Continuing on from part 1 of this series we being with Logan’s Log. Enjoy!

Logan’s Log

Nowadays an active constituent of both the X-Men and the Alpha Flight team -and an itinerant Avenger as well, Wolverine’s personal story goes back to the late 19th. Century in Alberta, Canada, where James Howlett was born as the son of wealthy plantation managers Elizabeth and John Howlett.

As a result of his mutant genes, Wolverine has animal-like senses, physical abilities and instincts; and his body’s “healing factor”: a mutant immunity which makes him capable of rapidly curing himself from any wound, as well as impervious to most earthly and even alien illnesses and viruses. But at the contrary of what would later become his reality the child was born with a fragile health, and used to get ill very frequently, apart from suffering of chronic asthma.

This condition led his parents to leave him at the care of a young girl called Rose Hopkins. Together with Rose they would find the friendship of Victor Logan, the son of the Howletts’ manor wicked caretaker Thomas Logan. At a certain point, James’ father gives the thumb down to his employee, whom doesn’t find that amusing at all and gets into quarrelling with his former master, creating the notion there had been foul play on the latter, courtesy of Elizabeth and himself, after which he kills Howlett and threatens the life of her own daughter Rose. Witnessing all this, a berserker James manifests his powers and kills Logan.
Incapable of bearing with all this, Elizabeth takes a gun and kills herself.

Logan takes Rose with him and together they go living in a mining colony, where he adopts the nickname Wolverine, or is given it, due to his laborious journeys at the mines. It is by this time he starts to call himself by the name Logan. Not long after they’re hunted down by Victor Logan, who fights him and, somewhere along the conflict, Wolverine accidentally injures Rose with his claws, killing her. Brokenhearted, he leaves for the wild, where he lives amongst the wolves for a while in the midst of the Blackfoot Indians’ tribe, where he meets and falls in love with later to be heroine Silver Fox.

However, Silver Fox gets “killed” (a condition from which -as is no strange happening in comics, she would get better) and Wolverine is shepherded to a Canadian military facility.
There, he would work for a Canadian Parachute Assault Group, and later be booked by the CIA. Eventually, he’d be recruited for the Team-X force, and it is during this period he gets kidnapped and experimented on as a part of the “Weapon X” super-soldier project, from which he gets his famous unbreakable skeleton: Adamantium, the third most endurable matter in the Marvel universe –after Silver Surfer’s skin and Thor’s hammer Mjolnir, is by force injected in his bones in a liquid form.

Running rampant again, escaped from his Weapon-X captors, he’s found by Alpha Flight’s Heather Hudson and her husband, who help Logan to recover his rather diminished humanity.
After much suffering he returns to Canada to become its first superhero, once again under the command of the local government, and here the character’s continuity-line ties-in with his historical continuity, as he’s sent to put an end to the debris created by none other than the Hulk in his fight with… yes, the Wendigo.

At some point of his life, Logan is sent to assassinate Professor Charles Xavier, but gets brainwashed by him instead, and forced to become a member of the newly formed X-Men team. This is of course the beginning of the character’s most important vital momentum, and even though this harsh start would make for an uneasy relationship between him and his comrades, things would get along well enough, and Wolverine would willingly make the choice of enduring Xavier’s vision of a brighter future for both men and mutants.

One of the most “uneasy” (yet again, a word you’d use a lot to refer to Wolverine) factors in Wolverine’s affiliation to the X-Men was the fact that he rapidly fell in love with X-Man Cyclops’ fiancée, telekinetic bombshell Jean Grey. This is one of the most sought-after love triangles in comics, and has been revisited over and over through most incarnations of the mutant group outside comic books, such as TV series and cinema.

Fatal Attractions

1993 was a hard year for the yellow-and-black… along came arch villain Magneto, and put a cold stop to Wolvie’s cockiness, removing all Adamantium traces from his body by means of magnetism control. That’s gotta hurt. After that, he returns to his wondering ways, deprived of both his indestructible skeleton and his healing factor, which got consumed after Magneto’s attack.
However, this mutant power would return and, being free from Adamantium –which constantly demanded a great percentage of it, it became even faster to act, making Logan quite near to implausible to wound. During this time he would also realize his claws to be made of bone, actually; no longer the shining blades he took so much pride of.

The non-Adamantium Wolverine ended when arch-nemesis Apocalypse’s “Horsemen” plot saw the ancient evil mutant capturing him and successfully re-implanting it into his skeleton once again… previously brainwashing the Canadian clean, of course. But the ever discontent Wolverine came out of Apocalypse’s grip, and returned to his heroic ways.

Then came the 2000’s, which saw Wolverine becoming a father (or rather revealed to be so) to the mutant named Daken, the son of his and Japanese human female Itsu. Daken turns out to be a pain in the groin for the Canadian X-Man: taken from the guts of his dying pregnant mother who had been shot by an order of the mysterious Romulus.

X-Men To The Movies

With some ups and downs and a little twist here and there, the X-Men Origins Wolverine movie hits theaters for fandom pleasure everywhere, having a somehow uneven reception, mostly by the critics. However, if you happen to be a fan of the Canadian X-Man, be sure to take the time and see Hugh Jackman’s respectful rendition.

Making his debut as a featured character in the pages of the Incredible Hulk magazine, he’s become on e of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable faces, and arguably the most popular member of mutant super-ream The X-Men. With a natural tendency to call his own shots, he’s been an uneasy and sometimes straightly annoying pupil to Professor Charles Xavier, yet one of the most reliable when the occasion so demands. And as he would put it, he’s “the best at what he does, but what he does isn’t pretty”. We’re talking Wolverine, for sure, and with the recent X-Men Origins film: Wolverine hitting theatres it’s time to take a look back at this yellow-spandex wearing, adamantium-clawed antihero.

The Incredible Feature

Created by writer Len Wein, designed by John Romita Sr., and penciled by artist Herb Trimpe, the Marvel Universe’s X-mutant James Howlett -better known as Logan and better known still by his super heroic persona Wolverine, made his first appearance not as an X-Man, but as a guest featured rival to Bruce Banner’s raging alter ego The Hulk, back in the pages of the Incredible Hulk magazine Nº 181, cover date November 1974. Some sources register this debut as having happened in the magazine’s immediate previous issue, Nº 180 with cover date October ’74, but that would hardly count as a presentation, since the character was only visible at the issue’s end in a “teaser” vignette.

So there was everyone’s favorite Green Goliath mindlessly creating havoc everywhere he’d put his feet on, cheerlessly fighting furry villain Wendigo when, out of nothing comes the Wolverine, presented as an agent of the Canadian government with a berserker edge and a three-set of bone-claws in each hand, who gets in the middle of this clash of titans… only to be miserably defeated short after. Although we do not see his claws as being retractile in this first assault, both Wein and Romita have been quoted as saying they were always thought of as retractable.

Given this not so brilliant first appearance one would think this was a character destined to stay on the background as a support or guest superhero. Not a chance.

X-Men Giant Size

He appeared again briefly in issue 182, and then the “guest star” days were over, as Marvel Comics’ revamping of the somehow drained X-Men titles took place at the beginnings of 1975 with the Giant-Size X-Men Nº 1 issue, which introduced readers to a brand new multi-national, multi-ethnic X-team of evil-fighters.

This first issue was written by Wein himself, with art by Dave Cockrum and cover by Gil Kane. As a kind of trivia note, it is remarkable how Kane made a mistake when drawing the character’s mask, making the headpiece larger at the ears than it was according to Romita’s design. Nevertheless, Cockrum thought they looked cool and gave the personage a “sharper” look (besides of making the mask a bit resembling Batman’s), and so, he adapted his inside art to that of Kane’s cover.

It was also Cockrum who first drawed Wolverine unmasked, and his rendition of the X-man‘s hairstyle has become one of the characters trademarks.

Logan, The Man With a Slogan

After his debut as a member of the X-team, the character took the ladder to success and refused to climb it down again. He started to become most well liked and popular among readers, and before you knew, those titles in which he starred started to stand out as Marvel’s best sellers monthly. This, plus the excellent idea the team at the publisher’s house had of making the X-men as colorful and varied as possible, paved the grounds for the magazine’s success, and the rising of the X-Books as Marvel’s most profitable franchise.

The character was further developed by writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne, and by 1982 his popularity took him quite near classic characters such as Spiderman or the Hulk or even Captain America in the rooster of Marvel heroes, as he got his own solo title which was a four-issue by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller; this saga would give him his now famous slogan-ish phrase: “I’m the best at what I do, and what I do ain’t pretty”.

Next: Logan’s Log

You can read the second part of this X-Rated Stories series here

Marvel has always been one of the most popular American comic book franchises but more than that the publics renewed interest in professor Xavier’s pupils is something to talk about. The success of the X-Men cinematic trilogy directed by Brian Singer and Matthew Vaughn, as well as Gavin Hood’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie starring Hugh Jackman have not only helped revitalise the franchise but create a new type of fanbase. In light of this we thought we’d take a look back at the roots of the X-Men and where it all began.

Marvel History 101

Now summing up the complete history of Marvel’s mutants is obviously near impossible. There have been so many titles, so many issues, so many plot twists and continuity reboots and ups and downs and whatever, even Marvel’s own X-writers have sometimes been unable to keep track of them, which has been the reason for some of the continuity flaws over the publication history of the X titles. So let’s take some air and work our way through some of the key titles and mutants that have brought marvel so much success.

Citizen X

The year was 1963; future Comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had been working together in the Fantastic 4 characters for a couple of years. It was a time of lonesome heroes and recurring sidekicks, and Marvel’s mailbox was getting filled up with more and more letters from readers who demanded the creation of a new superhero team, in the midst of so many lonely characters.

Stan Lee was, of course, no stranger to superhero creation, even at that time; he had already fathered many of today’s most popular characters in the comic book world, and had recently created Spiderman (1962). Lee’s creations had a somehow common background when it came to their powers: “I couldn’t get everyone bitten by a radioactive spider” he’s been quoted, thus the idea of having superpowers naturally manifesting through genetic mutation; the “Homo Superior” was born, and with it, Charles Xavier’s “School for Gifted Youngsters”.

Conceptual art was by Lee and Kirby themselves, along with Paul Reinman in charge of the inking. A title was all that was missing for the new group to start. “The Mutants” was originally proposed, but the creators thought it just wasn’t attractive and original enough. Besides, Stan lee himself thought readers wouldn’t know what a “mutant” was supposed to be according to the Marvel version of it, and wouldn’t bother buying a magazine to find that out, and so, the far more appealing, yet quite simplistic “X-Men” title was conceived.

Many people believe the “X” as a tribute to Xavier surname’s first letter, but it’s actually because of the “X-gene” which mutants have, causing them to develop their powers and abilities.

X Marks The Spot

The first issue of the X-Men title would set the grounds for understanding what mutant powers were all about, in the heart of the recently formed Marvel universe, with its all new heroes and antiheroes. The main players make their entrance while showing off their powers, as Professor X mentally calls for his team, which is comprised of The Beast a.k.a. Henry McCoy; Angel a.k.a. Warren Worthington III; Iceman a.k.a. Bobby Drake; and Cyclops a.k.a. Scott Summers.

The mutants are called for a session at the “Danger Room”, the X-Mansion’s training grounds, after which the last member of the team will make her entrance, Marvel Girl a.k.a. Jean Grey.
Right from the beginning, Grey’s inclusion in the group would make for an uneasy love triangle (is there any other kind?) between her, Cyclops and Angel, in which the rather shy Summers would not be too much of a match for Worthington’s high society ways. This, of course, would change in time.

Now that the good guys have come together, it’s time for the baddy ones to do exactly the same. Enter a guy by the name of Magneto a.k.a. Erik Magnus Lehnsherr (born Max Eisenhardt), whom has a grip on things, really… or at least, on everything metallic, that is. Magneto makes his appearance at a military base with an attitude and an obscure purpose, but soon gets fairly foiled by the X-team. From now on, the X-Patrol would gain public attention… and a lifetime fiend.

Just as there was a good team, there had to be a bad one; 1964 saw the creation of Magneto’s “Brotherhood of Mutants”, which presented as with a whole gallery of evildoers: Quicksilver a.k.a. Pietro Maximoff; Scarlet Witch a.k.a. Wanda Maximoff; The Toad a.k.a. Mortimer Toynbee; and Mastermind a.k.a. Jason Wyngarde.

Fight after fight these villains would battle the mutants for everything they’re worth, while several other already well known Marvel characters including Namor and the Avengers had their cameos as well.

X-Men By The Numbers: Market Value Comic Issues

• Issue 1: An obvious one, but anyways.
• Issue 7: Issue number seven shows the groups graduation, which makes it an oddball.
• Issue 10: By the title’s tenth issue, we discover the “Savage Land” which, guarded by its sentinel Ka-Zar, will later become a recurrent scenario for many X adventures.
• Issue 11: The eleventh issue present us with the Stranger, a mutant-seeker and recurring character (or, better said “character concept”) who tries to kidnap Magneto and the Toad. Also, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch abandon his former master, and the Brotherhood gets disbanded.
• Issue 12: Enter Professor X’s evil half-brother, the unstoppable Juggernaut!
• Issue 14: One of the most recurring menaces in the X-mythos gets featured in this issue: enter The Sentinels!
• Issues 41 - 42: Professor X gets “killed” by the first time, killed by a mob of under dwellers. After this, the X-Patrol disintegrates, according to it mentor’s wishes.
• Issues 49 - 52: The group reunites again, when Xavier’s mutant location computer Cerebro alerts of a great concentration of mutants going on.
• Issues 66: Year: 1969. After a while with poor sales, the title gets cancelled.

Second Genesis and Beyond

We’re now in 1972; Marvel Comics’ new Editor in Chief, Al Landau attends a meting with writers Stan Lee and Roy Thomas in order to set up the creation of a new multi-ethnic superhero team whose members would all come from different countries.

It was Thomas who came up with the notion of reassessing and relaunching the X-Men title, which had been on hiatus for a while. Thomas’ proposal is accepted, and the task of preparing the new characters’ designs falls in the hands of Dave Cockrum, while Mike Friedrich’s script gets brought to pencil by Len Wein. John Byrne also jumps onboard at a time, a period many fans regard as one of the finest.

Three years after, by 1975, Marvel’s group of mutants gets rebirth, as the first number of the Giant-Size X-Men magazine hit the stores. Many (if not most) fans acknowledge this as the most popular X-line-up ever: the team was comprised of Canadian native Wolverine a.k.a. James Howlett / Logan; Russian powerhouse Colossus a.k.a. Piotr Rasputin; African heroine Storm a.k.a. Ororo Munroe; Ireland man Banshee a.k.a. Sean Cassidy; Native American Apache Thunderbird a.k.a. John Proudstar; Japanese flaming hero Sunfire a.k.a. Shiro Yoshida; and West Germany original Nigthcrawler a.k.a. Kurt Wagner.

So, the original team decides to break out for good, live a normal life (as normal as being a mutant would allow for it to be) and it is only Cyclops who stays. The new group receives a call from The Beast (whom had been working with the Avengers) to stop Count Nefaria. The team goes on with the mission, but it’ll cost them the life of Thunderbird.

After leaving the group, the Iceman and Angel start at the Los Angeles University where, along with the Ghost Rider a.k.a. Johnny Blaze, the Black Widow a.k.a. Natasha Romanoff, and Hercules they’d form a group called “The Champions”; a somehow failed discontinuous series, which would last for only 17 issues.

The seventies saw the X-Men’s popularity become increasingly bigger and wider. Some would later argue about X-man Wolverine’s implication in this success. The character would pretty soon show a tendency to become sort of a separatist; a stand alone hero, nevertheless he was always under the “coil” of his teammate’s banner.

X-Men In The 80’s

The Crazy Decade was a time of violence, gloom, synthesizers and hair. Also, a time of change and growth, and musical debauchery. Except for British music, that is, which remained cool and all. For the X-Men, it was also the decade of spinoff titles: the growing popularity of the original books –and the fact that there were just too many mutants to keep track of in just a couple of titles, led to the creation of the so called “X-Books”, which included Alpha Flight; X Factor; The New Mutants; Excalibur; and yes, the anticipated Wolverine stand-alone title. 1983 also saw the departures of both David Cockrum and John Byrne, and the debut of new talents such as Paul Smith and John Romita Jr.

1986 was a year for intercourse… well, sort of. This was a period of unexpected alliances and surprising plot-twists. Also, the series’ first issues get re-edited under the title “Classic X-Men”, with short backup stories added which had a deeper take on the mutants’ personalities.
Then, for a little while, a sort of peace was achieved when Magneto -though briefly- joined the X-Men as head of the New Mutants. Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister and Madeline Pryor also made their first appearances as iconic 80’s villains.

X Stars

The nineties started as a less dramatic year if compared with everything that had been going on in the X-titles through the 80’s. In the first years of the decade, Marvel aimed at reassessing all its X-books and team line-ups.

Professor Xavier had been away for a while, and it was time for him to make a comeback.
The original X-Men team went for a return as well, which ended up splitting things by half: there was the Blue Team, which was under the leadership of Cyclops, and was featured in the X-Men title; and there was the Gold Team, under the leadership of Storm, featured in the pages of Uncanny X-Men.

New title X-Force was created out of the original New Mutants title. Artists from this period included Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, veteran Chris Claremont, Fabian Nicieza and Scott Lobdell.
Somewhere at the starting of the nineties (1992 to be exact)a sort of an exodus happen when many Marvel artists went away with the intention of uniting and creating a new publisher house, which ended up being none other than Image Comics.

All The Way To Hollywood

The X-men’s road to Hollywood hasn’t been an easy one. Decades of planning, setbacks and frustration had to be endured for hardcore fans to finally meet their favorite mutants on the big screen.

First came the two Brian Singer movies “X-Men” and “X-Men 2”, which were a great success at the box-office, and were followed by “X-Men •, The Last Stand” this last one of the trilogy directed by Matthew Vaughn, since Singer broke up from the franchise in order to revamp the Man Of Steel’s cinematic persona in “Superman Returns”.

All in all, the X-Men have become quite a cinematic franchise, the latest being the Wolverine origins movie - directed by Gavin Hood and starring Hugh Jackman. If you haven’t seen it, check it out in a theater near you right now.