Wolverine doesn't die at this time
A very quick look at Wolverine #75
Sorry, you seem like you were worried that Wolverine might die, because of… well, you know.
X-Men #25 actually moves the camera swiftly away from Wolverine soon after establishing that Magneto is doing what frankly everyone assumed he would probably do at some point since 1976, by wrenching Wolverine’s Adamantium Skeleton out through the pores of his skin. Fair to say that the main reason that he never had up until now was because of good sportsmanship.
It’s a big moment, but it can’t breathe because what happens next is nearly as big: Charles mind-whamming Magneto so hard that his brains fall out of his butt. It’s the action that convinces Charles that Magneto is simply too big of a problem to be allowed to continue to exist.
In a more modern context — probably only a decade later — there would be a lot to say about Professor Xavier unilaterally lobotomizing his greatest and most prominent enemy. It certainly would be fuel for those who argue that mutants might actually be too powerful and that something must be done to stop them.
Knowing that, I don’t mind that it happened in the “Hey, check out this cool shit” 90’s. Xavier pushes his power to the utmost limits and defies all reasonable form of ethics in using them, and the book is passive, at best, in exploring that. There will be consequences down the line, but in the immediate present, Charles is cracking fucking jokes about it.
Which is fine, if that’s what the X-Men comics want to be — you know, comics — I don’t actually have a problem with that. Nobody said they have to be psychologically rich reflections of reality at all times. They are just as much a meditation on prejudice in all its forms as they are a vehicle for sexy superbeings zapping each other with their laser eyes.1
But back to the action. Magneto is lobotomized and Wolverine is near death. Emphasis on near: homeboy has an ongoing series and a prominent role on a hit Saturday Morning cartoon show. They aren’t going to kill him… they’re not even going to “kill” him. But they’ve got to do something.
Arguably, claiming you are going to kill a character as prominent as Wolverine is the dumbest thing you can do. People will not believe you, right up until the moment it happens, and then once it does, they will begin the countdown to when he is coming back. Oh, they’ll buy the issue, of course, but for integrity’s sake, it might as well not have happened. Crying wolf on a major character death is kind of an insult to the readers, to the character, and to yourself as a publisher. As long as lines can be drawn on a page, Wolverine will live. Same with Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, and most of the rest of them. This isn’t news, this isn’t shocking.
Better to do something that completely changes their place in the narrative going forward. That’s beyond death. That’s cursing them with life.
In “Nightmares Persist” the Fatal Attraction written by Larry Hama and drawn by Adam Kubert with inks by Farmer, Green and Pennington and colors by Brosseau, we spend much time in crisis mode, with the X-Men returning from Avalon in the Blackbird with Wolverine in triage. Luckily we have two world class telepaths on hand to keep Wolverine in telepathic sedation while his body flips its shit and his mind follows suit.
As Wolverine’s star rose in the early 90’s, he was less a presence in the book where he made his name, and more a franchise unto himself. We are now at 75 installments of Wolverine solo adventures, and you don’t get that far without developing a world within the world you’ve been occupying, (the Marvel universe.) The driving force of Wolverine’s recent adventures — which comes up whenever he appears in X-Men but that’s increasingly sporadically — is that Wolverine is learning that his past is not exactly what he thought it was, that post-hypnotic suggestions and “memory implants” have made it impossible for him to tell what’s real and what’s fiction. For some reason this involves tricking him into thinking he went to prom, but whatever.
This revelation reconfigures Wolverine’s world from the straightforward superhero one into what would become a convoluted and complicated mythos reminiscent of the “kudzu plot” of the X-Files — a show that had just hit the airwaves when this comic was published, and thus was not even close to the public consciousness when this revelation was made a few years earlier.
On the face of it, it makes sense: Wolverine is the ultimate warrior (well, he’s not the Ultimate Warrior, but…) but his greatest battle is one that can’t be won with his claws; his greatest enemy is existential. In practice, it adds another confusing and confounding aspect to the X-Men’s world at a time when nearly every month included some new mystery thing that would never get resolved.
Back to the main point: you can’t kill Wolverine, but you can take his adamantium. Of course. Not only can it be done, it makes perfect sense. It’s the exact sort of thing you do with comic book characters instead of killing them. Storm got her powers taken away. Illyana was de-aged (and died in a very moving issue but… come on, don’t you think she’ll be back?) Anything that can be done to take these characters out of their status quo, but snapped back as soon as needed, is on the table.
So Wolverine survives the trip back to Earth. A little later, he’s ready to prove he still has what it takes with a session in the Danger Room. With the rest of the team looking on in shock, he soon finds that things aren’t quite as he thought they were.
Wolverine, like the rest of us, had assumed that the claws were a function of his adamantium-laced skeleton, and that without the adamantium, there would be no claws.
But the claws are, let’s face it, a huge part of what makes Wolverine so cool, and it does seem like an opportunity to do something surprising and shocking that upends the status quo… without quite upending the status quo.
Does it really matter? To some. Wizard magazine banged the “Give Wolverine His Adamantium Back” drum for years, all through the 90’s, being way too caught up in the supposed inferiority of the bone claws. In practice it doesn’t really make a difference, but on the page, it changes things, and that’s what’s important.
There are some real, tangible changes coming out of the X-Men’s 30th anniversary story. Wolverine has changed, and is further motivated to investigate his past — and he’ll be doing that on his own and not appearing so much in X-Men for a while. And Magneto, the X-Men’s oldest and most iconic foe, is once again off the board for the foreseeable future. Both of these facts would be reversed in time, but it would be a lot more time than you would think as the comics explore all the storytelling possibilities for both states of affairs.
You can’t kill Wolverine and you can’t kill Magneto, but you can seriously dent them for a while, which is even better.
Don’t forget to read Uncanny X-Cerpts every Monday and some Thursdays!
I’m gonna get in so much trouble for calling them “laser eyes” aren’t I…