The X-Men Comics Have Completely Forgotten Wolverine’s Real Nemesis (But That’s Probably For The Best)

Wolverine is the face of Marvel’s mutant community. While the majority of the X-Men only work on their own team and occasionally on another group, Wolverine managed to break out on his own and establish his own storied mythos. He has a very well-documented past with the Weapons Plus program, and even has his own personal troupe of villains that go after him and him alone. Sabertooth is the most famous, of course, being Wolverine’s archnemesis for decades. Their clashes are legendarily fierce, but he’s far from the only one. There’s Silver Samurai, Omega Red, Daken, and plenty more. However, only one of them is Wolverine’s true archenemy, and it’s not who people think. 

Romulus was introduced in Wolverine (2003) #55, though the seeds for his story were laid all the way back in Marvel Comics Presents #74 as the shadowy figure overseeing the Weapon X program. Romulus is, more than anyone else, the person responsible for all the trials and tribulations in Wolverine’s life. Moreso than Sabertooth and everyone else who worked on Weapon X, Romulus is the mastermind behind Wolverine’s tragedies. He’s the ultimate puppetmaster, and yet, Marvel has all but forgotten about him. Despite his insurmountable importance to Wolverine’s origin, that is definitely for the best.

Romulus, the Ultimate Convoluted Mastermind

Romulus is a millennia-old villain, claiming to be all the way back from pre-history. According to his words, he and Wolverine weren’t mutants at all, but actually an evolutionary offshoot called Lupine. Instead of descending from primates, they evolved from wolves, which was supposed to explain Wolverine’s feral nature and instincts. Romulus led a Lupine army in the shadows for centuries, slowly gearing up for an eventual war against humanity, and he saw Wolverine as his greatest soldier for that cause. He was the one who sent Sabertooth after Logan, starting their eternal rivalry. He was the one who oversaw the Weapon X program, bonding Wolverine to adamantium and restoring him to his true, feral self to make him the ultimate warrior.

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Much like Wolverine and Sabertooth, Romulus possessed an incredible healing factor, and once directed Wolverine and Black Panther to a graveyard with the bones of his Lupine army, proving his story. However, it was eventually revealed that all of this was a lie. Romulus’s sister, Remus, told Wolverine that his story of being a Lupine was a lie. While Romulus did engineer almost every major tragedy in Wolverine’s life, including killing his wife, Itsu, and raising his son Daken into a murderous monster, he was just another mutant. He wanted to use Wolverine to make a new species, seeing him as the perfect specimen, but he was never what he seemed at all. That is just one of the many reasons that Romulus should probably be forgotten.

A Walking Contradiction and Plothole

From 2007 to 2012, with Romulus’s Lupine lie taken at face value, it was canon that Wolverine wasn’t a mutant. That is, obviously, a major plot hole that makes absolutely no sense. He’s Marvel’s most popular mutant character, so suddenly making him something different that would diametrically oppose him to the core concept of the X-Men goes against everything that made the character popular in the first place. Obviously, this needed to be retconned out of existence, but Romulus’s entire character was based around this idea. Without the Lupine reveal, he has no reason to exist because he loses the one thing that separates him from Wolverine’s other villains.

If Romulus isn’t a Lupine, then he’s just a discount Mister Sinister. He’s an evil mastermind genetecist who orchestrated all the horrible events in his perfect subject’s life to prepare him for a specific plan over the course of decades. The only difference is that Mister Sinister is an interesting character who added to Cyclops’s lore, while Romulus unnecessarily complicated and took away from Wolverine’s mythos. The idea that Logan’s entire life was set out before him takes away from the centuries-long journey that led him to become the man he is. Sabertooth being instructed to hate Logan over all these years just dilutes one of the best rivalries in comics for no benefit. 

Considering all the baggage he brings to the table, Romulus has been practically forgotten about. He was recently the main antagonist of the first arc of Wolverine (2024), culminating in the milestone four hundredth issue. Before that, his next most recent appearance was in Wolverine #313 in 2012. Romulus doesn’t show up much, and while I believe every hero and villain has the chance to become a mainstay if given a chance and the right team, Romulus’s contradictory mythos definitely make that an uphill battle for him. It’s probably for the best if he doesn’t come back, or, at the very least, is heavily redone before then.

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