By Dr. Michael Robinson
Wolverine from Incredible Hulk #180
Superhero comics are a serialized form. In the good old days, they ran like soap operas with constant cliffhangers to keep the readers coming back month after month. One of my favorite tricks of the era was when a fight between two characters got interrupted by a third character who threatened to throw the whole match out of whack.
One great example is the last page of The Incredible Hulk #180 (July 2, 1974) when the Wolverine arrived on the very last panel on the very last page of the comic to mix it up with Hulk and his feral, cannibalistic opponent, the Wendigo.
That last minute entry meant that Wolverine did not get to do much in his debut moment but stand there waving his claws around menacingly in his yellow and blue costume (with a mask that I still say made him look like a little yellow kitty). Only in the next issue did this intruder get to cut loose. Issue #181 (July 30, 1974) was a savage battle with Wolverine using his agility, claws, and wits to take on the two pulverizing powerhouses menacing his homeland of Canada. Of course, the Hulk was ultimately the winner, but hey it was his comic.
No matter how you slice it, quick appearance or first brawl, July 1974 was Wolverine’s debut month, which made this past July into Wolverine’s fiftieth anniversary. Breaking all kinds of records, including the most successful R-rated movie ever made, Deadpool & Wolverine was the ultimate way to celebrate that anniversary.
Half-a-century later, it’s interesting to see how mainstream Wolverine has become. Originally, he was strikingly different than his superhero counterparts. This became increasingly clear when this Canadian mutant was brought into the all-new, all-different X-Men in Giant-Sized X-Men #1 (April 1, 1975). The initial goal of this comic was to try to reinvigorate sales of the X-Men (who had never been all that popular up to this point) by introducing a new team of international mutants. While the global market was not really affected by this appeal, the new team set the stage for the successful X-Men franchise we know today.
Wolverine was an angry anti-hero, aggressive and dangerous. He was more than willing to use his claws to kill his opponents, a stance that constantly had to be reigned in by the other members of his team. Yet, over time, we also got to see an honorable side to him, including his reverence for a Japanese code of fighting and behavior. He was a complex man, plagued by past decisions (the ones he could remember at least) and a drive to not completely succumb to his wild nature.
In real life, I don’t think anybody would be safe within a mile of this guy, but fans loved him then and they loved him now.
Like all superheroes, Wolverine would undergo a number of shifts and changes. This is what the opening parts of Deadpool & Wolverine played with so effectively. As Deadpool bounced between different alternate realities, he encountered the various Wolverines that fans have come to know over these five decades. Each one of those scenes was a playful riff on something long-time fans of Wolverine recognized.
In popular culture, success breeds imitation. I’m not saying there was never a character like Wolverine before Wolverine (the Legion of Superheroes’ Timber Wolf, for example). No other character exploded in popularity like Wolverine did.
We would get tons of characters in the Wolverine mode later (particularly during the extreme 1990s). Deadpool himself owes a bit to Wolverine, although the Merc with the Mouth was inspired more by DC’s Deathstroke the Terminator. There have been many more like him, from conceptual clones, such as Alpha Flight’s Wild Child, to actual clones, such as X-23 from X-Men comics, shows, and films (you might remember her as Laura in the Logan movie from 2017).
A half-century later though, Wolverine remains the best there is at what he does, even if what he does isn’t nice.
