We all know the story of Wolverine; the indomitable, animalistic mutant with a healing factor who wound up with an adamantium skeleton and claws. He was given those by the sinister Weapon X Project, an experimental project focused on creating a super-soldier fit for the Cold War. The spiritual ancestor of Project Rebirth, the goal was to create a killer who moved in the shadows rather than a star-spangled superhero who would lead from the front lines. It created Wolverine, not Captain America.
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The story is an iconic one, first told in 1991’s Marvel Comics Presents #72-84. It’s a fantastic tale, and so readers have always been willing to overlook the one simple plot hole in Wolverine’s origin story. Healing factors aren’t exactly commonplace, even among mutants, and Logan’s is unusually strong (amped up after an encounter with the angel of death during the First World War). Wolverine’s healing factor is the reason he could survive the bonding process, and it also keeps adamantium poisoning in check. So how did Weapon X find the one mutant who would be able to survive their experiments?
We Now Know Weapon X Had A Mutant Tracker
Marvel’s Wolverine: Weapons of Armageddon #1, by Chip Zdarsky, Jesus Aburtov, and Luca Maresca finally answers this question. It opens with a flashback to the night Wolverine was taken by the Weapon X Project, when he’s approached by a woman named Teri O’Barnes while drinking in a pub. Teri is actually a mutant with a mysterious tracking power that appears to be psionically based rather than rooted in tracking any physical trail. And it seems Teri was assigned to find a mutant with a healing factor.
The prologue is a terse one, with Logan mistakenly thinking Teri is hitting on him. In reality, she’s watching him carefully, looking for evidence of his healing factor. She immediately notices how much he’s drinking and that he isn’t even “buzzed,” before spotting glass in Logan’s stubble and realizing he’s taken a bottle to the face during a bar-room brawl – but hasn’t even taken a scratch. These are the signs Teri has been looking for, confirmation that Logan is the ideal test subject for Weapon X.
To be fair to Teri, she had no idea what Weapon X was. She seems to have been much more innocent and naive back in the day, meaning she was willing to accept paychecks from a clandestine pseudo-scientific project that had some very dangerous goals indeed. What’s more, Teri appears to have dedicated her life to reversing the harm she’s done, and Logan himself has learned to forgive her.
Still, the biggest Wolverine plot hole of all time – the question of just how Weapon X happened to find the one mutant who could survive the adamantium bonding process – has now been solved. Teri O’Barnes is the answer to the question most fans haven’t even been asking, a smart retcon who adds something pretty special to Wolverine’s origin story. In a tragic twist, it seems Wolverine wasn’t just created by humans, but also by another mutant who unwittingly betrayed her own kind.
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