Wolverine: Why is he so popular?

PS Cyclops is way better than Wolverine--repression and pouting are more fun than beer-swilling and running from Alpha Flight.

Wolverine has chemistry with a lot of different characters, which is very key to his popularity. You can use him in a lot of different types of stories, especially since he's very old and plays well in 20th century period pieces.

Wolverine is not the type of guy who would abandon his wife and kid for his ex-girlfriend on a whim, but Cyclops is because he's a whiny narcissist. He's the Nate Fisher of the X-Men!

Wolverine is overplayed yet still manaages to be awesome. He's such a simple template, you can put pretty much any type of story on him and it will work out great (although I do draw the line at pink chiffon, Mr. Huk).

Wolverine is also popular because he has elaborate and unrealistic hair that predates the current megapopularity of manga by like decades.

Also many of those stories suffered from leaving out the "nice guy masquerading as a" bit.

Is this consistent characterization, or just a series of writers saying "Hey, what's the most surprising thing we can do with this nice guy/bastard, that will really put our mark on the character"?

I may be misremembering, but I thought the original Lee/Kirby Cyclops was pretty much a milquetoast.

haha, omg

This is the way they've both written ever since GS#1.

If only this was one of those forums full of photoshop geeks who would slave to make that cover a reality!

The key issue is probably the one with him going buck wild on the Hellfire Club guards in the Dark Phoenix storyline. The Claremont/Miller miniseries cemented it.

This is 100% correct. (As is Vic's addendum).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/Uncanny133.jpg

The last panel of Uncanny 132 had (very young) me chasing my tail for a month. And Byrnemont, with their long-term lease on the book, had been building to this for YEARS. Every single time Rule-Following Older Brother Scott held him back, dressed him down for engaging claws before brain, it was a chip in the bank.* And now, at last, there'd be no one to hold him back, and a bunch of baddies who truly Had It Coming.

This pretty much sealed the deal. And yeah, it's a classic, but I mean just the cover alone:
http://www.dynamicforces.com/images/xmen-daysoffuturepast-tpb.jpg

*Most of the time (e.g. vs. Magneto, vs Sauron), poor straight-man Scott really was OTM. The resolution of the Alpha Flight arc gave Logan a chance to show he'd absorbed the message.

Wrong.

The appeal is that he's cool and a rebel, but Claremont is right to point out the significance and value of the noble-savage character arc and the long, shadowy (hence endlessly extensible/retcon-friendly) past.

Cool and a rebel doesn't buy 25 years of HOT. Ask Guy Gardner.

Guy just wouldn't be the same without the "ernie" hairdo!

Wolverine, on the other hand, and despite all the false memories / origin / blah blah blah is a character that's been kept relatively simple and his core characteristics have been the same for years, that contributes to his enduring appeal.

That can't be right. Surely that breaks the second law of thermodynamics? Yeah, like that matters.

And in the real world Logan & Jean Grey would have been shagging like a pair of nymphomaniacal rabbits with unlimited access to supplies of V1aGra.

Which probably makes him fairly popular with a certain type of fanboy...

Personally I've always thought that Forge's powers were the coolest. But that's probably because I'm a bit weird.

Oh come on, every other teenage girl has that power... It's called make-up and cleavage.

Let's see -

Forge - had a cool robot hand, could build a tank out of crisp packets like the A Team, boned Storm

Cypher - could speak Estruscan and boned Warlock

I would say Forge, though it was quite interesting to have Cypher as a superhero with a superpower that is absolutely no good in a Fite

Einstein: "Then again, e=mc^2 may only be a local phenomenon."

COMIC URBAN LEGEND: Wolverine was initially intended to be a genetically mutated wolverine.

STATUS: True

Initially, not only was Wolverine to be a mutated Wolverine, he was also supposed to be a teenager, just like the rest of the X-Men! It wasn't until Dave Cockrum first drew Wolverine without a mask that everyone realized that Wolverine was not as young as the other X-Men. Said Wein, at the time, "You just put thirty years on that guy."

In addition, according to Len Wein, “The adamantium claws were [only] in the gloves when I first created the character. And the claws were retractable. They were telescoping, and they would fit back in the casing of the gloves.”

As for the "mutated Wolverine" part, check out X-Men #98. A technician gets a reading on Wolverine that suggests he is not a full-fledged mutant. This was because Wein's initial intentions were to make Wolverine an evolved wolverine, courtesy of the High Evolutionary.

Chris Claremont soon took over writing the book full-time, and he went his own way with the character, but imagine...what could have been?!?

(Wein quotes courtesy of The X-Men Companion, 1982)

Nobody ever answered my question about Logan's eyepatch. So I'm going to assume it was private dig at Cyclops.

Since cover date January 2000, Wolverine has
appeared in Ultimate Wolverine vs Hulk, What If: Wolverine, Wolverine:
Soultaker, Witchblade/Wolverine, Wolverine/Punisher, Wolverine/ Captain
America, Wolverine: The End, Spider-Man & Wolverine, Wolverine: Snikt!,
Wolverine/Doop, Wolverine: X-Isle, Hulk/Wolverine: Six Hours, Wolverine:
Netsuke, Wolverine/Hulk, Elektra/ Wolverine: The Redeemers, Origin, Iron
Fist/Wolverine and Before the Fantastic Four: Ben Grimm & Logan.

Yet he remains one of, if not THE, most popular Marvel characters.

EXILES #85 - We're now firmly into the stories Tom Bedard is writing while he waits for Chris Claremont to recover and take over the book, but kudos for a premise so gloriously ridiculous that you've got to admire the sheer nerve. Having sacked the Exiles last issue, the Timebreakers introduce the new, improved team - all-new and all-Wolverine. After all, if Wolverine is great, six of him have got to be even better. Walking a fine line between sheer silliness and actually having a proper story, this is tremendous fun. A-

WOLVERINE #45 - God, I love this storyline. It's got all the playful absurdity of "Enemy of the State" without the grinding cynicism. This issue: Wolverine in underwater armour! With claws! You either get it and roll with the absurdity, or you don't and you'll hate it with a passion. Emphatically not for anyone who thinks Wolverine stories should be taken particularly seriously, but so cheerfully nonsensical that I can't help but smile. And when they stop for a couple of panels to lecture Wolverine about his extremely inconsistent sense of honour, there are some fair points being made as well. A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1NK9qrSqYE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zs92eCn11k

http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/035/5/1/wolverine_x_sabertooth_by_muuskazi-d38thuh.jpg

New Wolverine series next week, Origins II.

The cover is pretty sweet - plastic die cut on top of a painted cover

ugh

do these fucks never learn [Started by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhiteAmericanFolks.jpg (nakhchivan) in June 2011, last updated 6 hours ago by A Skanger Barkley (nakhchivan) on I Love Football] 2 new answers

I got the Wolverine & Nick Fury: Scorpio trade collection a while back. The main story is a graphic novel that Archie Goodwin and Howard Chaykin did in the 80s and it is a good story. It's a worthy sequel to the Steranko story. The few things Archie Goodwin wrote later in his career are all pretty good comic books.

The other two related tales are not quite as good and not written by Goodwin. The second story by Tom DeFalco with John Buscema also inking himself is a decent 80s Wolverine/Nick Fury adventure. Buscema inking himself just has a different look, smoother lines. The third tale is a sequel to the Goodwin story written by Chaykin with somewhat mismatched art by Shawn MacManus. It's not the best comic by either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyYtOYV4dBg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcAuua2l6U4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpX3VMTmKzU

sure are a lot of these, thanks 乒乓

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87EtjZ_kmWM

I feel like there was a more recent thread where Logan came up but with search down I can't find it so I found this with the google.

Saw Logan tonight, it is incredible. I vouched hard for the last Wolverine movie in some other thread (the one in Japan where he falls in love); never bothered with the first one which I heard was complete rubbish. But Logan is another level; certainly, by far, the best Xmen movie, and, if they choose for it to be such, a decent way to end the series. Jackman and Stewart are just great; the girl is great. The final scene is great. In the running for the best comics movie of all time.

I posted my review in the "Random Marvel Blabbery" thread... similar sentiments to yours!

(How painful was the Deadpool teaser that preceded it, though?)

haven't seen Logan but if you're talking about the phone booth teaser trailer, I love that thing to death

Diff'rent strokes, I guess...

Yeah it's possibly the best comic book film yet. Just leagues above the rest in so many ways. Also - Wolverine being Wolverine.

Ghost World? Akira? Danger: Diabolik? Scott Pilgrim? American Splendour? Snowpiercer? Nausicaa? When The Wind Blows?

Prof. X is very much a Clowesian grump in this movie. Also bearderine looks disturbingly like Mel Gibson.

Also, Snowpiercer was mostly rubbish

I would give the edge to The Dark Knight (it wasn't perfect, but was pretty darn good). Caveat: I have not seen every one of the other 5,980 comic book movies released in the past ten years.

The Dark Knight was dumb as fuck

The Dark Knight is an enjoyable movie, but the title character is the least interesting thing about it. Wolverine is consistently the most interesting thing about the movies he's in.

Did I miss an explanation about why there are no more mutants or is that in a line midway through the film?
Was aware of the comic arc where mutants died out from I think about 10 years ago. But wouldn't be something that would be immediate to large chunks of the audience. Or there would be a large amount of the audience who wouldn't be familiar with it at least.
Also does this story directly map to other comic arcs?

Oh, I didn't quite make the connection with the corn syrup: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/03/logan-x-men-killed-westchester-incident-professor-x-where-are-the-mutants

This was like Mad Max + The Road + Hanna + X-Men.

The Dark Knight was dumb as fuck

Nah, you must be thinking of one of the other two Nolan movies... "The Dark Knight" (2008) was pretty awesome!

xp in the movie they breeze over it in a couple lines, amazingly - through secret gene therapy in public water/food they weeded out mutantkind in a generation

the movie is very loosely inspired by a story called Old Man Logan which is much much worse than the movie turned out, they only took the bare bones of the plot (buddy road trip in an apocalyptic wasteland with old Wolverine) and changed the story and characters entirely. honestly the movie is more "inspired" by video game The Last of Us than anything else imo

the dark knight was totally great, it's board heresy to actually say so though for some reason. probably lingering Bush-era hatred

Xp, had this written.
Yeah got what Xavier said, missed the corn syrup.
Did wonder if it was Old Man Logan based but not sure where the cbr I had is. Couldn't get a new d/ld last week.

Funny seeing Stephen Gervais-buddy as Caliban.
Not sure what else he's done filmwise.

xp in the movie they breeze over it in a couple lines, amazingly - through secret gene therapy in public water/food they weeded out mutantkind in a generation

I agree this was oddly tossed-off (and was one of the few false notes in the plot for me; could that really be feasibly implemented / "work"? hard to suspend disbelief).

If we're doing spoiler-y discussion, one other small thing that bugged me was the pivotal cell phone video -- no way could she have recorded/edited that (she wouldn't have even been allowed to have a personal phone in there, let alone stand around filming... and some of the shots were just impossible!). I realize they had to deliver the background info to the viewer (and Logan) with more "impact" than if the nurse just told the story to the camera. I guess including more conventional "flashback" images, to accompany her narrative, would not have fit the style of the film. Not sure how I would have solved that problem, as director.

(A final thing I wasn't crazy about was the graphic fate of certain sympathetic characters... but I'm a softy in that regard.)

One other thing I thought was funny was the idea that kids would be safe once they had asylum in Canada (head bad guy: "We must stop them before they reach the border!"). Those Reavers didn't seem like the type to respect territorial sovereignty! But maybe the point was just that the kids would be well hidden, or Alpha Flight would be protecting their asses...

(I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking, but that's just because I liked the movie so much overall that these few things stand out as "off notes" or w/e)

not tossed off! there is a whole section of the movie where they fight GMO corn bullies. if anything, dr. posh nosh should have not blabbed and bragged bond villain style, and they could have just let the camera rest ominously on a box of corn flakes.

True, they did their due diligence in setting it up... but the reveal was still somewhat startling, and only left me thinking, "They found a way to get the *whole world* eating that corn syrup?"

monsanto doesn't play around.

I thought the well-edited cell phone video was strange as well but I let it slide.

maybe video editing apps have gotten really good and user-friendly by 2029

I may be totally making this up, but is it possible that it was just US mutants that died?

The Dark Knight's greatness is only a heresy on the other board, I think.

xp
You know, that's a good point, I forgot it's "da fyooture"... (I thought the prominent Sony branding of the phone was interesting, considering it's a Fox movie... you'd expect that in a Spider-Man pic.)

<i>if anything, dr. posh nosh should have not blabbed and bragged bond villain style, and they could have just let the camera rest ominously on a box of corn flakes</i>

...and speaking of product placement, wasn't it Kellogg's Corn Flakes that Laura was eating in Caliban's shack (before she calmly busts some heads)? That must have been a deliberate nod to the GMO storyline, I didn't catch that.

as someone in that general industry I assure you we are ambivalent to mutant powers

I'm all 'bout them GMOs; don't care if they suppress my healing factor

the worldwide by 2029 thing seems plausible, china actually planted as much corn as north america last year

People are complaining about glucose-fructose syrup's debilitating effects in the real world. That's corn derived I think.
Wonder if that's why I didn't take it in with the mutant demise cos it had me linking it elsewhere.

My wife declares Logan to be the most violent film we've ever seen, and I was all, "No, surely not!", but actually having trouble thinking of one more so, having avoided torture porn so far. Really liked it, the whole downbeatness and minimal apparent CGI. And the Xavier seizures were genuinely upsetting to experience as viewers.

Also, the actress playing Laura, where do they find a child who can act like that? Especially as it's almost all body language for the first 2/3 of the film.

watching this a couple days after my grandfather's funeral, when he was very mentally disconnected toward the end, made Patrick Stewart's role seem very true

the medicated parts where he doesn't know quite what's going on and lays blame on Logan, not for any specific thing but just all kinds of blame, because he has no control or even understanding of his life, was very realistic

Jackman is getting the lion's share of credit/publicity for the film, but Stewart did just a great a job on his way out

Also, the actress playing Laura, where do they find a child who can act like that? Especially as it's almost all body language for the first 2/3 of the film.

Apparently they looked high and wide, and found her in a UK/Spain family of actors. Something else I read said that an earlier draft had Laura talking a lot, from the outset; and a writer came in and stripped the dialogue way down, confident that she shouldn't speak until towards the end. (I think this is all in the film's Wikipedia entry, which was pretty much the extent of my post-viewing "tell me more" research.)

Phew, that was heavy! Really good though. Feel like they could have left the violence offscreen for the first two-thirds of the movie and it would have been ok (and maybe a bit more impactful). I was numb to it by the end. The scenes between Logan and Xavier were heartbreaking. And yeah - the girl who played Laura was amazing.

Also, as far as I could see this was wonderfully free of a Stan lee cameo! Hurrah!

Pretty sure he was at the casino

Aw, fuck

He should have left his wig off to respect the theme of aging

yeah, the idea that stan lee will still be alive, still hanging around being boring in 2029 one of the most frightening things about that projected future

This was like Mad Max + The Road + Hanna + X-Men

and a wee bit of children of men, right?

i wasn't super into this for a lot of different reasons which are too boring to get into here but i thought the scenes that were about family dynamics were really well done, and yes patrick stewart and the little girl were both really great

Downloaded this and loved it, mostly, but had to skip over the wholesome farm family interlude. I was shocked by how long it goes on--the action comes to a complete stop for 15 minutes! Feel like Wolverine and X23 could have learned the This Is What A Loving Family Looks Like lesson in a fraction of that boring time.

The farm family thing was where the movie really hit the skids for me - up until that point I was really digging on the setup, this very unfamiliar situation for the characters, seeing stuff like Wolverine loading Professor X's wheelchair in the trunk - so many really good details and you don't have a really strong sense of where this is all going. As soon as the farm family shows up it locks into a much more predictable movie: these guys are obviously all doomed and from there on out we're going to be in a Waterworld remake. There are still great moments after that (the little doctor's office scene was really well done in a non-showy way, I thought) but it becomes a more generic movie, with a particularly dicey final action sequence - oddly evocative of X-Men 3, of all things, and the kids alternated between forgetting they had superpowers, and then using them in ways that really felt like the B-team came in to do the shots and the effects.

Seemed particularly shitty that Wolverine basically dooms the family by getting involved in the confrontation with the evil agro corporation - hard to watch that and not think "oh, what, so Logan's gonna skip town tomorrow and these thugs are gonna come back around and burn the house down, or what?" It's also in this stretch that we wind up Professor X's arc and it seemed a really perfunctory end to this character, after all these years. But then the same could be said for Logan also.... evil twin Wolverine just didn't work well for me as a main antagonist. I get what they were going for thematically, but it doesn't quite take off as anything really interesting even if the fights are great.

y'know I was just thinking the other day about how I wish you had continued that Claremont/X-Men blog

I think about that a lot! Always feels like something we MIGHT pick back up again someday, maybe with slightly different expectations for ourselves. I fell out of keeping up with current comics again right around the time we lost track of the blog, and that was a small but subtle angle of interest, being able to refer to much more recent developments. But I was always really itching to get to the point where we could alternate between X-Men and New Mutants, all the different artists coming and going, the recurring themes becoming clearer and clearer with time even as you can feel Claremont constantly itching to escape any kind of fixed setup or status quo for the book... ahhhh, I love that whole period. Maybe! Maybe!

I'm not even a big X-Men fan (altho the apex of Claremont's run did coincide w my peak superhero-comics-buying years ie, the mid-80s), I just dug the approach and perspective on something that's so canonical

like there's huge gaps in my reading - I was really only paying attention for a couple years - so it was interesting to get all the details filled in from a post-mortem critical perspective

Thanks! Yeah, not to toot my own horn but it felt like we were finding a good balance. In hindsight we probably still did a little too much summary or lingering on silly things, but it was the kind of blog I want to read and want to write, where you're generally analyzing things at whatever level and not just listing everything that happens. It was also really cool because David has a much deeper knowledge of, for example, artist credits and careers, and could draw connections to other titles and things going on in the period that were really off my radar. It was a good pairing. Every time we meet up we talk vaguely about reviving it, but it's a schedule thing since projects like that do require setting aside dedicated time for reading, for having the conversation, and for editing/posting.

The lesson of the Farm Family thing isn't that "this is what a loving family looks like", it's that Logan is the harbinger of death.

Okay, but it's still pretty interminable.

and I do think that a strong theme of the section (or at least the parts I saw, I fast-forwarded through most of it), was that Xavier wanted Big and (especially) Little wolverines to observe these good-hearted folks and learn that it's possible to live in a normal, peaceful manner with people you love without shoving a metal spike through their skull at the slightest provocation.

what with her being repeatedly shown to be institutionally feral and all

Well, yeah, that was all pretty explicitly rammed home. I think the thematic beat is fine, if unsubtle - just how it was worked into a narrative was pretty weak.

Sure, but I'm saying but a point of the sequence is that Xavier is dead wrong there.

I mean as noted it's not subtle about it - they watch Shane fercryingoutloud.

Ah, fair enough.

As soon as they were on the freeway inviting them back for dinner I was wishing I could skip the next X minutes. Hoped it would be a fake-out where no one ended up murdered. :)

I thought the farm sequence was well-done; I just didn't need to see an innocent teenage boy murdered onscreen. That went too far for me.

I liked this movie despite everything. I'm biased towards the story, because I certainly empathize with a scruffy-bearded, self-loathing dad to a miraculous daughter who seems just like him in all the best and worst ways, and I'll give the time of day to any character whose emotional comfort zone is being angry at everything all the time even though they know it's self-defeating.

The villains, though - I had no idea why we were supposed to be afraid of them, much less interested in anything they had to say. They just seemed like an army of jerks. The orcs in LOTR were more believably fearsome, and you knew they didn't stand a chance either.

Stephen Merchant was completely unexpected. Didn't give him nearly enough to do.

My favorite part was (paraphrasing) "bad things happen to people I care about!" "then I'll be fine."

This movie was recently re-released in B&W for a weekend (limited-run), which is an interesting thing for a big studio to do.

I'd pay to see the silent film cut, like the black & chrome version of the last Mad Max. I might even pay movie ticket prices.

The b&w Logan cut is with the digital release as a freebie.

watched logan last night and was super-impressed by jackman, stewart and dafne keen's performances - patrick stewart in particular was fantastic in a role that could easily have been mawkish but he was great at swinging between lucid tenderness and rage and confusion

i also really, really liked the effects they put together for professor x's seizures

i think ultimately it's better than the sum of its parts mainly due to the familiarity of jackman and stewart and how good their performances are. for all the talk of it being the first 'real' wolverine movie it shared a lot of the faults of mangold's first one - shitty villains and weirdly slack pacing being the main ones. and while i understand that having wolverine face and overcome a younger, more feral version of himself was thematically appropriate it ended up being just kinda ham-handed in practice. having him face off against sabretooth instead would still fit the themes of family and redemption and might offer a bit more of an interesting villain for a final face-off

the other thing which bugged me was the utterly implausible exposition video put together by the nurse who rescued laura - if they were going to do that, couldn't they have mocked up the shots as like stolen surveillance camera footage or something instead of implying that the was walking around highly secure areas with her phone out filming like a tourist?

also, while i remember: i'm sure it's hard to do a road movie about a grizzled burnout shuttling a precious human cargo across a dystopian landscape without invoking children of men or the road but mangold seemed to be leaning into it rather than offering points of differentiation most of the time

the other thing which bugged me was the utterly implausible exposition video put together by the nurse who rescued laura - if they were going to do that, couldn't they have mocked up the shots as like stolen surveillance camera footage or something instead of implying that the was walking around highly secure areas with her phone out filming like a tourist?

Yeah, I made the same gripe up above (...I point out in a "gr8 minds think alike" way, not an "I scooped you" way)

two great minds united by irritation at a minor detail in an action movie

I think that's what brought Adorno & Horkheimer together

captain and tennille too iirc

I wonder if there will be an X-23 movie; I'd love to see Laura's story continue (although not necessarily the same story told in the comics). I read a blurb saying it may happen, but of course who knows.

I'm assuming the New Mutants movie coming next year has nothing to do with the world of "Logan" or the group of kids at the end.

it's going to have Storm from Days of Future Past, so barring time-jump shenanigans I assume it'll be set in the early '90s

Grunge soundtrack!

Grunge soundtrack would be perfect for that Cable movie we were brainstorming a while back, that would just go all-in on 1991-era badassery, and have only solid colors as backgrounds for 3/4 of the scenes, five variant opening credits sequences, etc.... gah, what thread was that?

I reread some Cable stuff on Marvel Unlimited and it's not all bad? The badass gun dude cliche is horrible but any mid-/post-conflict era where dudes who are into guns and infiltrating our zeitgeist (and colonizing our police forces) makes a reasonable big gun man a viable alternative to "shoot everything" big gun man

plus pouches are back in

http://68.media.tumblr.com/ce1e42821718dc00ae2eedd171c1c742/tumblr_osqwqfaLQk1wuopnno1_1280.jpg