Comics: Wolverine

Story

Wolverine goes to Japan! This story, published back in 1982, was roughly the basis for the recent Wolverine movie. I say “roughly” because, based on what I’ve read of the movie, it’s a loose adaptation at best. I haven’t seen the movie yet, however.

Chris Claremont handles the writing chores; if you’re at all familiar with the X-men you likely know his name, as he’s the writer most associated with the team and the book, having written Uncanny X-men for 17 years. He’s got a very distinctive writing style – complex stories with highly-developed characterization. Towards the end of his run (and later on, when he returned) the complication nature of his stories was sometimes seen as more of a hindrance than anything else, but most of the time it was enjoyed by the fans.

However, he suffers a bit from forgetting that this is a comic book story and there are pictures, so he has characters narrate some stuff that’s pretty obvious (mostly Yukio).

“A net! I’m caught!”

“I slipped! I’m falling!”

Yeah, no kidding, Yukio. While he does have Yukio play Captain Obvious for most of the story, this kind of reinforcement-of-images-through-dialogue wasn’t that uncommon in the books of the time.

Less common were the dialogue-free fight scenes that served to showcase the talents of his artist collaborators.

But I digress. In the Wolverine mini-series, Wolverine goes to Japan (the why is not really that important), fights samurai – including the father of the woman he loves, Shingen – and ninjas, meets the ronin Yukio, and eventually gets engaged to his love, Mariko Yashida. There’s a whole complicated wheels-within-wheels plotline of betrayal and backstabbing that goes on with Shingen, Yukio and Wolverine. But it all works out in the end (of the series, anyway).

He invites the X-men out for his wedding at the end of the mini. The Uncanny book has them showing up, with Rogue tagging along. We get to see Wolverine and Rogue interact (up until around this time in the X-men books, Rogue had been a villain). Storm bonds with Yukio and (with the help of Mastermind, who doesn’t do much in the story other than show up and mess with people – this is all set-up for later stories) gets a radical new look. Viper and Silver Samurai show up. Fights ensue.

Let me go ahead and ruin the ending of a book published 30 years ago: they don’t get married.