Goodbye Wolverine
Last night, I watched “Logan” on television in my bedroom. I’d seen it before. “Logan” was made in 2017 because Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart were tired of making X-Men movies but wanted to end the series the right way.
They talked about making X-Men movies for about fifteen years before they actually made one. Jack Nickleson was the first actor attached to Wolverine before his role as the Joker. His 1994 film “Wolf” gives you a pretty good idea of what a Jack Nickleson Wolverine might have been like.
When Hugh Jackman was announced as the Wolverine when they finally made an X-Men movie in 1999, my initial response was that he was too young, tall, and good-looking to convince me he was Wolverine. Honestly, in the first film, the only people who really sold me on their characters were Stewart as Charles Xavier and Ian McKellen as Erik Lehnsherr, Magneto. As time and new films wore on, I felt like Jackman grew into the character, and by the time “Logan” came along, I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.
There was a time in my life when some people thought I was far too old to still read comic books, while others were just glad I was reading anything. I read Spider-Man, which was a story about a teenager who couldn’t tell his friends about his life and couldn’t get a date. I read the Fantastic Four but only the issues when The Thing was part of the lineup. He moved in and out through the years. Ben Grimm had body image issues; he struggled to control his temper, and he couldn’t get a girlfriend. The Hulk was everything The Thing was, but more. The Thing had at least three friends, but Hulk had nobody. Thing struggled to control his temper. The Hulk didn’t care.
X-Men Number 1 shipped in October 1963. I was four months old.
By the time I was thirteen, there were at least four X-Men titles. The lineup changed several times, but older members, even the dead ones, always resurfaced. Wolverine got his own title the year after I graduated from college, but he’d long since been the star of the show.
What made Marvel Comics different from DC Comics, and the reason I read them, was that Marvel characters might have superpowers, but they had life issues your average American adolescent and teenager could understand.
1963 was sort of a peak year for bigotry and intolerance in America. Medgar Evers was shot, and so was John F Kennedy. As young as I was, reading the X-Men comics my mother sent as a care package to Strong River Summer Camp, I understood what Stan Lee and the team at Marvel were getting at. Mutants were the rejected and oppressed in America.
Even though my parents tried to hide some of the ugly truths from me, by eleven years old, I knew that Mississippi held a prominent position in the story of bigotry and intolerance in America. By the time I was thirteen, I could see it reflected in the X-Men. Before I was thirty, they revealed that Rogue, one of my favorite characters, was from a fictional town in Mississippi.
Once or twice a year, the X-Men visit or see some version of the future or have someone from the future visit them. Even though the Mutants were a metaphor for the trouble we were having living with one another in America, X-Men writers never gave us a hopeful view of the future. There were semi-sentient robots, mutant hunters, and even an intergalactic reality television program in the future, all bent on destroying the mutants and sometimes did. We never got to see a glimpse of a happy, peaceful end for the mutants in a world that appreciated them.
The message was obvious: “If you don’t do something, this is what will happen.” I got that, but they never offered much of a roadmap to a different future.
Although I’ve always kept up with my comic book friends, I quit reading them in any regular way before I turned thirty. When I stopped picking up the monthly issues, things weren’t looking good for anybody. Spiderman was getting a divorce. Professor X had health problems, and the Hulk was battling with an older version of himself.
I always thought that by the time I reached the age daddy was when he died, the world would have found solutions for the bigotry and intolerance that tore Mississippi apart the year I was born. Like with my comic books, I always figured I’d pick up an issue one day, and they’d have found a solution. In the comic books, they don’t do that because they have to sell new issues next month, and with no conflict, not many people are gonna put down four bucks for a comic.
In Mississippi, we always seem to find new people to hate. We even managed to get the people who hated themselves to hate the new guys. The current most hated in Mississippi is transgender people, which I don’t really get because there are so goddamn few of them; trying to say they’re some threat is just ridiculous.
Since I no longer actively read comics, I had to look up a list of current LGBTQ characters in Marvel Comics. It’s quite a list. Seventy-two Marvel characters have been portrayed as LGBTQ+. They include Iceman, Kitty Pryde, Deadpool, Magik, Rachel Summers, Mystique, Rictor, and Sebastian Shaw.
A lot of people will read that list and think “Goddamnit! They made comic books WOKE!” That’s misreading the situation. Comic books, especially Marvel Comic Books, were always targeted towards young readers who felt they were different, even if they couldn’t clearly identify what made them different. Comic Books were always Woke as fuck; it’s the readers that grew blind to it as they got older.
In Comic Books, you always have to sell new issues next month, and Wolverine and Professor X were among their most popular characters, so it took an awfully long time to kill them off, even though there were scores of near misses. It’s different in the movies.
Even though Hugh Jackman returns as Wolverine in the upcoming Deadpool movie, he gave the character a fitting end. Comic books like to deal with multiple universes to keep their stories going, so I suppose it’ll always be possible to see more Wolverine movies with Jackman. I wouldn’t even mind. He’s just now getting old enough, actually, to be Logan. Even if he does, the movie where Logan and Charles die, still in the struggle, in a world that still doesn’t accept them, is probably the best way to go.
