Most fans won’t know this (especially those that joined the fandom from the films) but the man who many see as the quintessential ‘X-man’ didn’t start as one. Nor did he really have a fleshed out origin when he made his first appearance in 1974, in the final panel of The Incredible Hulk #180.
No, all that was thought up and came in much later, as was ‘Logan’, the mononym that became as familiar to fans as the character’s codename (and really the only identity up till then) Wolverine.
It all began with the prototype of the now iconic blue and yellow suit, said to be inspired by the University of Michigan American football team (which also goes by the moniker ‘Wolverines’). Some black accents, reminiscent of tiger stripes, to evoke something feral about the superhero and set him apart from the clean-cut boy scouts that dominated the pages of American comics back then. A distinctive mask that featured black, pointed fins on the sides, resembling a wolverine's ears or a bat's wings (the original mask was rather modest than the ‘classic’ version with larger fins, which owes its creation to an error by legendary artist Gil Kane). And three metal claws (knives rather) jutting just before the knuckles on each hand, suggesting the character in question would get down and dirty like a knife-wielding street brawler, instead of keeping his bouts clean and honourable.
That really was all there was to the Wolverine blueprint and until he joined the X-Men around a year later, the character remained a blank slate. No one knew how he looked under the mask – some early concept sketches envisioned him as another teenager like the contemporary version of Spider-Man rather than the grizzly middle-aged Logan we’ve all come to love. No one knew where how he got his powers – one rumour that persists, despite denials by writer Len Wein who originally fleshed out the character, was that the character was once intended to be a ‘mutated wolverine cub’.
For much of that first decade, Wolverine existed as Marvel’s take on Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name from the celebrated Spaghetti Western Dollars trilogy. And while Logan would ditch it from time to time, or its design and colour would be updated, changed and then restored, when it mattered in the comics, it would be the suit that made the hero.
My reason for recounting this little history lesson is to remind fans why it was so egregious of Fox to not just ditch but make fun of Wolverine’s suit (essentially the character’s very design) all these years. I’ve never been the greatest fan of Hugh Jackman’s rendition of the character, but he did as best as he could as Fox fumbled the franchise beyond those first two films, X-Men Origins: Wolverine representing the nadir. That film also gave us the almost criminal screen debut of Deadpool, sealing the mouth shut of the ‘Merc with a Mouth’.
The Deadpool films, in their own way, have been an attempt at setting things right. The character’s fourth-wall breaking nature has allowed the movies to poke fun at the various Fox missteps. The second even took direct jabs at X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with Deadpool travelling across film universes to eliminate that poorly conceived iteration of his character.
For Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, Fox had already intended a swansong in the critically acclaimed Logan. The rave reviews it garnered had allowed Jackman to finally bid adieu to the character that made his career on a high-note. Or so it seemed.
After hitting the peak with Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been on some shaky ground. A climax more than a decade in the making would never be an easy act to follow. But perhaps the biggest challenge it has run into is one that has plagued the comics for decades: continuity in a constantly growing narrative universe is complex to navigate for creators and tedious and exhausting for casual fans to keep track of. It also tends to eliminate possibilities for a lot of interesting storytelling as creators attempt to tie all narrative stands into a single-overarching story. To be fair not everything MCU is bad these days: the Loki and What If? series have been compelling enough. But the bigger moving pieces, such as The Marvels movie and the Secret Invasion Disney+ series, that Marvel Studios intended to build its next 'Endgame' off have not inspired any excitement or anticipation.
What has been hotly anticipated ever since Disney acquired Fox, and with it the film rights Marvel had sold, has been the return of the X-Men to their rightful home with the other Marvel superheroes. Many fans and 'filmfluencers' had wondered if Disney would be brave enough to put the R-rated Deadpool in its otherwise PG Marvel Cinematic Universe, but from a business standpoint that was always a no-brainer. The Deadpool franchise had given Fox's superhero outings a second wind, doing some of the studios best business. They had also created genuine fan buzz after several X-Men project either fizzled out both critically and at the box office, or failed to launch (looking at you New Mutants). A third Deadpool was always coming. Inevitable as Thanos would say.
The real draw was enticing Jackman out of retirement one last time to give fans what they had wanted all this time and believed had lost out on: a Deadpool-Wolverine movie. It's hard to convey how depressing it would have been if the only time we had seen the two together was in that god awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Leak an image of Jackman in the classic blue and yellow, and you had gold no matter how good or bad the final product was.
That the movie turned out to be quite entertaining is the cherry on top and no surprise either. The Deadpool property, with how it has been established, is hard to mess up. The self-referential meta humor lets the movies skirt by a lot of incredulous, even nonsensical situations and references, as long as the end result is funny. As expected, Deadpool & Wolverine played fast and loose with a lot of MCU plot devices, but the entertainment gives you no reason to dwell on it. It takes a lot of shots taken at both Fox and Disney, and surprisingly, gives some of Fox's renditions of Marvel characters their final ride into the sunset. It even resurrects one of those failures to launch I alluded to earlier.
One can take a cynical view, that Deadpool & Wolverine is an out and out corporate cashgrab, and one would be right. However, in my view, this is one of those rare occasions where commercialism isn't a bad thing. Give the fans what they want!
The movie did lie to me. "How are we going to do this without dishonoring 'Logan's memory?" asks Deadpool right at the beginning. "We're not." I disagree that it dishonored anything. This is it. This is the swansong. Jackman as Wolverine, in glorious blue and yellow, as he always should have been. That the suit was included at all could have been pure fan service, and it would still have been alright. Kudos to the writers that it's not and imbued with some motivation.
So why was it not included the first time around, in the Bryan Singer movies? Why were the multi-coloured X-Men of the comics clad in black leather, as somehow that made more sense? I blame the Matrix. Outside of some exceptions that break new ground and become the stuff of legend, Hollywood has always been and will remain risk averse. Superheroes were silly things only nerds cared about so of course Hollywood had to do the mature thing and dress them like they had a BDSM fetish. Superheroes and cinematic universes are cool now so every franchise needs to be part of one, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
Until the next innovative Hollywood legend pushes the industry into a different trajectory, there's no harm in enjoying fan-service done right once in a while.