Back after a hiatus. Time for more Wolverine!
As I near the end of Woverine’s defining moments, it’s easy to see why the character has held my interest for so long. Unlike many of his contemporary characters, Wolverine, Logan, James—whatever you want to call him—retains a complexity and depth of character that, if not always properly mined or understood by his writers, provides enormous potential for development as a character, diversity of narrative options, and a wealth stortyelling richness. His struggle between the human and the beast personalities, tragic and destructive relationships, part-time superheroics, and constant quest to find himself worthy in the eyes of those he honored fuel Logan’s maturation as a character—his hero’s journey. But the spectre that always overshadowed these elements was his mysterious past, a gaping black hole in Logan’s memories that nourished his mystique as a mutant loner.
For years before the publications of Origins, Wolverine fans speculated on the origins of their favorite Marvel mutant. That speculation came to a head in Wolverine vol. 2 #50.
SNIKT!
This is where it starts to get silly: wrap-around covers, chromium covers, foil variant covers, the works. The 90s were a time of excess in comics, the glory of the big shoulder pads-bigger guns look among steroidal antiheroes, whacky art and even whackier scripts. This was the time of Liefeld, Lee, Portacio, McFarlane, and company, the time of X-Men #1 selling millions of copies, Image Comics super-stardom, collectible comic cards, and fly-by-night comic companies pumping out a few wheezing issues of generic super-nonsense before deflating into oblivion.
So, you’ll understand when I say that Wolverine #50’s 3-layer claw-cut cover seems tame by comparison.
It’s impossible to understand this thing without having it in hand. And to the giddy, twelve-year old me, this was a thing of dreams. Claw marks on the cover? Wolverine fighting robots, discovering his past, riding a motorcycle through the window of a S.H.I.E.L.D heli-carrier? I shit you not, this comic was the superhero Holy Grail to me.
But in retrospect, this is where things start to get silly. The issue begins on an utterly ridiculous note. Wolverine, determined to get answers from S.H.I.E.L.D. commander, Nick Fury, rides his motorcycle up a building and through the aforementioned carrier window. Then they have a conversation. Then it’s time for the X-Men, then it’s killer robot and Silver Fox. And yes, none of that should make any sense. I’m staring this sucker down and the damn thing refuses to cohere; it’s a mess of story ideas, half-baked, with good intentions wrapped up in some pretty decent Silvestri art. The effect is a comic trying too hard, desperate to stay relevant, popular. Much of the dialog is ham-fisted in ways that much earlier Claremont stories—even earlier Hama stories—never came near, the action and antagonists are generic, and the whole book can’t seem to wind up to anything resembling a conclusion.
So, if it’s terrible, why do I have it listed under a defining moment?
Simple: while it does so many things wrong, Wolverine #50 does one very important thing right: it treats Wolverine’s mysterious past with narrative respect and makes it more interesting.
Wolverine’s memories are revealed to be elaborate implants from the Weapon X program, artifice crafted on sound-stages complete with backdrops, lighting, and scripts. Suffice to say, without getting heavy into literary theory, this is a symptom of postmodern thought and art. Caught in narrative self-reflexivity, Logan asks, “Is that what my past is? A cheap movie?” (18). What is a memory, a life? A text? Or a cheap comic book, for that matter? Here Logan’s fictional reality is laid bare, revealed to be constructions that have, to a great degree, formed the foundation for the development of both his human and bestial sides. That there are no cameras makes it clear that Logan himself is voyeur, audience, and capture devices all in one: he witnesses and engages with the false memories because he has taken part in them, filmed them with his eyes and mind, and encoded them as literal truth.
What, then, are we as readers to make of the character? All of the things which defined his bestial sides are fictions within fictions—stories within the story of the comic book format. We, along with Logan, are simultaneous voyeurs and discoverers; we uncover the truth and fiction of his reality as he does, and the only definition of what THAT means is left to us, the reader, to decide. We engage with these fictions along with Logan, vicariously and at some distance, and with a cautious eye on the make-believe embedded within the make-believe.
BECAUSE HE’S EXCELLENT!
Of course, Hama can’t let it go without a little action. And you can’t blame him. This is a Wolverine comic, after all, and Wolverine’s the best there is at what he does: shredding dudes who get in his way. Enter Shiva, a series of robot bodies controlled by an unrelenting, adaptable program.
Okay, yes, that’s a terrible design for a robot–can you even imagine manufacturing something like that, all those intricate points and layers? Never mind the robot. Look at the X-Men, top left panel, pointing out Wolverine’s name on a mysterious list. Again we participate in the metafictive , a fictional list of fictional byproducts of Weapon X, each implanted with fictional memories to conceal their true relationship and background. Xavier’s question is apt: “Why is Wolverine’s the first name?” (30). Because he stands as the fictional representation of the creative team behind the comic, the originator of the fictions. From Logan the other names gain meaning: Sabretooth was his partner, is now his arch-enemy, Mastodon was a teammate, etc. Logan’s fictive existence provides the very substance of meaning to the other characters, the tentative network by which they are connected, assembled, categorized, and understood as quantifiable entities. In short, Wolverine is the glue that binds these characters together.
The tricky part, of course, is that the glue that binds Wolverine together has just been shown to be bogus—a hoax of manufactured memories. The real danger to Logan isn’t the giant robot, it’s the total dissolution of identity, complete conceptual breakdown, an endless loop of repeating a vicious mantra: “But if I’m not me, who am I?”
But Wolverine—and thankfully, the vast majority of superhero comics—aren’t about metafictional word and idea play (Batman R.I.P., take notes). Hama knows when to reel it in and kill the giant robot, the personification (robotification? oh yesyesyes!) of this fictive thought-circus.
Logan makes a decision and chooses a reality, that of a human, that of Logan, and rejects the abstract self-reflexive fiction of his crafted memories. In doing so he thwarts the power of memories, real or fabricated, to decide the moral and intellectual outcome of his life. He guts Shiva, guts the revelation of artifice, illusion, and chooses to accept and engage with the constructs of his life as he has known them: human and animal, hero and superhero. As a fictional character, as a fictional IDEA, Logan can’t be killed with memories—with the very fictive substance of his status in the superhero genre.
CONCLUSION
Logan rejects the postmodern notion of interpretation of self-reflexive query. In doing so, he make a powerful statement about fictional characters of the superhero comics medium—specifically that, regardless of the word or idea play at hand in a comic book, superheroes are not hollow analogs, metaphors, or other devices, but characters with potential for substantial literary depth and merit, and an attempt to classify them otherwise removes the result from existing firmly within the superhero genre.
Next up: Wolverine gets his adamantium ripped out, nipple shots, and a whole lot of body hair as I crack open the hologram-covered Wolverine #75!
Tags: Hama, illusion, Jubilee, Logan, memory, postmodern hooplah, Shiva, Silvestri, the 90s, Wolverine, X-bait, X-Men, Xavier
