Marvel’s Obsession With Regression Will Be Their Undoing

Marvel has long been the gold standard when it comes to superhero stories. You don’t have to like Marvel more, but if you deny that they’re more popular than DC, then I have years of sales charts to show you. Marvel basically ran the table for the entirety of the 21st century, and it was only recently that the attention brought to DC by the Absolute line has allowed them to outsell Marvel books. There are multiple reasons that Marvel has fallen in the esteem of many fans, but a big one is regression. Marvel has stopped moving its characters forward in any appreciable manner, and some characters have gotten it worse than others. When most fans think of Marvel character regression, they think of Spider-Man and for good reason.

“One More Day” basically destroyed the Spider-Man fandom, and the character has been going through a cycle of diminishing returns for almost 20 years now. However, we’re not here to beat that dead horse. No, today we’re here to talk about another character and how badly Marvel’s regression has affected him — Wolverine. Wolverine is the ultimate Marvel hero, and grew immensely as a character throughout the 21st century. And then “From the Ashes” happened. The X-books are basically playing the hits right now in anticipation of the X-Men’s debut in the MCU, but as a long time Wolverine fan, I can say that his regression is the most egregious and it’s going to limit where the character can go in the future.

Everything Great About Wolverine Has Been Undone

The ’00s were a great decade to be a Wolverine fan. There were amazing runs on the character from Greg Rucka, Mark Millar, and Daniel Way, and the character joined the Avengers, finally reaching the upper echelon of the Marvel Universe. He grew beyond the mouthy berserker that he had been throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s and became an elder statesmen. The ’10s saw the character reach even higher levels, leading X-Force, becoming one of Captain America’s most trusted Avengers, and eventually starting his own mutant school, as well as getting a stellar run from writer Jason Aaron. He died in 2014 and would return in 2019, just in time for the Krakoa Era. The Krakoa Era found a way to use the Wolverine that had been established in previous years to tell great Wolverine stories that saw him wrestling with the morality of his own actions and Krakoa’s. The end of the Krakoa Era could have built on that, but instead, we got writer Saladin Ahmed and Martin Coccolo’s Wolverine, which immediately put him into the wilds of Canada, where he had run to because of the end of Krakoa. Wolverine did something that he had seemingly grown out of, and since then, we’ve basically been getting Wolverine stories that are basically using the ’90s version of the character.

Wolverine, as a book right now, really has nothing going for it. The book’s first story arc introduced the Adamantine, a sentient metal that had been used to forge god weapons, establishing that adamantium was just a bastardized version of it. This was an interesting idea, but it was told in the least interesting way, with the metal taking control of classic Wolverine villains and throwing them at him. The book’s next story arc is basically picking the bones of Origin clean, the story that gave Wolverine his origin as James Howlett, revealing that his mother Elizabeth is still alive. This could be interesting, but Ahmed is basically copying the homework of writers that came before him without understanding what made those stories work, which is the biggest problem with Marvel’s regression. Instead of using the way the character has grown to show how he reacts to things, we’re getting the simplest version of Wolverine possible, one that longtime readers have been following decades. It’s hard to believe that the Wolverine starring in Wolverine right now is the same one that led the X-Men or gained the respect of Captain America. This is just ’90s Wolverine all over again. Now, Wolverine in the ’90s was awesome, but one of the best parts about the ’90s was the changes thrown at the character. He had to deal with Weapon X shenanigans, losing his adamantium, and trying to rebuild himself. Now what do we have? A ’90s style Wolverine who has decided to throw away the person he became because Krakoa failed. This isn’t an interesting version of the character, and it shows how badly regression can hurt a character.

Regression Hurts Everything in the Long Run

This is where we get to the biggest problem with Wolverine, and it’s something that Spider-Man has been suffering from for years now — what’s next? How many times can we expect readers to read the same types of stories? New readers are getting into comics all the time, and don’t always have the knowledge of the older versions, so some regression is always going to be a part of a character. However, there’s a way to do it and make it work, and Marvel has never found how to do that with characters like Spider-Man. How many times can we watch Spider-Man screw up his relationships, lose all of his money, and end up nearly destitute? How many times can we watch Wolverine throw away his life to go hide in the woods for a little bit and then come back?

One of the things that most people never talk about is that we don’t actually get a lot of new readers in comics. Most superhero fans prefer movies and TV shows. Comics have become a place to basically test stories that will get adapted down the line. The amount of new readers coming in is minuscule compared to the people who have been buying for years (and that amount is minuscule compared to the number of movie/TV superhero fans). The core audience rarely changes. You can argue that regressing Wolverine or Spider-Man is good for new readers, but how many new readers are these takes getting? Wolverine (Vol. 8) kicked off at the top of the sales charts, and has had a precipitous fall since Ahmed and Coccolo took over. What new readers is this series getting? What new readers has Spider-Man got and kept over the last 20 years? Marvel’s wholesale regressions do more damage to the characters than they fix. If they keep alienating the long time readers, there will be no one buying the books, something that Brevoort’s X-Men line is learning. Wolverine is the best there is at what he does, and for years that has been growing as a character. Taking away that growth just means that the majority of readers are going to get the same stories all over again, and the fact of the matter is they won’t be as good.

What do you think about Marvel’s tendency towards regressing characters? Sound off in the comments below.

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