This Wolverine Masterpiece Inspired One of Logan’s Wildest Movie Moments

Wolverine has grown from a third wheel in a fight between Hulk and the Wendigo to one of the most popular superheroes ever. He became a star in the ’80s, helping drive X-Men sales like no other character, and would be a key part of the team becoming a multimedia sensation starting in the ’90s. The ol’Canucklehead was usually the most popular character in whatever X-Men property was being adapted, including the films, where he’s been played by Hugh Jackman since the year 2000. Jackman’s rendition of Wolvie has become one of the most beloved in superhero movies and he became the first member of the X-Men to get his own solo movie, eventually starring in three solo films (and one team-up movie).

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His first movie was X-Men Origins: Wolverine and it was roundly panned, but his second movie, The Wolverine, was an improvement, taking the hero to Japan for an adventure that had its origins in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. This was a wild moment in superhero cinema and most fans don’t realize that it had its origins in the comics. Logan had many adventures in Japan, and one of these showed what he was doing on the day that Japan was bombed: the miniseries Logan, by Brian K. Vaughan and Eduardo Risso. This series showed readers one of the most tragic happenings in his life and was quite different from the movie that it inspired.

Logan Took Readers Back to World War II to Show Wolverine’s Most Tragic Romance

It all began with the Marvel Knights line. ’90s Marvel had its highlights, but the publisher shot itself in the foot by chasing the collector’s market and trying to match Image Comics for style over substance superhero comics. In 1998, Marvel got creators Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti to recruit a bunch of creators to tell more grounded stories with some of the publisher’s B-list greats. Eventually, Marvel Knights books would become some of the most popular around, with characters like Wolverine, Captain America, and Spider-Man getting their own more grounded Marvel Knights series’.

The late ’00s would see the publisher start to put out Marvel Knights miniseries for numerous characters, these books teaming A-list creators for stories that dug deep into these heroes. 2008 saw Logan from the team of Vaughan and Risso; Vaughan had been killing it on Runaways, Y: The Last Man, and Ex Machina, while Risso had been supplying amazing pencils for 100 Bullets. They were an interesting team for a Wolverine mini and they were able to knock it out of the park with this three-issue masterpiece.

Logan told its story in two eras, with Wolverine returning to Japan and thinking of the fays around the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He had been in a prison camp in Japan and escaped along with a man named James Warren, hiding from the soldiers and trying to figure out their next move. The two meet a woman named Atsuko that Warren tried to kill but Logan saved. The two of them get away from the other soldier and end up having sex, but the American returns and the three fight out, with Logan and Warren both discovering the other is an indestructible mutant. Atsuko was stabbed with a bayonet, but the fight is ended when Hiroshima is hit with the atomic bomb, the mutants surviving. The story ends with Logan and Warren meeting up again in the present day and finally battling to the death.

Logan and The Wolverine are very different stories. The Wolverine smushed together several Logan in Japan plotlines, using Logan’s presence at the atomic bombing as an inciting incident for its story. However, both of them are stories about Logan tying up some loose ends from his time in Japan, dealing with the specter of the past. The idea of Wolvie being present for the atomic bombing of Japan is an interesting one – down the road it would be referenced in Death of Wolverine #1 (although in that story it said that the bomb blast had irradiated his adamantium bones; Marvel editors can’t catch everything). There are plenty of people out there who probably think that it was a movie invention, but it happened in a comic first, one that every fan of Wolverine should check out.

Logan Deserves More Attention Than It’s Gotten

The Wolverine was the movie that saved Wolvie’s film career, making Logan (the movie, not the comic; I can see how that might be confusing in this article) and Deadpool and Wolverine possible. However, Logan didn’t have to do the same kind of heavy-lifting – 2008 was a pretty good year for the ol’Canucklehead in the comics – but it is one of the best moments in the character’s long history, a perfect little Wolverine tragedy that ends with the same amount of heartbreak as it began. The only difference is the person who caused the heartbreak is dead.

In that way, it’s a perfect Wolverine story. Logan’s stories aren’t about him winning and saving the day, they’re about him surviving everything and coming back a little diminished, just like in real life. There are loads of great Wolverine stories out there, but few of them have the same narrative heft as Logan. It’s a story that has been unfortunately forgotten, but is definitely worth hunting down.

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