Even in his battles against Sabretooth, Wolverine had always shown a level of restraint when it came to unleashing his berserker. Animalistic, savage,
brutal, feral–these terms always applied to Wolverine’s darker, more violent side, but it wasn’t until the creative team of Marc Silvestri and Larry Hama took over the book effective issue #31 that the depths of Wolverine’s inner beast were explored at length.
There’s Wolverine before issue #31, and there’s Wolverine after issue #31. The divide is that sharp.
Before issue #31, Wolverine was a feared combatant and front-line member of the X-Men. But while he was dangerous, it wasn’t until Silvestri’s and Hama’s opening story (cover above) that his current status as an unstoppable (not to mention super popular) killing machine solidified. In this post, we’ll take a look at one of Wolverine’s darkest defining moments and examine the full nature of Wolverine’s bestial, berserker side in order to define and position that aspect against his more thoroughly defined humanity.
BERSERKER MUTANT
From the mimi-series to the end of his run, Claremont’s Wolverine stories always had an emphasis on Logan’s struggle to retain his humanity. Whether
battling Shingen for the love of Mariko, or slumming it in Madripoor as Patch, Logan’s conflicts with opponents more often than not served as external
representations of his internal conflict to reign in his inner beast.
Hama, on the other hand, begins his run by exploring Logan’s inner berserker, pushing the character to his physical, and later, emotional, limits. Issue #31 kicks off with Yakuza attempting to assassinate Patch.
No diplomacy, no speeches or deliberation on the necessity and nature of violence are offered. Human beings are ejected from the scene (“Better get
scarce, Corrigan”), and Wolverine’s humanity is called into question. He’”sometimes known as ‘Patch’ . . . and sometimes known as ‘Ro-gan’” (2). In
short, the human identity of Logan is a part-time moniker, given over “sometimes” to Patch, an allegorical, less than whole alter ego. The Logan
identity is further degraded when Logan translates the Yakuza’s broken English; from the get-go, this is a decidedly more violent Wolverine, one who takes on the name, the mantle, of death incarnate (a theme later repeated, albeit in a derivative, literal form, in later stories) (2).
The bar fight quickly disintegrates into an orgy of violence:
The only color aside from bruised black and blue, red–the color of blood, passion, anger, violence–here obscures the human in Logan from reality. Speech and feral howls lose their distinction, become one, and the beast, “[e]cstatic in knowin’ he is the best at what he does,” feels neither pain nor
restraint (9). He is “[f]ree to rip and tear,” further defining the kind of freedom give to us in Uncanny X-Men vol. 1 #151 as one of unrestrained
violence, murder, bloodshed.
That Logan creeps and crawls through holes like a common beast only cements the image of Logan as a berserk beast, a mindless animal. When he reappears, he is wordless, speechless, emitting only a feral, “ROWRRRR” as the stunned Yakuza offer final prayers (14). More interesting is where logan appears–from the roof, through a hole he creates, symbolic of a sudden ejection from the higher realms of human reasoning as he plunges into animal frenzy.
RIDE THE LIGHTNING
Wolverine’s descent into animal madness deepens when three Yakuza hitmen show up whacked out on a lightning bolt-shaped drug called Raiden.
In the first panel Logan rises half naked from a pile of corpses, distinguishing features obscured in shadow, against a backdrop of smoke, bodies, carnage. It’s fitting, then, that the tattooed dragon “bearing madness before him,” and not the human visages of his opponents, faces Logan (18). His acts of astounding violence have so distanced him from humanity that not even the icon of his own animal madness reflected back at him makes an impression. The Yakuza he now mocks have likewise traded in their humanity for something else: a crazed, suicidal strength. They attack Logan, fearless, painless, like modern Kamikaze bombers:
The double penetration of Logan and Yakuza connotes a sexual fertility of lunacy. Madness breeds madness, and when the two are joined, the outcome can only be destruction, murder, and violence on a scale untold. Logan, however, proves the stronger; his humanity, represented by his higher faculties, cannot be severed from his body, the engine of his non-thinking animal frenzy, the very thing that cannot deal, will heal from any wound (19). The key here, as Logan tells the Yakuza, is proximity, a discussion of storytelling: the more he unfurls the beast, the less human he becomes, the more like Ryu–a thing, a representation of form stuffed with insanity, spreading chaos. Logan walks a fine line and must continue to walk it, or the internal conflict of the character is resolved–thus so will his external conflicts. With inner peace comes exterior resolution, an inability to meet destructive, violent forces with like aggression, and an end to narrative impetus. Equally important: this is done behind the scenes, on a character level, wrought in symbolism, character agency (his choice to abstain or engage in violence). An attempt at literalism–making Logan a literal animal or altering his physical makeup is an incredibly risky endeavor; to date there has been three attempts to do exactly that: one successful, and two horrifically unsuccessful. More on that in an upcoming post.
CONCLUSION
Despite Logan’s desires to safeguard his humanity, time and again he is faced with overwhelming odds that can only be met by sublimation to the berserker animal within. The cost is a greater, more powerful bestial personality, one much closer to the surface that drives Logan ever closer to complete and total madness as represented by the dragon Ryu. Freedom for the beast equals madness, destruction of humanity, and the release of an unstoppable monster–a dragon in human form, a howling killer above and beyond even the depravity of those who ride the lightning of Raiden. His ability to retain his humanity is directly contrasted with his loss of control over his berserker frenzies, and his plunge into inhumanity symbolically degrades his status as a superhero, much less a human being.
In addition, the Silvestri and Hama run cemented the idea of Wolverine as the bad ass he’s known as today. More importantly, it signaled a swerve in the tone of both Wolverine stories and superhero comics in general toward a darker, edgier, anti-hero style. From this point on, Wolverine became every bit as notorious, if not as controversial, as Marvel’s Punisher for pushing the edge of superhero mainstream standards of violence, and became the companies marketing spokesperson for a whole new generation of comics readers and superhero enthusiasts.
Don’t believe me?
Wolverine is the only current Marvel character starring in five running series: Wolverine: Origins, Wolverine: Weapon X, New Avengers, Uncanny X-Men, and Astonishing X-Men, and that’s not counting the youth-marketed titles. Spider-Man has two. Captain America, in both iterations, has three.
Next up: a convoluted look into Wolverine’s past as I dig into issue the extra-size issue #50. Stay tuned!
Tags: Archie Corrigan, berserker, blood, dudes on drugs, fertility, humanity, Logan, madness, Madripoor, Patch, pentration, Princess Bar, Raiden, red stuff, squishy dead Japanese dudes, stabby stabby, wicked dragon tats, Wolverine, Yakuza
