Graphic Novel Roundtable: Wolverine
Posted By MaraW on August 30, 2013
Welcome to Nerdspan’s fourth edition of our Graphic Novel Roundtable. This month’s selection is Chris Claremont’s Wolverine. Have you read it? Tell us your thoughts in the comments! Either way, read on for our (somewhat spoiler-filled) thoughts on Claremont’s classic story about our favorite Canadian!
Mara:
I do want to start off by saying that this particular story has some personal meaning to me. My mom was a big Wolverine fan, so she collected this miniseries herself. It was fun to go back as an adult and read what my mom was interested in when I was much younger. I definitely see the appeal.
There isn’t any one moment in this story that made me stop everything and proclaim my love for it. Instead, it grew slowly, without overpowering my senses as a reader, and left me wanting more. I read it on the Marvel Unlimited app, which allowed me to immediately go find more of Logan’s story and the relationship between him and Mariko.
One complaint I had about this series was the lack of development for Mariko. Yes, it’s a Wolverine story, but as his greatest love, shouldn’t we get a glimpse into her personality and thoughts? Just a tiny glimpse?
Joe:
My initial impression is that I clearly haven’t read a comic from the ’80s in a while, and definitely not a Chris Claremont one. The book is verbose to say the least, and most of it is inner monologue from Logan while he’s sneaking around or hunting. I know that’s just how comics were written back then, and even into the ’90s, but wow did all those captions take some getting used to again.
I’d never read a solo Wolverine comic before this one, but I’ve read many where he’s part of a group either as an X-Man or an Avenger. I certainly got a different impression of him in this series than I have in any others. Part of that is due to all the inner monologue. You get a really strong sense of Logan’s moral code from that and from his interactions in Japan. I’ve definitely never seen Wolverine shamed before.
I agree with you, Mara, that Mariko is a blank slate. She’s there solely to be the object of Wolverine’s affection. Yukio isn’t much better, though, as sort of a cookie-cutter ‘bad girl’ with no real motivation at all. I definitely wanted to see the Japanese characters more fleshed-out. I think I would have found the series more compelling if I felt like there were actual stakes involved, but it felt like the only fully-formed character in the book was Wolverine, and as a result the book all left me kind of bored.
One point that stuck with me is the opening of the first issue, where Logan hunts and kills a bear. Later on in the series he’s sneaking into an area that’s being guarded by dogs and he mentions internally that he doesn’t like hurting animals. But he had no problem tracking killing a bear two issues prior? Sure, the bear had killed some people, but it had also been drugged and Logan knew that. How about a tranquilizer, or the antidote to whatever the bear was drugged with? Nope. That part bothered me.
Leo J:
Reading these issues made me realize that I’ve not read many comics from the 80s at all. I guess it has something to do with not being able to read until the mid-90s.
There was a lot of narration, which I found interesting for Wolverine. Even despite all his grim and gritty fighting, this original Wolverine seemed closer to the Professor Wolverine that is emerging in books like Wolverine and the X-Men than the Berserker Wolverine that was popular for so long. Wolverine has a very clear sort of code for himself. He has made up his mind about who and why he kills, but regrets that he has to kill at all.
One thing I noticed was that every issue had a sort of “catch up” moment where Wolverine explains to the reader that he is a mutant with a healing factor and claws and all that good stuff. With most current comics, if you come in during the middle of an arc, you’re completely lost, so it was interesting to see each issue explaining the character and situation somewhat.
I do have to agree that Mariko was basically a blank character. She seemed devoid of any real distinguishing features, especially for a woman who Logan was willing to cross the world and kill a bunch of people for.
Keith:
I can remember when these Wolverine comics were some of the most exciting ones on the newsstand. Frank Miller’s name had a power at that time–something like the weight Jack Kirby’s or Neal Adams’s names carried in the sixties. My older brother was collecting at that time, and this is a title that he bought for his collection. Even though comics were cheap back then, our income was from paper routes, so we couldn’t afford to each buy the same comic so we shared each other’s “pull lists.” So I read Wolverine when it came out, though it wasn’t in my collection. My brother had caught on to the Frank Miller craze the year before and was buying every issue of Daredevil. There wasn’t a comic shop yet in my hometown, and of the slim pickings available at newsstands and convenience stores, Daredevil was the standout title on the racks for a while and when this Wolverine mini-series came out, not only drawn by Frank “Daredevil” Miller but written by Chris “X-Men” Claremont, it was hard to find a copy. Mini-series were also still cool and in demand at this time, and hadn’t been done to death yet. The first mini-series, World of Krypton, had only appeared three years earlier in 1979. Somehow we managed to track down all four issues of Wolverine. The very next year a comic shop appeared in my town, and issues of comic scarcity would rarely plague me thereafter. But when I consider that the comic market at that time in my town was probably not an uncommon situation for others in the U.S. at that time, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the original printings of these comics command such high prices today. They have never been easy to acquire, always in demand, and tend to be comics that are prized and retained and not resold. And they are also critically esteemed, and today comprise a little of the foundation of this summer’s Wolverine movie.
Miller did some astonishing things in Daredevil with page and panel composition. The first issue of the Wolverine mini-series plays it safe by comparison, plodding along with a more or less traditional marching order of panels. But this is deliberate, as Claremont and Miller are establishing the characters and letting things simmer a little. In the second issue, the art explodes. Pages two and three of the second issue are one large panel that relieves the building pressure of the first issue as Wolverine leaps through a window at his enemies. These pages are probably an homage to Jack Kirby, as Kirby as often as not would use pages two and three for one expansive panel like this, especially in the seventies.
Comics as they are written today may be not as restricted by powerful editors like they were in past decades, but they are constricted by the influence of their readership to conform to an expected form, a form that is a Diet Coke version of the comics that I grew up on. In today’s market, while it is not unknown to write a comic from the first person POV, it would be rare to have the hero indulge in a full-blown soliloquy like Logan does at times. And while the heroes are verbose, the villains are also articulate. When I downloaded them on comiXology, my wife read them, and she was amazed at the wordage in these comics. I admire Claremont’s skill, and I am glad that his vision wasn’t bogged down by self-consciousness about his work, that he never thought once “what will my readers think if Logan waxes eloquent in his pursuit of justice for a bear?”
Mara:
How does this book compare with the movie that came out a few weeks ago? Did the movie do the story justice?
Joe:
The book and the movie bear passing resemblances to each other, but other than that I think they’re completely independent of each other. His reason for traveling to Japan, his relationships with Mariko and Yukio, and other pieces of the story are entirely different here than they are in the comic. Part of that is a result of the standalone nature of the movie, versus a comic that could draw on Logan’s continuing adventures in the pages of the X-Men comics. Which is not to say that the movie doesn’t carry with it the weight of Wolverine’s actions in previous movies, but the road that led him to where he is in the movie is different than the one he traveled in the comics.
The biggest different is really in the theme of the two. The comics are very much about honor – Logan personal code, his loss of his honor, and then ultimately regaining it. The movie is about mortality and about coming to terms with one’s past actions. A prime example of the difference: in both pieces, Wolverine kills a bear early on. In the comic, he stalks and kills the bear because it had killed a group of people. Essentially, he’s acting as a force for justice. In the movie, he comes across a bear dying in the woods, having been shot by hunters with poisoned arrows. He kills the bear out of mercy, putting it out of its misery (an action that mirrors Logan’s killing of Jean Grey at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand), and then hunts down the humans who did that to the bear. Similar actions, but different motivations that serve the greater themes of the work.
There were things that I thought the movie did better than the book, and most of those things are in the female characters. Mariko feels more like a person in the movie, and not just the object of Wolverine’s quest that she is in the comic. Movie Mariko has hobbies, friends, a back story, and personality. The same could be said of Yukio, who is given a mutant power that adds some pathos to her – she’s more than just a generic bad girl in the movie.
Mara:
Well said, Joe. I watched the movie before reading the comic, so I was looking for similarities. Obviously they were few and far between, including the themes. I like how you summed them up as honor vs. past actions. While I wish that the movie dealt more with the honor that the comic book Wolverine had, I thought it was true to the previous movies. They’ve strayed too far from the comics; why would I expect them to draw heavily at this point? Makes me wonder how Days of Future Past (and, on the Marvel Cinematic Universe side, Age of Ultron) will turn out in relation to the comics it shares a name with.
I think the treatment of Mariko and Yukio in both works may be a reflection of the time they were created. There really wasn’t much of a demand for female characters, especially background characters, to be more than agents to move the plot forward. Today, there’s been a demand for well-rounded female characters. Movies that provide a one-dimensional woman are almost always criticized for doing so. Reading the comics after seeing the movie left me disappointed with both of their treatments.
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As far as well-rounded female characters go, I’d say that Mariko and Yukio’s thinner characterization is a bit of an anomaly for Claremont, who also gave us Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Moira McTaggart, Magik, etc., etc. Marvel’s currently doing pretty well with female characters – Defenders, Journey into Mystery, X-Men, Captain Marvel…but a lot of that gender barrier was smashed through in the first place by Claremont, who also made a pointed effort to show an internationally-cooperative team (like Star Trek did before it.)
Of course, I think the worst love interest Wolverine ever had was what’s-her-name from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for whom we were inexplicably asked to mourn, after she was killed off after nothing but a silent montage.
At least Mariko isn’t…whatever that character’s name was. See? She didn’t have enough screen time for me to remember what they called her.