Wolverine: Why is he so popular?

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.

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