Given Wolverine's ability to regenerate his body, what good did grafting Adamantium to his bones do? I can understand doing the claws to make them sharper and stronger, but none of the rest of it makes sense to me. It didn't make him stronger and I doubt it did much of anything to make him more durable.
Also, why doesn't his body reject the grafts? They're foreign to his body. I don't know much about biology but I don't think it makes sense for the grafts to work.
Yes, I'm aware the answer is "because", but I'm wondering if these questions have ever been answered on the page.
Replies
I think I can answer these! Maybe!
Let's take it as a given that Wolverine wasn't created with any of his backstory in mind. His claws, healing factor, being able to speak Japanese, etc., were created as a series of reveals that I think we can assume weren't planned from the get-go. Then his origin was cobbled together in a series of reveals to explain all those reveals which, again, I think we can assume wasn't imagined at the time of Incredible Hulk #180.
In fact, to the point of your question, Wolverine didn't have adamantium grafted to his body in that appearance. According to co-creator Len Wein, "I readily admit that my original idea was for Wolvie's claws to extend from the backs of his gloves."
Then Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum revealed that the claws were part of Logan in The X-Men #98.
So then came the question, "How did they get there?" I don't think that's a really obvious question, because Wolverine was on a team where a colleague could turn into living metal. Why couldn't metal claws just be part of his mutation? But as Wolverine got more popular, more and more writers took stabs at his mysterious past, and Logan's backstory became a huge jigsaw puzzle ... or maybe several jigsaw puzzles in the same box. Mix and match!
Eventually, though, came the "Weapon X" story in Marvel Comics Presents by Barry Windsor-Smith. There we learn that Professor Abraham Cornelius grafted adamantium to Wolverine in the Weapon X program.
All of that is pretty cut and dried. Now comes the part where my patchy memory cannot separate what I read and what I assumed. I can only hope other readers can help with that.
At any rate, what I got out of the "Weapon X" story (or maybe later ones) was that Cornelius wasn't trying to benefit Wolverine in any way ... he had picked Logan for the adamantium injections because he was the only one they'd found who could survive it.
The process would have killed most people. Then, as you note, any potential survivors would die from having a bunch of metal in their body. So for the project to work, Cornelius needed someone with an incredible healing factor, which allowed to Logan to survive the process, AND to survive in the ensuing years of constant rejection of the adamantium.
This was in fact Wolvie's problem in the movie Logan. Logan was sick, because his healing factor was failing, which meant that he was finally losing the long battle with adamantium rejection. In fact, I don't recall if the movie said it, but I assumed his healing factor was failing BECAUSE it had finally been worn out by constant adamantium rejection.
At any rate, the movie did establish (if the comics hadn't already, which they probably had) that Logan's body DOES reject the adamantium, but his healing factor is constantly at work sparing him from sepsis or whatever.
That's my take. Which may or may not be canon.
In Wolverine's very first story he was referred to as a mutant. But what made him a mutant? I think it was pretty much assumed (by readers as well as Len Wein himself, as Cap pointed out), that the claws were artificial. From the "series of reveals not planned from the get-go" school of thought, I think that's where the animal senses and healing factor came from.
I think that his original mutant power was "able to take a beating" similar to the Spirit!
To buttress Jeff's point, in the Len Wein blog I linked to in my first post, Wein says that he established Wolvie as a mutant from the get-go. This was in response to the rumor that Wein meant for Logan to be a High Evolutionary-style mutated wolverine. He said he doesn't know who first suggested that, but it wasn't him.
Also, Wein meant for Logan to be a teenager, until he was first drawn with his mask off (by Cockrum, I think) and he looked 40-ish! So the whole "I"m 100 years old Bub" thing didn't start until later, also.
I'd have to re-read Incredible Hulk #181, but I think his original mutant powers were just the usual suite of physical enhancements, i.e., being stronger, faster and more durable than humans. He may even have had Wolverine-ish senses already, but I think that was a later development. Again, I'd have to re-read it, as I don't remember anything specific on that score, but there could have been a throwaway line I've forgotten.
What I really remember was not being impressed by this short guy with the bad attitude and fake claws. He didn't seem any match for the Hulk, aside from writer's fiat.
You know what the problem with the world is? Too many people know Hulk #181 but not enough know #182. All things being equal, #182 is a far superior issue. I didn't follow the link you posted, but yeah, now that you mention it, I have heard that "High Evolutionary" and "teenager" stuff before. But I'm 99.99% certain nothing in that original story explicitly stated what his mutant powers were, only that he was one.
Len Wein originally meant for all the New X-Men to be teenagers (except Banshee) but Wolverine's initial powers were very similar to Thunderbird's. Indeed Thunderbird was meant to be stronger and faster.
They retconned the adamantium skeleton to give T-Bird "Wolverine-Envy" in Classic X-Men #3 (N'86).
Ugh.
Look, I don't hate Wolverine. But I do hate Marvel writers re-writing Marvel history to make Wolverine more important, because he became popular.
Philip Portelli said:
The High Evolutionary mutating a wolverine to create Logan idea was used as Spider-Woman's initial origin, substituting a spider for a wolverine, of course!
Yes! And her origin was re-written so that the "I'm a spider" origin wasn't the case. Have people conflated that with Wolverine?
Philip Portelli said:
Of course, they did eventually use that origin for the second White Tiger from Heroes For Hire (1997)!
Captain Comics said:
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next