Part 1 – Origin to Origin II
Part 2 – 1907 to 1914

We’ve reached World War I, which is… untapped territory, for the most part. Not entirely, though. Wolverine: Origins #17 tells us that Logan fought in World War I as part of Romulus’s “Devil’s Brigade”, some sort of black ops or mercenary squad who fought alongside the regular troops. Daniel Way seems to have picked this up from Alpha Flight vol 1 #33, where Wolverine mentions in passing his service with the Devil’s Brigade. In reality, the Devil’s Brigade was the nickname of the First Special Service Force, a US/Canadian commando unit that existed between 1942 and 1944 and is regarded as the forerunner of modern US and Canadian special operations forces. Maybe Daniel Way didn’t get the reference, or maybe he was suggesting that that unit was also part of Romulus’s conspiracy.

Flashbacks in WOLVERINE vol 3 #57-60
“Logan Dies, parts 1-4” by Marc Guggenheim & Howard Chaykin
November 2007 to February 2008

22 April 1915. Logan is fighting with (apparently regular) Canadian forces. At the Second Battle of Ypres, the Germans use chlorine gas for the first time. Everyone else dies, but Logan survives to see a mysterious figure with a sword. Being Logan, he promptly fights and kills the guy, who immediately reappears alive and well and says they will meet again. This is Lazaer, an angel of death. (Yes, it’s an anagram of “Azrael”.) The nagging sense that he has defied the order of nature leads Logan to fall into a depression, to the point where he attempts suicide – but evidently he comes to terms with it over time.

By the way, this is one of a number of stories where Logan uses some other sort of bladed weapon as improvised claws, seemingly unaware that he already has claws of his own. His pre-Weapon X flashbacks are all over the place about whether he uses his claws, or doesn’t know they exist, or what – you just have to chalk it up to his fluctuating mental state throughout this period, along with a lot of other hopelessly inconsistent behaviour, and it’s really not worth trying to track or make sense of.

Anyway, having beaten the angel of death in combat, Logan now gains the right to fight Lazaer every time he dies, and to return to life if he wins. This seems to have been intended to explain away Wolverine’s more absurd healing stunts, and also to draw a line under them (since the story brings the deal to an end). In practice, it had very little impact, whether on Logan’s back story or on the way writers used his healing factor.

SAVAGE WOLVERINE #21-22
“The Great War” by John Arcudi & Joe Quinones
July and August 2014

October 1918. Logan is still serving in the Canadian army in the front lines of World War I. His unit includes another mutant, a frail telepath called Lieutenant Bellamy, but nicknamed “Link”, who is proud to be fighting for his country, and resents Logan’s attempts to bond over their powers. Logan’s unit attack a bridge whose German defenders, led by Captain Egon Hiban, are mainly marking the days until the expected end of the war. Link, perhaps subconsciously, creates a mental link between Logan and Hiban, who nobly attempts to discharge his duty, and is mortally wounded for his troubles. Logan allows Hiban to die peacefully while listening to music he loves. Broadly, the point of all this is that Logan, Link and Hiban are all driven by their nature to play out their roles in a fight over a bridge that they all know to be objectively pointless given the imminent end of the war. It’s an unimportant story, but quite a good one.

An epilogue shows Logan at the Armistice Day celebrations in Paris (on 11 November 1918), still brooding over Hiban’s death.

And that’s it for World War I. Lots of untapped territory for writers there. Much the same goes for the 1920s…

Flashbacks in WOLVERINE vol 3 #62-65
“Get Mystique!” by Jason Aaron & Ron Garney
April to July 2008

Mexico, 1921. Logan is sentenced to death for stealing a horse, and is brought before a firing squad. He escapes alongside fellow prisoner Raven Darkhölme (not yet using the name “Mystique”, but not in disguise either), who may have engineered the meeting. Raven takes him to Kansas City, where she wants Logan to help her group of low-level scam merchants with a bank robbery. Logan shops them to the police, partly because he’s convinced she’ll stab him in the back eventually, and partly because he’s already fallen into the habit of keeping his distance from people who offer him family and stability. Raven escapes town on the same train, and offers to let bygones be bygones… before booting Logan off the moving train. There’s no mention of the Romulus storyline here, so from the look of it this is one of the periods where he’s largely outside Romulus’s influence.

The Marvel Index has Logan’s first meeting with Ogun in around 1921, but we’ll come back to that.

In around 1923, Logan spends some time in St Paul, Minnesota (according to Savage Wolverine #15). He befriends brothel owner Dolly, and eventually leaves “because [he] couldn’t settle down”.

Age of Ultron #9 has a single cryptic reference, never followed up, to Logan doing something in 1928 with a “Charlene Baumgartner”.

SAVAGE WOLVERINE #20
“Valentine’s Day” by Frank Tieri & Felix Ruiz
June 2014

Chicago, 1929. It’s the Prohibition, and Logan is a bootlegger working for Bugs Moran. He appears to have a girlfriend, Molly Barker. After Logan gets into a fight with Al Capone’s men, Molly shows up dead. The killer turns out to be Victor Creed, who is working for Capone, but was acting on his own initiative. Creed lures Logan to a meeting where he and seven of Moran’s men are shot down (the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, in other words). Unusually, while Logan is healing, Creed takes the opportunity to give a mutant-supremacist speech, apparently wondering why his superiority – so obvious to him – isn’t actually translating into power and status beyond being a henchman.

It’s a somewhat interesting take on Creed. For Logan, it’s more generic, but hey, if anyone wants to do 1920s gangster stories with Logan, the precedent is there. Logan’s involvement in smuggling during the Prohibition had previously been mentioned in Wolverine vol 3 #12, but that was dialogue in the middle of a dream scene; Tieri’s story confirms it actually happened.

Probably somewhere in the 1920s, Logan makes his first trip to Madripoor, the island principality with massive disparities of wealth. Some stories portray Madripoor as virtually lawless, but since it apparently supports a thriving business community and a wealthy population who would be unlikely to hang around in a state of total anarchy, we should probably take that as meaning that the authorities are heavily corrupt, and pay little attention to what’s going on in the poor parts of town. All we seem to know for sure about Logan’s first trip is that it predates 1932 (when he makes a return trip), and that it happened during his “freelancin’ days” (according to Wolverine: Origins Annual #1).

Savage Wolverine #12 has a flashback to South Africa in 1931, where Logan meets a herd of elephants. (It’s intended as an echo of the famous doe-stalking scene in X-Men vol 1 #109.) According to the following issue, this begins “an 80-year long history of annual visits to Africa and a friendship with a herd of elephants.” We surely can’t take this literally – there must be long stretches of Logan’s history where he doesn’t remember the elephants or simply can’t get there – but apparently he really does drop in on his elephants on a regular basis over the following decades.

Flashback in WOLVERINE vol 4 #10
“Wolverine’s Revenge!, part 1” by Jason Aaron, Renato Guedes & Jose Wilson Magalhaes
June 2011

Striking miners in Kentucky bring in Logan as a “special negotiator” to help with a brutal mine owner and his Pinkertons. When the mine owner drunkenly attacks the union rep, Logan kills him with a knife. The mine owner’s son sees the killing and is duly horrified. Logan warns the boy not to come for revenge when he grows up, because it’d suck him into a life he should want no part of. The boy will completely ignore this advice and become the leader of a Wolverine revenge organisation, the Red Right Hand. This is another thread which keeps popping up throughout Wolverine’s back story, thanks to a handful of Jason Aaron stories which have rarely been referenced anywhere else. (Those same stories establish that Logan has a large number of illegitimate children, but there are no further flashbacks expanding on the details.)

The flashback is placed “eighty years ago”, which at the time of publication meant 1931 – but the kid shown in this story needs to remain alive in the main story, so it’s probably been dragged forward a bit by sliding time. Historically, the reference is to the Harlan County War, which lasted for most of the 1930s.

WOLVERINE: THE AMAZING IMMORTAL MAN AND OTHER BLOODY TALES
“The Amazing Immortal Man” by David Lapham & Jose Villarrubia
May 2008

Somewhere in the 1930s (though it seems to think that Logan was still in wild-man mode in this timeframe). Logan is arrested in Tennessee for stealing chickens, and gets sold to a circus, where he winds up using his healing powers as a sideshow attraction. The circus uses him as a distraction to rob the towns they visit. Logan draws the line at endangering the lion-tamer’s pregnant wife Olga, but the rest of the circus doesn’t, and so the whole arrangement collapses in predictable chaos. Basically a random anthology story that has to get shoehorned into the timeline somewhere.

In Wolverine vol 2 #183, Logan mentions that he saw Lou Gehrig play baseball. Gehrig played from 1923 to 1939, which is a pretty wide range – but it’s going to go somewhere among these events. In Wolverine vol 2 #187, he mentions meeting Jim Beam (who was responsible for rebuilding the distillery business that now bears his name in the aftermath of Prohibition) – if he’s not joking, that goes somewhere in here too. 

Flashbacks in WOLVERINE: ORIGINS ANNUAL #1
“Return to Madripoor” by Daniel Way & Kaare Andrews
July 2007

This expands on some teaser flashbacks from Wolverine vol 2 #126 (a Chris Claremont story from 1998). Returning to Madripoor, Logan hooks up with his old flame Seraph, who runs the Princess Bar. (Logan later becomes the owner, and it becomes a standard setting for his Madripoor stories in the late 80s.) Seraph works for Romulus, and she’s carrying on a relationship with Logan partly in order to train and steer him for her employer. On the other hand, she thinks that Logan doesn’t deserve what Romulus has planned for him, and feels guilty about manipulating him. Later, Seraph insists on tagging along when Logan goes on a mission with Viper (the details of which are not specified). The group encounter Victor Creed, who nearly kills Logan.

Viper gets Logan to safety while Seraph seemingly dies in a heroic last stand against Creed. However, she shows up alive and well in Wolverine: Origins #16, nearly a decade later, and also written by Daniel Way – so either she has some sort of healing powers of her own, or this is another staged event by Romulus. As Way repeatedly makes clear, Romulus’s plan to keep Logan under control includes killing off any woman that Logan gets too close to, in order to dehumanise him – but Romulus also repeatedly puts his own agents in that position, which makes rather more sense if it’s a scam, at least when they’re the ones involved.

Wolverine vol 3 #58 has a single-panel flashback to Logan fighting Lazaer following a life-threatening injury, wearing his Patch outfit. The Marvel Index treats that as referring to this story, and it’s as good a choice as any.

Flashback in WOLVERINE vol 2 #113
“The Wind from the East” by Larry Hama, Leinil Francis Yu & Edgar Tadeo
May 1997

Shanghai. Logan stops two Japanese soldiers from abusing a couple of locals who have stolen a box (which becomes the macguffin in the present day story). A captain summarily executes one of the soldiers for dishonourable conduct, and then invites Logan to study the martial arts at his dojo in Kanazawa. The older local man makes a competing offer, but Logan turns them both down for now. If you hadn’t guessed, the Japanese officer is Ogun, and this is Logan’s first meeting with him; less obviously, his sidekick is the future Stick.

The story itself doesn’t give a precise date, but there are Japanese soldiers acting as if they have some form of authority in Shanghai. I’m not at all familiar with this part of history, but as I understand it, Shanghai came under Japanese control following the Battle of Shanghai in 1937. However, parts of the city were under de facto Japanese control from 1932. The Wolverine Index timeline has this flashback taking place in around 1920, but also wrongly describes it as happening in Japan.

This can go pretty much anywhere in the 1930s, as long as it leaves space for Logan to train with Ogun before World War II. (Technically, the evidence for the Ogun stint coming before World War II is that Logan is familiar with Japan in wartime stories. Since Wolverine: Exit Wounds has now established that Logan lived in Japan much earlier than that, it’s technically possible to suggest that Wolverine meets Ogun in Shanghai in the late 30s but doesn’t train with him until after the war – but that doesn’t seem to have been anyone’s intention, and Logan is doing vaguely samurai-type stuff in some of the wartime stories, which he presumably learns from Ogun.)

SAVAGE WOLVERINE #14-17
“Wrath” by Richard Isanove
January to April 2014

Logan is a bootlegger again, this time in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. A French gangster, Pierre-Anselme, kills Logan’s friend Elias, and abducts Elias’s daughter. Logan rescues her, maiming the face of Pierre’s partner Marion in the process. Logan sets off with Elias’s four children for South Dakota, where they have an uncle and aunt, but the vengeful gangsters are in pursuit. On the way, one of the kids is killed, and another dies of consumption, but Logan succeeds in delivering the other two to their new home. Unfortunately, he sets off again just before the gangsters arrive. Realising his mistake, he doubles back in time to save the kids, but the uncle dies. It’s rather slow paced, but it’s not a bad pulp storyline. It is, of course, an early sighting on our timeline for “Logan tries to save innocent young companions from being dragged into his bleak and inescapable life of violence”, which is one of the standard plots of Wolverine solo stories.

Flashbacks in WOLVERINE #314-317
“Covenant” by Cullen Bunn, Paul Pelletier & David Meikis
October to December 2012

1934. Logan seems to be some sort of freelance adventurer at this point. The secretive Covenant – Vanessa Baker, the Menace, Murderous Lion, Wyatt Crowley, Jefferson Chambers and Ulysses Bloodstone – hire him to break into a temple in Marrakech and kill the Dreaming Maiden, a woman whose dreams have strange effects on the real world. The Covenant are scared of her powers, but she persuades Logan to save her, and he helps her hide in a cave. He tells her that as long as she stops dreaming, he’ll eventually come back for her. Later, in 1935 Shanghai, Logan falsely reports back to the Covenant that he’s completed his mission. The Covenant offer him more assassination work, but he declines.

Somewhere around here, Logan apparently starts using “Wolverine” as a nickname, because he’s using it in…

X-MEN: TRUE FRIENDS #2-3
by Chris Claremont, Rick Leonardi, Al Williamson, Jimmy Palmiotti & Shannon Blanchard
October 1999

1936. Logan has reconciled with Raven Darkhölme, who is now also working with the precognitive Irene Adler (later Destiny). Presumably following Irene’s predictions, Logan shows up in Edinburgh to stop Nazi agents from killing aristocrat Alasdhair Kinross (Moira’s MacTaggert’s grandfather). Kinross and a time-travelling Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde) have uncovered a Nazi plot to destabilise the British monarchy on behalf of the Shadow King (an evil psychic entity who becomes a major villain towards the end of the 1980s). Logan also gets to meet fellow time traveller Phoenix (Rachel Summes) and… well, the future Queen, because it’s one of those stories. The Shadow King’s defeat somehow or other leads to Shadowcat and Phoenix being returned to their own time.

This story isn’t on Unlimited yet. Logan never shows any signs of recalling this meeting when Kitty or Rachel show up in Claremont’s present day stories, so presumably by the time he wrote True Friends, Claremont was on board with the idea that Logan had massive memory gaps.

According to Wolverine vol 2 #35-37, Logan then travels to the Spanish Civil War. He’s present at the bombing of Guernica (on 26 April 1937) and meets Eugene Judd (later Puck) and Ernest Hemingway. Although the storyline is set during this period, it depicts a time-travelling Wolverine and Puck temporarily displacing their counterparts – so we never actually see what the originals were up to at this point, except in a photograph.

Flashbacks in WOLVERINE ANNUAL #1 (2019)
“Acts of Evil” by Jody Houser & Geraldo Borges
September 2019

A classic example of the “I’m sure it’ll fit in Wolverine’s backstory somewhere” approach to continuity. Never mind all that Romulus, Madripoor, freelance investigation stuff – it’s 1938, and Logan moves to Hollywood with his girlfriend, aspiring actress Celia Stroud! She dumps him after six months, but he stays in Hollywood as a studio worker, unable to move on with his life. When Celia discovers his healing factor after an on-set accident, she introduces him to a group that she’s joined. Naturally, it’s a cult, through which Celia has made contact with Morgan Le Fey (of the present day, for some reason). Morgan possesses Celia, then sticks Logan in his Wolverine costume and makes him fight images of villains from his future. Apparently this is meant to provoke rage and pain that Morgan can feed on, but of course none of it means anything to Logan at this point in his life, so he just fights his way out and slashes Celia/Morgan. Morgan breaks the link, and Logan is shocked at hurting Celia, so he runs away.

This issue really makes no sense in the context of the stories around it, but the dates are what they are. The framing sequence clarifies that Celia was a willing participant in this scheme, because Morgan promised eternal life. Because Logan interrupts the spell, she does indeed get eternal life, but not eternal youth, so she simply lives on into the present day in an increasingly feeble state.

We round out the pre-World War II stuff with a trip to Japan to train with Ogun. This is where Logan picks up his ninja skills, and since he has them in some of the World War II flashbacks, this must come first. The actual flashbacks from this period are minimal and depict points very early in the training:

• Wolverine vol 2 #103 has a generic scene from early in Logan’s training. Ogun quotes Sun Tzu at him, as you do.
• Wolverine vol 2 #89 shows Ogun using his superior skill to toy with Logan. Logan flies into a berserker rage and defeats Ogun, but Ogun tells him that he will not be a true master until he has balanced both his human and animal sides.
• Wolverine vol 2 #169 shows Logan a few weeks into his training. Ogun’s dojo is attacked by ninjas working for crimelord Ugama Hana. At Ogun’s request, Logan stands aside to let Ogun fight the ninja. Ogun defeats the ninja but then allows Hana to run him through with a sword. Completely unaffected, Ogun removed the sword from his body and decapitates Hana – then tells Logan that death is merely a state of mind, and he is beyond conventional mortal concepts. Logan is, understandably, completely confused by all this, and uncertain whether it’s some sort of trick.

Ogun is the main villain in the Kitty Pryde & Wolverine miniseries, which broadly establishes that he has a magical or psychic ability (it’s never clear which) to transplant his personality into a new body – or possibly a copy of his personality, which then carries on as if it was the original. Ogun tries this on Kitty without success in Kitty Pryde & Wolverine, and indicates that he had the same in mind for Logan – but apparently Logan never realised this at the time, and tells Kitty that he was “blind not to see what he truly was”. So either Ogun was taking it much more slowly with Logan (he breaks Kitty within days) or Logan was much more resistant to his technique. Either way, Logan apparently leaves Ogun believing that they’re on good terms.

Wolverine vol 3 #40 throws in Ogun also points Logan in the direction of another sensei, Bando Suboro. He’s the sensei at Jasmine Falls, where Logan meets Daken’s mother. There’s a stray reference in Wolverine: Origins #9 which tries to place the Jasmine Falls stuff before World War II, but that’s impossible (because by the time Logan leaves Jasmine Falls, Bucky has become the Winter Soldier). So we’ll get to all that in a couple of posts.

Next time, World War II.

Edited on 20 July 2020 to add references to the Savage Wolverine stories, on 7 September 2020 to add reference to Age of Ultron #9, and on 25 July 2021 to add Stick. Edited on 10 October 2021 to add the Lou Gehrig reference and on 22 October 2021 to add Jim Beam. Edited on 28 November 2021 to add the reference to Wolverine vol 3 #12.