“For the most part, you see,” Claremont candidly explains, “Wolvie had been portrayed as a terminal psychotic, akin to human nitroglycerin, ready to explode into a beserker fury without warning, as likely to attack his friends and teammates as his foes. In fact, Claremont seems to do that in the introduction to the collection of the four-issue miniseries. I don’t think he’s exceptionally deep or complex, and I’d argue that Claremont himself would concede that. He’s a fairly conventional genre character, and I think he appeal comes from how carefully Claremont defined him within that mould. Although Claremont’s somewhat over-populated word and thought balloons meant he wasn’t quite the man of few words, he did have an air of mystery about him, being far more likely to face the world with snark and cynicism than wide-eyed optimism. In many ways, he evoked the sort of Clint Eastwood archetype, the rough and ready macho icon, ready for whatever the world could throw at him. I think that a large part of his appeal in Uncanny X-Men was the fact that he was the most flawed member of the team, the resident “bad boy.” While I’d be very reluctant to describe Chris Claremont’s Wolverine as an “anti-hero”, he did have a bit of an edge to him, something lacking from most comics at the time. I tend to think that, as a rule, the character is well-served as part of a group dynamic, where he can define himself in opposition to other members. I’ve remarked before that Wolverine isn’t the most complex of comic book characters. The four-part Wolverine miniseries, written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Frank Miller, is generally regarded as one of the best miniseries that Marvel ever produced, and I think that it provided a lot of the momentum and characterisation that would sustain the character over three more decades of solo appearances. Still, given how ubiquitous the character has become in recent years, it’s impressive that it took so long for him to get a solo adventure. In fact, I think you could make the argument that Wolverine and Storm were the central protagonists of Claremont’s epic X-Men run. During Chris Claremont’s celebrated Uncanny X-Men run, Wolverine emerged a hugely popular character.
The character had first appeared as a foe in The Incredible Hulk in 1974, and was coopted in the X-Men with Len Wein’s Giant-Sized X-Men #1 a year later. It’s almost hard to believe that Wolverine only earned his first solo miniseries in 1982. Join us for a month of X-Men related reviews and discussion. With our month looking at Avengers comics officially over, we thought it might be fun to dig into that other iconic Marvel property, the X-Men.
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