Today’s edition of Rich Johnston’s weekly comics gossipfest indicates that Marvel comics has forced new Wolverine artist Darick Robertson to make Wolverine attractive again.
FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE, IT’S ABOUT EFFING TIME!
In recent years, in a move spearheaded by writer/man-about-town Grant Morrison, Marvel has made a real effort to cash in on the innate sex appeal of Wolverine, or at least the innate sex appeal of Hugh “Curly” Jackman, by transmogrifying him from a hirsute, diminutive sack of ugly with an annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person and talking in what passes in supercomicsland as “dialect” to a leather-clad, good-looking guy with a halfway-decent haircut. In the process–which included taking his X-Men brethren out of some of the worst-designed costumes in the superhero business and putting them in outfits real people might conceivably wear–they gave one of the most prominent books in supercomics a much-needed makeover. You can say “comics are cool” as often as you want, but it’s unlikely to make any difference if your main character looks like a Brylcreemed, slightly more muscular version of the Simpsons comic shop guy. Seen in this light, making the X-Men look like a rock band and Wolverine like the lead singer was a fantastic idea.
You’d think this transformation–a sort of rough-hewn Young Brando-esque type instead of Bruno Sammartino with claws–would make sense to everybody. You’d think. But no, the fanboys are up in arms that this character, who was once the embodiment of what 11-year-olds think of when they think “tough guy,” is now a sexy beast, thereby forcing them to ask questions of their own sexuality they’d just as soon leave unanswered. So in the kind of misguided artistic move only made by mainstream comics people (or, perhaps, by whoever in Blur thought it would be a good idea to plow ahead without Graham Coxon), new Wolverine writer Greg Rucka and artist Darick Robertson decided to return Wolverine, a fictional character, to what he “really” looks like–namely, a human garbage truck with back hair.
Brilliant, no?
The result was a Wolverine solo book in which the main character bore not the slightest resemblance to the character called Wolverine in every other comic (he appears in virtually every X-Men related title on the shelves, and on the cover of each of them practically every month). Fortunately, it didn’t take long for Marvel to figure out that when Hugh Jackman is drawing in women and helping to rack up $85 million in opening-weekend box-office receipts, maybe it’s a bad idea to have a comic in which Wolverine looks like Robin Williams running around nude in The Fisher King.
Of course, they’re apparently planning to put all the X-Men back in their spandex pajamas. 8-year-olds, Dude.