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Wolverine's Prototype

When DC and Marvel colluded to create the amusing Amalgam line of stories, they filled these tales with blended versions of DC and Marvel characters who had some connection or equivalency. For example, Superman and Captain America, owing to their iconic nature, portrayal as leaders, and fairly persistent optimism became the single character "Super-Soldier" in a series of comic books that dealt with the result of fusing DC and Marvel into one amalgamated universe.

Based on tone, popularity, or a connection to Frank Miller, the Amalgam comics joined Wolverine to Batman to create "Dark Claw," a figure that mostly resembled Wolverine but had all the material trappings that Batman uses in his pursuit of criminals.

While perfectly defensible on the grounds of tone, popularity, or Frank Miller treatments, something struck me as unlikely about this fusion nonetheless. The two didn't fit together. Wolverine didn't seem to parallel Batman well; his history, abilities, and values all made a poor match that tended to show in the dominance of all of Wolverine's traits in Dark Claw.

However, one ill-remembered DC character would provide an excellent parallel, and readers over the years who remember the comics of the early seventies might nod to think about this. Amalgam Comics, had they done more research and taken more risks, would have found just the right match for Wolverine in the Archie Goodwin / Walt Simonson Manhunter.

Origins and Baggage

Wolverine, as he first appeared, mainly represented a super-powered hit man brought out to give the Incredible Hulk someone to fight with. He would not develop a dense history or a fleshed-out personality until Chris Claremont and Frank Miller decided to give him one.

By today, of course, Wolverine's fans know these things about him: an agency kidnapped him, modifying his body to improve him so that he might serve as an ideal assassin; due to the circumstances around which this agency acquired him for these experiments, many years were lost to his memory; he received extensive training in far-Eastern martial arts; he turned against the agency that modified him, becoming their enemy; he does not trifle about using mortal violence against opponents; he presents a persona of a surly loner; and he has a "healing factor" that allows him to recover from injuries that might prove mortal to a normal human.

Every one of these statements apply to the Goodwin / Simonson Manhunter, who appeared around 1973, before Wolverine's first recorded appearance; and some of these elements would not appear on Wolverine's resume until the 1980s.

Thus, we have a strong case to support the suspicion that Wolverine represents a recycled character.

The Manhunter

Many of the essential elements of Wolverine - those things that make the character more interesting than just something that scratches a lot - became formulaic in characters, provided the substance of DC's Manhunter revival in the early 1970s. In light of their first appearance in the context of Goodwin and Simonson's work, one may easily acknowledge the character as archetypical (by virtue of constant imitation).

However, to substantiate this claim, let this synopsis of the Manhunter story argue for itself, and recall that the entire sequence predated Wolverine's appearance in Incredible Hulk.

Paul Kirk had fought evildoers in the 1940s as the Manhunter, a Simon/Kirby character who appeared in about twenty stories before its cancellation. Goodwin and Simonson took this story up at some point after the War, around 1947, when Kirk, retired from crimefighting, returned to big game hunting. While hunting a bull elephant in Africa, Kirk lost his taste for it and pulled a shot just as his target charged at him, and, trampled by the great beast, he lost consciousness, expecting to die.

He awoke in the hands of a consortium of scientists bent on ruling the world via an army of super-assassins. These scientists genetically modified him to endow him with a "healing factor" (a power grafted fairly verbatim onto Wolverine shortly thereafter) and cloned an army of goons from his flesh before waking him to have the greatest living master of ninjitsu train him in the art.

Kirk did not care to serve in his designated role of super-assassin and turned against the scientists who revived him, waging a brutal campaign against them and their army of Manhunter clones. The scientists found that the very things that would have made him a perfect servant made him a formidable enemy. Kirk could out-fight the other Manhunters (the clones, who wore blue so that readers could distinguish), did not suffer from any scruples about killing as the situation might demand, and could heal all but the most mortal of wounds with his healing power.

Manhunter set a tone that would find an echo in later works of extremely violent heroes or anti-heroes that Marvel would promote near the turn of the 1980s. This tone remained conspicuously lacking outside of some of the more mature war comics; it presented a foreign element to the superhero equation, even if, in a later day, it would become a haggard cliche. Years before Daredevil or the Wolverine would skirmish with armies of ninjas, Manhunter fought armies of clones armed with bizarre and archaic far Eastern weapons.

These fights defied the contemporary superhero formula. Manhunter chopped his enemies, shot them with his Luger, stabbed them, flung shirukens at them, or blew them up with his cigarette lighter and a trail of gasoline in a festival of carnage completely unlike DC's hoaky superhero battles with boxing glove arrows and magic lassos.

Furthermore, well ahead of the medium, the Manhunter story ended in the death of all the principals as Manhunter sacrificed his life to eliminate the cabal that had recreated him to serve them. Accepting a brief bit of help from Batman (appearing in Detective Comics did make this Batman's turf, after all), Manhunter managed to fight his way to the controls of their destructive nuclear device even as radiation destroyed his flesh, and used the scientists' weapon against them, dying in the process.

Unlike a Marvel character, Manhunter stayed dead. As of this writing, he has avoided returning from the Great Beyond for about 26 years, a record that may only take second place to Bucky Barnes' 35-year stint as a dead comics character.

Transmitting the Legacy

Wolverine would show Marvel a new style of character with his complete lack of social skills (when he chose not to use them), his contrariness, and an outlook that bordered, occasionally, upon nihilism. While Manhunter did not reach the narcissistic depths of histrionic comic-book angst that would later pollute the pages of almost anything that sold enough copies to cover printing costs, he did, nonetheless, set the precedent for Wolverine's personality. He acted as a loner; he ignored the demands of the consensus of acceptable behavior; and he single-handedly fulfilled a purpose that he knew only he could.

Manhunter lacked the pathetic self-absorption that would masquerade as character depth by the 1980s. Instead, the frozen mask of his scowl represented the determination of a soldier far behind enemy lines who expected to die. Nothing remained to him but his purpose; the goal of stopping his creators, not sadism, not blood-lust, moved him.

In duplication, however, such depth washes out. The unrelenting pursuit of an aim that defined Manhunter represents an problem for an ongoing character, as one must realize with characters like Deadman or the Punisher: these characters must achieve their goals or lapse into redundancy as they mark time in a task writers never let them complete. Simonson and Goodwin recognized this when they let Manhunter die.

Even recognizing such a limitation, we may note the strength of the concept in its ability to produce viable and sometimes popular, if inferior, spawn even in the end-of-the-millenium comics market.

However, decades of stories have accreted onto the Wolverine character elements that never had a chance to affix themselves to Manhunter, whose one-year tenure limited the development of interactions and history. One may therefore consider Wolverine a slightly divergent character, including a series of romances and near-romances, paternity hoaxes, and other sometimes-disposable baggage. Nonetheless, stripped of the irrelevant elements of costuming and big sideburns, one may see a clear kinship.

Convergent thinking, homage, or recycling all could have led to this resemblance. By whatever source, though, Wolverine reflects Manhunter's precedent.