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TO BE TOTALLY HONEST, most of
the Hulk's stories during the 1970s weren't exactly
groundbreaking pieces of work. At the time, the Hulk was
a monstrously strong being with the mind of a child, and
most stories depicted him as a misunderstood brute
trying to find a place where he could get some peace
from the people who hounded him. It didn't make for
imaginative storytelling, but The Incredible Hulk
#181 -- almost in spite of itself -- became a part of
history by introducing a type of character never before
seen in comics.
In this issue, the Hulk's journeys bring him to
northern Canada, where he tangles with the Wendigo, a
white-haired man-turned-beast. Naturally, a fight is
soon brewing between the two monsters. Enter a short,
scrappy masked man to stir things up even more.
Codenamed Wolverine, he was introduced as a super-agent
of the Canadian government, and he used his claws to
preserve the peace in a most un-Canadian way.
After that first outing, Wolverine might have
disappeared into the guest-star void if he weren't
brought in to be part of the new X-men lineup.
Short-tempered, feisty and always ready for a scrap, he
soon proved to be a big hit with the audience, and he
grew to become one of Marvel's most popular characters.
The turning point in the character's evolution came
when the X-Men traveled to the Savage Land, and
Wolverine killed one of the villain's guards in an
off-panel scene. Today, that wouldn't be a big deal, but
at the time it was inconceivable that any superhero
would kill, much less use razor-sharp weapons
specifically designed to inflict pain.
Over the years, Wolverine (whose unexplained past
added to his appeal) became a noble but savage hero, a
man in a constant struggle to contain his bestial side,
but one who never shied away from doing what had to be
done. After all, as he often said, he was "the best
at what he did." His popularity signaled a change
in what the comics considered a hero, and -- for better
or for worse -- there was no turning back.
There were heroes before Wolverine with personality
problems, and there were heroes who never fit in with
society's "play-nice" rules. But in those
Comics Code-approved days, even the meanest heroes had a
heart of gold (the Hulk, for instance, was monstrous,
but never murderous). Right was right, and killing was
wrong. Wolverine's violence was unprecedented, and it
paved the way for more violent heroes to arrive on the
scene. (Although the Punisher,
a gun-toting vigilante, appeared in Amazing
Spider-Man a few months before Wolverine's first
appearance, he was originally seen as a mentally
disturbed person, and the level of violence in his early
stories was nowhere near what it would be in his own
1980s series.)
Even Wolverine's non-violent superpowers seemed to
encourage a new level of violence. Wolverine's mutant
power is his super-fast healing factor; his wounds heal
in minutes, and his superstrong, reinforced skeleton
allows him to take a lot of punishment before he can be
stopped. In a sense, this was a messy form of Superman's
invulnerability -- he could get shot like a normal
person, but the wound would heal to let him fight again.
It's a detail that writers have put to gory use time
after time.
Wolverine's introduction is a milestone because his
arrival forced writers and readers to redefine their
definitions of what a hero should be. Is a hero someone
who lives by a strict code and refuses to kill, or is he
someone who does what has to be done? Should heroes
offer defeated villains mercy, or is "an eye for an
eye" the only way to deal with evil? And is an evil
act committed in the name of a greater good really an
evil act?
Wolverine was the first sign that the comic-book
heroes don't live in a perfect world where the nice guys
always win. Sometimes, their world can be as messy and
as complicated as our own, and not every problem can be
solved with a fierce sense of justice; sometimes, it's
better just to have someone fierce.
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