Back before the movies made him globally famous, Wolverine was, for many comic book fans, both obviously the greatest of all superheroes, and also almost entirely unknown and inexplicable to the world outside comics fandom. It was impossible to explain what made him so special without sounding ridiculous, even by the low standards of explaining superheroes. For a start, he’s Canadian. He’s named after a sort of nasty snow weasel. He has impossible owl-like hair, and calls nearly everyone “bub” or “darling”. Also one cannot explain Wolverine without a disquisition on “adamantium”, Marvel Comics’ made-up, unbreakable metal that can cut through anything. No sensible, grown-up person wants to hear about adamantium.
However, as with all matters involving superheroes, what makes Wolverine ridiculous is intrinsic to what makes him wonderful. Wolverine is an X-Man, created in 1974, during the first golden age of the X-Men comics, when they were emerging as an entirely new thing within the superhero cosmos. Where other heroes were mostly clean-cut and all-American, the X-Men were scruffy misfits: foreigners, drop-outs, exiles, or simply painfully ordinary. A soft-hearted German who looked like a blue demon; a strapping peasant lad from the USSR who could turn into living metal; a weather goddess who grew up as a Cairo street child; a Jewish teenager from the Chicago suburbs … No group of superheroes had ever looked anything like this. Yet the magic wasn’t just in their oddity, but in how that oddity wasn’t a joke or a quirk, but was combined with all the tragic heroism and wild adventure inherent to the genre.
Yet the magic of the X-Men wasn’t just in their oddity, but in how that oddity wasn’t a joke or a quirk, but was combined with all the tragic heroism and wild adventure inherent to the genre.
The X-Men were unlikely heroes, but true ones, and none of them was more unlikely and more heroic than Wolverine. Wolverine is short, hairy, cigar-smoking (alas, no longer), beer-guzzling. His retractable, unbreakable, all-cutting claws are the sort of weaponry that belongs to a nightmarish villain, not a good guy. So too his frequent tendency to lapse into feral, bloodthirsty rages. The claws are designed to kill, and Wolverine has always made, at best, a mixed job of sticking to the superheroes’ code of not killing. Nonetheless, no hero is nobler than Wolverine: he will be the first to run into danger, and the last to leave; he will snarl with defiance at every evil god or hideous monster on his path; he will fight on and on, but always to protect his honor, and to shelter the weak and innocent, to whom he is, in his rough way, unfailingly gentle.
Wolverine is tough and nasty and sardonic, but also a knight errant at heart—he is, in the eyes of little boys, cool, in a way the square-jawed Superman and Captain America, or the nebbishy Spiderman, could never quite be. We quite simply wanted to be him, to extrude our adamantium claws (SNIKT!) when the going got tough, and then ride off on our Harleys into the sunset (we were too young and confused to actually want to get the girl, and Wolverine almost never could stick around for the girl). He was, to quote from Darren Franich’s delightful ranking of the X-Men, “a fifth-grader’s idea of a grown-up”, or rather of the ideal form that manhood would take.
We quite simply wanted to be him, to extrude our adamantium claws (SNIKT!) when the going got tough, and then ride off on our Harleys into the sunset (we were too young and confused to actually want to get the girl, and Wolverine almost never could stick around for the girl).
Of course, really growing up is nothing like this, and if Wolverine retains his appeal for some grown men, it is largely because we have not entirely let go of our fifth grade selves. There’s no shame in that—at least not necessarily. Still there is also something in this ludicrous character (and all superheroes are of course ludicrous) that goes beyond the little boy’s longing to be the toughest and noblest kid on the playground.
A very strange aspect of Wolverine is that his original super-power is not his adamantium claws or adamantium-laced skeleton, although these are of course the qualities that make him formidable. But, as the mythology has it, the claws and skeleton-metal were grafted on to Wolverine, in a particularly evil CIA super-soldier experiment, by exploiting the sole power he was born with (well, apart from a preternatural sense of smell): his healing factor. Wolverine’s genes gifted him with a superhuman ability to heal from nearly any injury. This meant he could survive the grafting of adamantium.
The healing factor is unique, and it is not fun, but disquieting. Wanting to be Wolverine meant wanting the claws and attitude, not the healing factor. Bullets bounce off Superman and the Hulk. Spiderman dodges them with arachnid agility. Wonder Woman repels them with her bracelets. But there is no such invulnerability for Wolverine. All the slings and arrows of his enemies are kryptonite to him. He is as vulnerable, as sensitive to pain, as you or I. The only difference is that he invariably, and swiftly, recovers. Accordingly, the writers have subjected Wolverine to endless punishment. He rarely gets in a fight where he is not riddled with bullets and sliced apart. It’s a good day if a bomb doesn’t explode under him. Far more than any other superhero, Wolverine has to suffer in the flesh.
Far more than any other superhero, Wolverine has to suffer in the flesh.
Wolverine’s suffering is all the more acute because that same CIA program that gifted him with adamantium robbed him of the bulk of his memories, and replaced them with false ones (they have techniques for doing this in Comics-science—don’t ask). Wolverine does not know the shape of his past before the government re-made him to be a killer. He can remember his every wound and fight since he became a hero, but he cannot anchor himself, as we all need to, in an origin story—parents, a childhood, a first love. And yet he soldiers on.
All superheroes are tragic figures, if only because their quest to right the wrongs of a fallen world can never end, be it through retirement or death (at least as long as the title keeps selling). Superman can never settle down with Lois Lane. Batman can never hang up his cape. Bruce Banner can never learn to control his temper. But Wolverine’s destiny is more tragic than most. His essential native gift is not strength or speed or mind control, but a unique capacity to endure punishment. Malevolent actors exploited that capacity, and sought to rob him of his past and his humanity, to turn him into a murderous beast. Wolverine’s story, in all its iterations, is about how he can only reclaim his humanity through submitting to suffering in the cause of good, and trusting to his healing factor to pull him through. It is a crude metaphor for endurance and grace, but it is a true one.
Wolverine’s destiny is more tragic than most. His essential native gift is not strength or speed or mind control, but a unique capacity to endure punishment.
Comics, and all media derived from them, are shamelessly exploitative. From the 90s onward, Wolverine became far too popular, and so the character was used and abused, till there was a great surfeit of Wolverine in the world. The mystery of his past was cleared up (a terrible mistake); he had a mostly tiresome series of adventures in Japan; he featured in too many mediocre movies; he lost and regained his powers more times than even the most devout aficionado can count; he joined the shiny, government-approved Avengers—where he can never rightly belong—when the movies made the Avengers Marvel’s flagship series; there are now even two Wolverines, from alternate timelines.
By the iron law of comics, having dreamt up something special, the creators proceeded to ruin it by over-exposure. Pick up today a random a comic that features Wolverine, and you will usually get no more than a tired recycling of the old tropes. But a second iron law of comics says that nothing touched by the specific genius of the genre can ever truly be destroyed by the creators’ worst efforts. Wolverine is Don Quixote, Philip Marlow, Clint Eastwood, with a hint even of Jesus Christ, but also with claws and a cigar—a pure manifestation of the lurid, loopy, and ultimately heart-breaking mythology only comics can offer, and can ceaselessly ruin and revive. That too is a healing factor one can rely on.
