SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
As a biographical aside, I was never aware of this six-issue series back in the day. I had become disenchanted with the various X-Men serials in the eighties and nineties, and so only followed the odd arc or single issue. I knew that bits and pieces of Wolverine's origin had been tossed out over the years, but I thought that the only in-depth treatment of the mutant hero's early years had been the 1991 series by Barry Windsor-Smith, WOLVERINE: WEAPON X, which was a good read but not an adequate origin for the relatively complex character.
ORIGIN, however, is a tale worthy of Marvel's most popular Bronze Age hero. Paul Jenkins plotted and scripted the epic, with plotting input from Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada, while Andy (son of Joe) Kubert provided the luscious linework. I have no idea whether or not the narrative is considered canonical these days, but I'm impressed by how many disparate bits of Wolverine-lore Jenkins et al managed to weave into this ambitious tale.
WHAT'S IN A NAME DEPARTMENT: Now, in this review I can't very well speak of the main character as "Wolverine," since from start to finish he's many years from running around in a costume with the X-Men. And though in the early sections the character's true name of James Howlett is consistently utilized, for most of the story he goes under the assumed name of Logan. Thus I will speak of him in the first section as James, after which he'll be the only character designated as "Logan," since it's something of a transitional identity between the boy and the superhero he becomes.
Young James debuts as the only surviving son of a wealthy Canadian family, the offspring of John and Elizabeth Howlett. Having money doesn't necessarily make life OK for the Howletts: John is frequently chastised by his father "Old Man Howlett," Elizabeth lives in seclusion after having recovered from depression following the loss of her first child, and James himself is weak and sickly. The viewpoint character for the early section of ORIGIN is Rose, a young Irish orphan brought to the Howlett estate to tutor James, and it's through her eyes that viewers meet the only two servants who become important to the doomed Howlett saga: groundskeeper Thomas Logan and his young son Dog. Astute readers will notice that the groundskeeper bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Logan of mature years, but Jenkins' script, while not denying the possibility that Thomas may be the real father of the Howlett heir, throws out just enough suggestions to let readers come to their own conclusions.
Since James-Logan, Dog and Rose are the only children on the estate, they bond for a time, though the alignments of class suggest that James and Rose leave young Dog on the outside looking in. But Dog's greatest problem is his father. Thomas is a mean drunk, forever carping about how the wealthy Howletts look down upon his kind, and beating his son for any presumed infraction, even after Dog saves James from drowning.
Thomas's brooding resentments eventually bring about the first tragedy for James. Dog tries to get overly friendly with Rose. James tells his father, and John expels both of the Logans. Thomas and Dog come back armed at night, allegedly to rob the Howletts though vengeance is the more likely motive. In the ensuing confusion, Thomas shoots John dead, and in the struggle the anguished James manifests his mutant power as bone claws erupt from his hands. He claws Dog and kills his maybe-father Thomas. The half-mad Elizabeth takes her own life, but Rose becomes James's functional new mother, taking him to another Canadian province to keep clear of the law.
It's in a dingy mining-camp in British Columbia that James becomes Logan-- initially, because Rose simply bestows that name on him to conceal his real heritage. While Rose assumes clerical duties at the office, Logan must push around heavy carts of ore, forcing his weakly frame to take on muscle. Logan and Rose pretend to be cousins to allay suspicions from the other workers, and their family nucleus is somewhat supplemented by rough foreman Smitty. Initially Smitty only signs Logan on to give the weakling the hardest grunt-work, but over time Smitty takes some loose paternal interest in the youth, and even defends him twice from the tender mercies of the camp's malicious cook. That Logan begins to have some reciprocal feelings toward the foreman is indicated by the fact that latter-day Logan picks up Smitty's habit of calling other individuals "bub."
But in a sense the true parent overseeing the tutelage of Logan is Mother Nature. Since the camp is near the omnipresent Canadian woods, Logan's savage instincts come to the fore, and he begins hunting game at night. He's forgotten that he even possesses retractable claws of bone, but he gets a vivid reminder when cornered by a pack of wolves out in the wild. He then begins to run with the wolf pack, a Tarzan prompted by mutation rather than being reared by animal parents.
Smitty provides at least one other link in the Logan mystery, when he introduces the surly youth to the stories of Japanese samurai, whose legacy will also be imprinted on the future hero. But Rose, after living with Logan for years in the role of a functional "brother," has also grown during this time, and when she as a young woman turns to look for a mate, it's not toward Logan.
Logan-- nicknamed "Wolverine" by his camp-mates-- tries to hate Smitty and Rose, and fate seems to set him up for an Oedipal contest, when Smitty, desperate for money to marry Rosa, enters a cage-match with "Wolverine." Logan's inherent decency makes him not only spare Smitty's life but throw the fight as well. However, in place of the father-sacrifice, a sacrifice of mother/sister is set up when yet another sexual competitor for Rose, Logan's maybe-brother Dog, comes looking for vengeance.
I mentioned Tarzan earlier, and despite all the surface differences, this saga of the "wolverine-man" probably takes some inspiration from the narrative of the "ape-man." Logan is born with a savage nature symbolized by his mutant talons, but civilization saps his energies, making him rich and sickly. In his original setting, James Howlett is somewhat like William Clayton, the weak cousin of Lord Greystoke from RETURN OF TARZAN: a decent human being but not capable of coping with danger. Tarzan does not witness the horrors that end the lives of his parents, though to some extent the death of his ape-mother stands in for this trauma. Logan witnesses the murder of his father and (subliminally perhaps) the suicide of his mother, but he largely forgets the chaos in his new identity, with Rose taking on a roughly maternal role while Smitty becomes a new father-imago. Tarzan's only competition for Jane is his cousin, a brother-analogue, while Rose is pursued both by Logan's maybe-brother and by Logan's surrogate father. It's interesting that while Logan may not actually be the child of two aristocrats, he patterns his ethical outlook on Father John, for during his maturation Rosa remarks that Logan is "a leader by example, much like his dear father." This may be an evocation of the "noblesse oblige" found in Tarzan, who, despite his savagery in combat, always has a firm moral grasp of his circumstances. Even if James Howlett was the by-blow of Thomas Logan, the man called Logan did not slide into degradation as did the self-pitying groundskeeper-- which might be a repudiation of the very "class conflict" suggested by the story's opening chapter.
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