22 Years Ago, Marvel Completely Reinvented Wolverine (& Created A Masterpiece)

Wolverine had his first solo book in 1982, and since then readers have gotten 43 more years of tales starring the ol’Canucklehead. Wolverine is a character that can lend himself well to basically any kind of story you need him for. He’s great in straight superhero stories, spy stories, sci-fi stories, westerns, even romantic stories. It’s one of his biggest strengths as a character, and it’s allowed his various solo stories to really sing at times. However, even though he’s starred in every kind of story you can imagine, there are some thing that everyone thinks of when they think of a Wolverine story: the costume, the tortured backstory, Japan, Weapon X. What would happen if you took all of those things away?

That was the question asked by 2003’s Wolverine (Vol. 3). The previous volume of Wolverine was outstanding in the ’90s, but it eventually fell into the trap that many long-running superhero titles do. It needed a refresh and Marvel decided to send it to the Marvel Knights line, for a dose of gritty realism. They turned to Greg Rucka, who was most known for crime comics at the time, to write the book and brought in Darick Robertson, who had worked on the character before in Wolverine (Vol. 2) and had just came off some high-profile projects with Garth Ennis, for art. What followed was a short but amazing run of Wolverine stories that redefined what a story starring the character could be.

This Wasn’t Your Father’s Wolverine

Wolverine had gone through basically everything you could imagine in the ’90s. He had dealt with his past and went on a quest to find himself. He lost his adamantium and… went on a quest to find himself. He started to go feral and fought the beast inside of him, eventually going on a quest to find himself. It all had started to go in the same directions and fans were kind of bored with the whole thing. Wolverine is a great hero, but there are only so many times you can watch him go on a quest to find himself.

Rucka didn’t do any of that. Instead, he took Wolverine away from the X-Mansion, giving him an apartment and dropping him into a more gritty “realistic” world. He never wore his costume once throughout the run, and there were no quests to learn the secrets of his memories. This was true street-level Wolverine, and it worked just as well as you could imagine. The first two arcs of the run, “Brotherhood” and “Coyote Crossing”, pit Wolverine against more mundane types of threats, a gang and human smugglers in those cases, and it worked brilliantly.

These two stories used Wolverine as the defender of the underdog, writing wrongs to the innocent people around him, and they were sensational. It was unlike anything that Wolverine fans had seen in years, closer to something like the original 1982 miniseries than his some of his other more fantastical stories. It wasn’t exactly a new look at the character, but it was going places that fans didn’t expect and that made a world of difference, especially since Wolverine (Vol. 2) had gotten so bogged down in “Wolverine-isms”.

The final story of the run, “Return of the Native”, was more of a standard Wolverine story, in that it included Sabretooth and evil government agents trying to bring in a mutant like them, with super senses and a healing factor. However, it still felt like something different. It was kind of an emotionally manipulative story, in that Wolverine fell in love with the mutant and then Sabretooth killed her, but even with all of that, it fit the gritty feel of the other two stories; it was more realistic than these kinds of stories were in the past and that helped it fit in to the rest of the run.

Wolverine (Vol. 3) Showed That the Hero Could Go in Different Directions

The Rucka/Robertson run on Wolverine was raw, and that’s what made it work so well. It was a suite of stories that didn’t focus on Wolverine as a superhero, instead giving him a more mythic presentation. He was a force of nature, appearing to right the wrongs of the world around him in his uniquely violent way. Their run gave readers some of the best Wolverine stories of the ’00s and showed that Wolverine wasn’t just the superhero with the claws, the unbreakable bones, the healing factor, and the bad memory, he was something more primal. He wasn’t just yellow and blue spandex, he was dirty alleyways and beat up leather jackets.

Rucka wasn’t charting new ground with the character; we had gotten Wolverine stories like this before. However, it hadn’t ever been the dominant paradigm of a Logan ongoing series like it was during these three stories. It doesn’t contain any “world-shattering” changes to Wolverine’s status quo or anything, it’s just a couple of great stories that use aspects of the character that we don’t always see, with artwork that brings the gritty, realistic vibe to life beautifully. It was exactly the kind of soft reboot that can make reading a character interesting again after years of the same old, same old.

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