MYTHCOMICS: WOLVERINE: ORIGIN (2001-02)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

 As a biographical aside, I was never aware of this six-issue series back in the day. I had become disenchanted with the various X-Men serials in the eighties and nineties, and so only followed the odd arc or single issue. I knew that bits and pieces of Wolverine's origin had been tossed out over the years, but I thought that the only in-depth treatment of the mutant hero's early years had been the 1991 series by Barry Windsor-Smith, WOLVERINE: WEAPON X, which was a good read but not an adequate origin for the relatively complex character.

ORIGIN, however, is a tale worthy of Marvel's most popular Bronze Age hero. Paul Jenkins plotted and scripted the epic, with plotting input from Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada, while Andy (son of Joe) Kubert provided the luscious linework. I have no idea whether or not the narrative is considered canonical these days, but I'm impressed by how many disparate bits of Wolverine-lore Jenkins et al managed to weave into this ambitious tale. 

WHAT'S IN A NAME DEPARTMENT: Now, in this review I can't very well speak of the main character as "Wolverine," since from start to finish he's many years from running around in a costume with the X-Men. And though in the early sections the character's true name of James Howlett is consistently utilized, for most of the story he goes under the assumed name of Logan. Thus I will speak of him in the first section as James, after which he'll be the only character designated as "Logan," since it's something of a transitional identity between the boy and the superhero he becomes.

Young James debuts as the only surviving son of a wealthy Canadian family, the offspring of John and Elizabeth Howlett. Having money doesn't necessarily make life OK for the Howletts: John is frequently chastised by his father "Old Man Howlett," Elizabeth lives in seclusion after having recovered from depression following the loss of her first child, and James himself is weak and sickly. The viewpoint character for the early section of ORIGIN is Rose, a young Irish orphan brought to the Howlett estate to tutor James, and it's through her eyes that  viewers meet the only two servants who become important to the doomed Howlett saga: groundskeeper Thomas Logan and his young son Dog. Astute readers will notice that the groundskeeper bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Logan of mature years, but Jenkins' script, while not denying the possibility that Thomas may be the real father of the Howlett heir, throws out just enough suggestions to let readers come to their own conclusions.

Since James-Logan, Dog and Rose are the only children on the estate, they bond for a time, though the alignments of class suggest that James and Rose leave young Dog on the outside looking in. But Dog's greatest problem is his father. Thomas is a mean drunk, forever carping about how the wealthy Howletts look down upon his kind, and beating his son for any presumed infraction, even after Dog saves James from drowning. 

Thomas's brooding resentments eventually bring about the first tragedy for James. Dog tries to get overly friendly with Rose. James tells his father, and John expels both of the Logans. Thomas and Dog come back armed at night, allegedly to rob the Howletts though vengeance is the more likely motive. In the ensuing confusion, Thomas shoots John dead, and in the struggle the anguished James manifests his mutant power as bone claws erupt from his hands. He claws Dog and kills his maybe-father Thomas. The half-mad Elizabeth takes her own life, but Rose becomes James's functional new mother, taking him to another Canadian province to keep clear of the law. 

It's in a dingy mining-camp in British Columbia that James becomes Logan-- initially, because Rose simply bestows that name on him to conceal his real heritage. While Rose assumes clerical duties at the office, Logan must push around heavy carts of ore, forcing his weakly frame to take on muscle. Logan and Rose pretend to be cousins to allay suspicions from the other workers, and their family nucleus is somewhat supplemented by rough foreman Smitty. Initially Smitty only signs Logan on to give the weakling the hardest grunt-work, but over time Smitty takes some loose paternal interest in the youth, and even defends him twice from the tender mercies of the camp's malicious cook. That Logan begins to have some reciprocal feelings toward the foreman is indicated by the fact that latter-day Logan picks up Smitty's habit of calling other individuals "bub."

But in a sense the true parent overseeing the tutelage of Logan is Mother Nature. Since the camp is near the omnipresent Canadian woods, Logan's savage instincts come to the fore, and he begins hunting game at night. He's forgotten that he even possesses retractable claws of bone, but he gets a vivid reminder when cornered by a pack of wolves out in the wild. He then begins to run with the wolf pack, a Tarzan prompted by mutation rather than being reared by animal parents. 

Smitty provides at least one other link in the Logan mystery, when he introduces the surly youth to the stories of Japanese samurai, whose legacy will also be imprinted on the future hero. But Rose, after living with Logan for years in the role of a functional "brother," has also grown during this time, and when she as a young woman turns to look for a mate, it's not toward Logan.

Logan-- nicknamed "Wolverine" by his camp-mates-- tries to hate Smitty and Rose, and fate seems to set him up for an Oedipal contest, when Smitty, desperate for money to marry Rosa, enters a cage-match with "Wolverine." Logan's inherent decency makes him not only spare Smitty's life but throw the fight as well. However, in place of the father-sacrifice, a sacrifice of mother/sister is set up when yet another sexual competitor for Rose, Logan's maybe-brother Dog, comes looking for vengeance.

I mentioned Tarzan earlier, and despite all the surface differences, this saga of the "wolverine-man" probably takes some inspiration from the narrative of the "ape-man." Logan is born with a savage nature symbolized by his mutant talons, but civilization saps his energies, making him rich and sickly. In his original setting, James Howlett is somewhat like William Clayton, the weak cousin of Lord Greystoke from RETURN OF TARZAN: a decent human being but not capable of coping with danger. Tarzan does not witness the horrors that end the lives of his parents, though to some extent the death of his ape-mother stands in for this trauma. Logan witnesses the murder of his father and (subliminally perhaps) the suicide of his mother, but he largely forgets the chaos in his new identity, with Rose taking on a roughly maternal role while Smitty becomes a new father-imago. Tarzan's only competition for Jane is his cousin, a brother-analogue, while Rose is pursued both by Logan's maybe-brother and by Logan's surrogate father.  It's interesting that while Logan may not actually be the child of two aristocrats, he patterns his ethical outlook on Father John, for during his maturation Rosa remarks that Logan is "a leader by example, much like his dear father." This may be an evocation of the "noblesse oblige" found in Tarzan, who, despite his savagery in combat, always has a firm moral grasp of his circumstances. Even if James Howlett was the by-blow of Thomas Logan, the man called Logan did not slide into degradation as did the self-pitying groundskeeper-- which might be a repudiation of the very "class conflict" suggested by the story's opening chapter.

MYTHCOMICS: THE INHUMANS #1-12 (1998-99)

Given the negative press being given to the new INHUMANS movie, it seems appropriate to look at one of the better renditions of these Marvel characters.

The Inhumans were introduced in the mid-sixties by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in FANTASTIC FOUR, and the prevailing wisdom is that they were mostly Kirby's designs. However, subsequent attempts to launch the characters in their own series were largely unsuccessful. Though personally I liked the characters, I found that they were too static and lacked a viable group dynamic. The pattern for THE INHUMANS slightly resembled the Lee-Kirby THOR. In both features, the stories alternated between a fabulous otherworld where most of the characters had super-powers, and visits to the mundane world of humanity. Yet, what worked for Thor-- a central character with a retinue of support-figures-- didn't really work for the five main characters of THE INHUMANS. One reason was that four of the continuing heroes-- Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- were eternally deferential to Black Bolt, who was not only the leader of their group, but their absolute monarch, and the ruler of all the Inhumans who dwelled in the remote city of Attilan. This meant that it was difficult for writers to evoke the standard formulas of Marvel interpersonal drama.

In this 12-issue maxi-series, writer Paul Jenkins and aritst Jae Lee found a way to exploit some of the "monumentalism" of the Inhumans theme, by focusing upon the enigma of Black Bolt. The character possesses a plurality of powers, but the one that most determines his character relates to his voice. Black Bolt is a "silent king" because even a whisper from his throat can unleash catastrophic sonic destruction. Early in the series, Jenkins's script even specifies the touch that his own parents-- and those of his brother Maximus-- were slain when Black Bolt uttered a calamitous sound. Jenkins uses captions to speculate on what Black Bolt may be thinking during the story's events, but in keeping with the usual depiction of the character, "thought-balloons" are not used for him (thus making him a distant pioneer to the many "mature" works of the 1990s that foreswore the use of balloons).

Brother Maximus, a prisoner in Attilan, is one of the threats to the Inhumans' peaceful isolation, and it's soon revealed that he has a hand in an outward threat: a group of mercenary soldiers, secretly funded by both Russian and American schemers. The soldiers surround Attilan and begin bombarding the force-field defenses of the super-city. To the expressed surprise of the four "junior" members of the Royal Family-- that is, Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- Black Bolt refuses to take violent action against the invaders. Even when a few rank-and-file Inhumans suffer death or injury because of the invading humans, Black Bolt stays his hand, with no explanation. 

Thus the stratified nature of Inhuman society-- one in which Black Bolt is a messianic figure to a population where every citizen is "a subspecies of one"-- is used to beguile the reader as to the king's true motives. The field-leader of the invaders thinks that the Inhumans' king withholds violence due to a sense of noblesse oblige. "Being a man of honor," opines the military man, "it would be beneath him to destroy us." One of Black Bolt's subjects asks him. "What are you afraid of?," suggesting that he may withhold violence because the king was traumatized after killing his parents. 

Subplots also deal with some of the serpents in the Inhumans paradise. Earlier stories established the existence of the Alpha Primitives, a breed of lookalike Inhumans with no special powers, and though Lee and Kirby treated them simply as "shock troops," later authors, including Jenkins, put a "Morlock" spin on the Primitives, claiming that they were created to service Attilan's miraculous technology. "Their breeding," comments a character, "gives [the Primitives] no choice but to work the machines." The Inhumans' penchant for maximum diversity, in theory, sounds like it ought to prevent body-shaming, but Jenkins and Lee establish that there exists a "darkward" section of Attilan, as the dwelling-place for mutations who prove less than optimal. In addition, another subplot deals with some of the young people of the city, who are about to undergo their genetic transformations, and how some of them, following said transformations, began to show signs of pretension.

Still, the narrative emphasizes the unfathomable mystery of the monarch's apparent lack of initiative. Even when the conclusion reveals that he has been playing a dangerous game of chess against his opponents, the sense of mystery is not lessened. Lee's artwork, in contrast to the hyperkineticism of the Inhumans' artistic creator, gives the story's events a slow, stately gravitas, even evoking Egyptian art-motifs to convey the stasis of a monarchical rule-- as we see in the splash page to the cleverly named chapter "Sonic Youth."

Jenkins and Lee aren't able to do nearly as much with the other four members of the Royal Family, though each of them does get some attention. Karnak, who began as something of a gimmicky type, comes off best, as Jenkins makes his special power-- that of finding any physical flaw in a structure, so that he can break it-- a metaphor for the flawed nature of society and the physical world. In the end, even fantastic super-powers cannot reverse what Karnak calls the "entropy" of the world. But Black Bolt, despite his silent reserve, ultimately justifies his people's faith in him, and finds a way to put off doomsday for just a little longer.