Wolverine Origin (graphic novel) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine don’t have much in common. They deal with different stories in different ways. The book is great and the movie is okay.

Wolverine is one of the most popular Marvel characters of the last few decades. I started watching him in the early 1990s when the X-Men cartoon came out. I’ve seen the movies and I of course read the comics.  However, until this week I had not read the official Wolverine Origin graphic novel. The original comics were published around 2001. I was in college. I was broke. And I’d seen or read the story several times. 

The graphic novel was not the story I had heard. It’s not the story that’s in the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie. And it’s definitely not the story from Saturday morning cartoon. The graphic novel takes us through Wolverine’s life from five years old through his late teens. He is portrayed as a tragic figure: a sickly child with almost no friends, product of a broken home, and in the end he is alone in the Canadian wilderness. On the other side of the coin, he is an accidental murderer and product of his harsh environment. It is an excellent character-driven story. Weapon-X, the storyline that gives Wolverine his adamantium skeleton and claws, as seen in the first three X-Men movies, is not in the book. There are no spandex costumes or superhero-esque antics. In short, it’s one of the best, if not the best, superhero book I’ve read. 

The movie crams all the wonderful character-based drama into the opening four or five minutes, and then montages us into the 1970s or 1980s. The rest of the movie deals with Weapon-X and the conspiracy/shadow government motif of the original story. Basically (spoiler through the end of the paragraph), a rogue colonel is trying to use mutants as weapons. He takes it a step further and attempts to make a generically obedient killing machine with the correct balance of powers crammed into a single body. 

The storyline in the movies has been hashed out in comic books at least twice in various X-Men titles, including the more recent Ultimate X-Men- Volume 2: The Return to Weapon-X published in 2002. 

If you haven’t seen the Weapon-X story before, then the movie is worth watching. But under no circumstances should you judge the graphic novel by the movie. 

 

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