much fans and creators protest that his backstory should be hidden, they’ve certainly engaged with a lot of books over time that deal with possible origins. Ditto for the ‘angry loner who hunts alone’ thing. Guy’s supporting cast is bigger than the Batman Family.

A) Healing factor
B) Animal senses
C) Claws
D) Adamantium-laced skeleton
E) Berserker rage
F) Is (sigh) the best there is at what he does, and what he does isn’t pretty.

If nothing else, Wolverine is a survivor. His healing factor is the centre of his character, survival as mutant power. I like the idea that the reason for his memory issues is the healing factor crudely patching up a damaged psychology.

Who are Wolverine’s villains? Every damn thing. Everyone he’s ever met, every situation he’s ever been in. He’s his own worst enemy, and that doesn’t just mean the character as he’s defined in his present, but also the person he used to be. Every different aspect of his past, whether nobleman, frontiersman, assassin or samurai, becomes a different enemy, and creates a new conflict that Wolverine has to survive. Wolverine never triumphs. The best he can hope for is that he sees another day.

Actually, considering everything he’s been through, maybe that’s wrong. He can’t really be killed, not considering his core power, so he can’t escape any of his actions. He won’t even get the peace of the grave. Even survival itself becomes his enemy, because the best he can hope for is achieving a measure of peace.

There’s some depressing stuff behind that yellow spandex.

But it’s not really the nihilism people come for. Everyone likes a rogue, and if we think of the action movie culture that brought characters like Wolverine and the Punisher to prominence in the 80s we can see that the attraction was mostly a surface one. Blood, rage and Rambo. Luckily for Logan, there was still enough to him that he stayed popular after circumstances changed.