X-Rated Stories: Wolverine Part 2 of 2
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.