One of the secrets to Wolverine’s enduring popularity, both in Marvel’s comics and in various adaptations, is that there are two distinct versions of the character. Both have their fans, and both exist more or less concurrently. Sometimes he’ll flip back and forth between them in one story.
The first Wolverine, and the most famous, is a short, hairy ball of imminent violence. As his codename suggests, this Wolverine is as potentially dangerous to his allies as his enemies, and has never even heard of anger management; there’s a reason why many of the most iconic images of Wolverine involve him trying to kill another superhero.
This Logan is hard to like, but once you get the obligatory fight over with, he’s a good man to have on your side. Whenever Wolverine showed up for a guest appearance in someone else’s book, this was usually who you could expect to get.
The second Wolverine, conversely, is the one who’s actually got a third dimension. He’s over a hundred years old, and while his memory’s often full of holes, he’s still got the experience. This was the version of Wolverine who had any business running a school, who’s weirdly good with children, and who picks up a new teenage sidekick once a decade.
Which Wolverine you get from appearance to appearance tends to depend upon the writer, the book, and the situation. Sometimes he’s in permanent adolescent mode, where he’s ready to brawl with absolutely anyone for no reason at all, and other times, you get Logan the Zen philosopher. That inconsistency can be frustrating, particularly if you binge through a lot of comics in a row. More than with many big Marvel characters, there’s a vast gulf between good, bad, and mediocre portrayals of Wolverine.
You can find a lot of articles about the wit and wisdom of Wolverine at this point, many of which seem to be content to simply list his various catchphrases — “I’m the best there is at what I do,” explaining his bones and/or healing factor to someone who’s just tried to kill him, calling Cyclops a dick in the first X-Men movie, etc. One of my favorite moments for the character, however, comes at the end of a brutal arc in what turned out to be a brutal book.
Wolverine vol. 7 ran from 2020 to 2024 as part of the Krakoan era of the X-Men comics, where mutantkind was assembled as a single political force on the living island of Krakoa. This was an exciting, forward-looking time for the X-Men franchise, and it still hasn’t rebounded after the Krakoan era’s end in 2024.
This Wolverine run was written by the novelist Benjamin Percy (currently working on The End Times with Stephen King), and issue for issue, it’s one of the darker runs the character’s ever had. This is Wolverine as a one-man black-ops squad for a mutant nation, up to his knees in blood from the start.
The volume ends in a story arc called “Sabertooth War,” where Victor Creed punches his way out of mutant prison for his latest final showdown against Logan. The body count and collateral damage are both high, and while Logan eventually wins, he does so at the cost of his son Daken’s life. (Daken got better later on, though. Long story.)
The last page of the story, and this volume, features Logan reflecting on what he’s learned so far:
“Here’s the thing I’ve learned about happiness. I can be feeling good… but that feeling never goes far. Because I’m remembering all the pain going on in the world. I used to think that made happiness impossible. But Krakoa taught me the reverse is true too.”
It’s an interesting capstone to this run, especially when coming from this character. Logan is typically written as being almost too cynical to function, even in the utopian sci-fi of the Krakoan era, so it hits hard to send him out on this kind of high note.
It’s also not a meditation on his own badassery, which to my mind, sets it above Wolverine’s usual list of catchphrases. Instead, it’s a simple, useful thing to remember about both happiness and grief. If you’re looking for inspirational quotations that were, inexplicably, said by the angriest Canadian in comic book history, then this is a good place to start.
