The Bendis Board are thinking about what Marvel have done to the once-popular furry mutant:
“It seems that - as Marvel started adding more Wolverinesque characters into their universe, Wolverine’s ‘cool’ factor waned. As I come across negative comments about the character, I see where many fans stopped liking the character during the 90s, during the time when many other ‘badass’ and feral characters were introduced. Their addition to Marvelverse obviously watered down the impact such a once-unique character like Wolverine had in the stories. It would now be near impossible for the character to get that level of coolness back, unless one damn good writer was put on his book - and KEPT there. But I digress… So - it seems to me that by adding TOO many similar characters to the rolls, Marvel has taken away some of Wolverine’s cool factor. I don’t think he’s the only character this has happened to - Marvel, at one time, had tons of telepaths, and other powers have been duplicated in multiple characters. Each time a villain or hero shows up with a similar skill to another, it’s kinda like…’*yawn*…back there again, are we?’. But - from reading all the griping over Wolverine - I’d have to say that his character has been affected the most by this, seeing as how unique he was, so any sort of knock-off is pretty obvious.”
“There were tons of forgettable Beatles knock-off bands, but that didn’t dilute the appeal of the Beatles. The knock-offs have not diluted the popularity of Wolverine. He’s still enormously popular, because he’s a very good character. He’s even survived Marvel’s policy of shoving him into every book they can.”
“Well adding all that cloak and dagger, false memory, ‘I’m a mopey bitch cause I’d make a shitty samurai’ stuff did alot to make him uncool. I like the ornery redneck Wolverine that read nudey mags in the drug store and drinks lot of beer. I’m glad Whedon brought that guy back.”
“Are we still pretending that ‘cool’ and ‘Canadian’ aren’t mutually exclusive?”
November 10th, 2007 at 12:24 am
I have a hard time regarding any discussion where one of the posters has an animated gif (of a bikini clad top-heavy woman running by an incredibly fat guy) as his or her standard signature. The animated gif is officially more annoying and useless than the dancing baby of years back.
Logan lost his luster somewhere between origin revelation event 71 and the idea to make him an Avenger. I think about two years down the road, Logan as an Avenger will be regarded as sensible as the days when all the Avengers became Image-ified, went around with George Michael stubble (even Sersi sometimes) and wore rejected padded orthodontia headgear (sure it was Epting inked by Palmer, but ewww…)
November 11th, 2007 at 10:55 am
The problem with Wolverine, I think, is that they’ve started to take it for granted that Wolverine is cool, without really putting any coherent thought into WHY. In other words, the reasoning has drifted to “This is a cool story because Wolverine is in it,” when it ought to be “This Wolverine story is cool because he does cool things in it.”
So, even though this is generally an era when Marvel isn’t too bothered about continuity, Wolverine has ended up in endless stories like ORIGIN, in which a set of essentially dreary events are supposed to be exciting merely because they involve Wolverine, and Wolverine is supposed to be so intrinsically fascinating that even the most banal details of his continuity are thrilling beyond compare.
Of course, Wolverine became popular in the first place at a time when his back story was essentially a blank. That doesn’t mean it was necessary a BAD idea to tell stories about his past, but it does show that the central appeal of the character always lay elsewhere - something that Marvel have largely lost sight of in recent years. “Where did Wolverine come from?” was a potentially interesting story to be told about Wolverine, but it wasn’t the actual selling point of the character.
Personally, I think the “brainwashed for decades” material which Daniel Way has been adding to the character’s history is a lead weight which should be got rid of as soon as possible, since it’s not very interesting in its own right, it makes the character harder to identify with, and it vastly REDUCES the number of stories you can tell about his past. In other words, it’s a rare example of a retcon that is genuinely damaging to the character and needs to be either reversed or pointedly ignored until it goes away.
But that aside, they could tell great Wolverine stories again tomorrow. It’s just not the sort of story that they’ve been using him in, because they’ve lost sight of why he works.
November 11th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Wolverine lost his cool factor due to three concepts:
1. the healing factor made him a unique character for specific battle situations. when marvel writers/editorial allowed wolverine to regenerate from the merest scrap of flesh left on his adamantium laced skeleton his credibility as a “human, but more than human” hero flew out the window. He’s indestructible and almost godlike and that = boring and unrelatable.
2. for some reason marvel editorial seems to believe that their books won’t sell unless wolverine is on the cover. Puh-leeze! i’m not a continuity hound, but why should i care about what happens to a character if his actions/adventures in three other titles render any other development null and void? a little continuity goes a long way to making characters consistently believable and possibly cool.
3. i wholeheartedly agree with the over-proliferation of wolverine-esqu characters. i mean, come on! how many secret weapon x experiments have been out there? enough is enough. ooohhh, this guy is weapon 89 he’s a thousand times stronger, more vicious, and deadly than wolverine. look! he has adamantium teeth and skin! but guess what, ol’ wolvie is still gonna kick his butt! as if we didn’t see that coming.
i miss the old days of Chris Claremont taking the time to develop characters internally to make them more human. Logan’s struggle with keeping his animal side under control though meditation and samurai practice added depth to the character and he was a hell of a lot more interesting then than as a rampaging freak that servers no more purpose than a super-powered pittbull on a leash.
November 11th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Somebody tell me if this O’Brien guy ever considers reviewing X-books or something…
Seriously though, thanks for your (insightful) take, Paul.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:35 am
The problem isn’t necessarily telling stories about Wolverine’s origin and early days, but it’s all in the execution. “Origin” itself was a masterwork and an incredibly daring move, and even giving Wolverine his memory back was also ballsy–but “Origins” the series and especially “Evolution” have been so utterly ham-fisted and clumsy in how they use the material that they, as Paul said, actively detract from the character.
By making every single event in Wolverine’s life tied to this mysterious conspiracy, it reduces what could be great storytelling to “X-Files”-esque cliche. By taking a throwaway element from “Earth X” (Wolverine and Sabretooth as rival elements of an evolutionary strain) and making it the central tenet of their conflict, one of the best rivalries in comics was reduced to an anticlimactic mess.
Plus, all the extra stuff being thrown in messes up storylines that worked better on their own. Did Wolverine even need another son, let alone an emo-punk masochist freak like Daken? Did Romulus have to be such a huge badass that he could outpace Xavier, Sinister, and Apocalypse in knowing how to control mutants–even though we’ve never seen or heard of him before? Did Silver Fox really die or didn’t she? In the end, why should we care?
Wolverine works because of who he is and what he’s doing NOW, not what he did THEN. His interactions with other characters and his unique take on the world make him a compelling addition to a story–there’s no need to keep strip-mining the vein of his Mysterious Past(tm) when there’re much better stories to be told in the present.
November 14th, 2007 at 4:18 am
Paul O’Brien - Like Kurt Busiek, he’s Always Right.