Credits:
Written by Chris
Claremont
Pencils by Frank
Miller
Finishes by Joseph
Rubinstein
Colors by Glynis Wein
Lettering by Tom
Orzechowski
Marvel and DC, to
comics what GM and Ford are to cars, have their high-end makes and models that
define in the public mind what each company represents. It’s inescapable.
Thinking about DC, the icons (for some sixty years) are Superman and Batman.
With Marvel, the first image to pop has to be Spider-Man; the next would be a
toss-up between several contenders, but I’m willing to bet it’d be Wolverine.
(The match-up works, too: Spidey and Supes as the moral centers of their
universes, Batman and Wolverine as the more chaotic and embattled warriors.)
Chaos, of course, is
the secret to Wolverine’s appeal. Chris Claremont added the character to the
X-Men back in the mid-seventies; at that time he was sort of a feisty
counterpart to DC’s golden age atom, a short, explosive scrapper, only with
adamantium claws. But Claremont made the character interesting: he jacked up
the intensity of Wolverine, making him prone to psychotic “berserker rages” in
times of stress, when the mutant would lash out in all directions, destroying
everything until he was sure he was safe. He made Wolverine a dangerous person
to be around.
Then, Claremont made
the character *interesting*, putting on Wolverine a layer of grace and nobility
to counteract every layer of brutality and animalism. The result was a
character who became a fascinating read: a hard-bitten man fighting to maintain
his serenity, and it mattered to the reader whether he won or lost that fight.
If he won, you reveled in his ability to keep control. If he lost, what a great
fight it made!
In 1982, Claremont
wrote the miniseries that really fleshed out the new, dualist Wolverine after
going over the whole concept with then-penciller and writer Frank Miller. The
result, a four-issue miniseries available in trade paperback for years now, is
not only a glorious exploration of the character, but a good primer on when we
first really got a feel for what would become the dominant Marvel character of
the 80’s and 90’s.
In *Wolverine*,
Claremont attached a samurai motif to Wolverine, subjecting the beast-like wild
man to the bushido code, a strict system of honor maintenance, calling for restraint
and justice, for Claremont the pinnacle of humanity to contrast with
Wolverine’s bestiality.
We first meet
Wolverine in the wilds of Canada, tracking a crazed grizzly, before Claremont
sends Wolverine to Japan in search of a recently disappeared lover, Mariko.
Mariko, the daughter of the Japanese equivalent of the Kingpin, has been
married to a cruel man, and honor requires that Wolverine leave the two be.
From this simple set-up, Claremont and Miller roll Wolverine deeper and deeper
into tests of his physical and spiritual strength. Wolverine battles the
mysterious ninja-clan the Hand and tries to determine how well he can trust the
mysterious and beautiful assassin Yukio, who seems to alternately save and try
to kill him at whim. All of this, of course, is written in that strange Raymond
Chandler-like style that Claremont pinned down for Wolverine, and certainly
influenced Miller later in the superb *The Dark Knight Returns*.
Freeze it: 1982, the
year of *Physical* and *Eye of the Tiger*. That’s the year we first really got
to know Wolverine. Have a look.