50 GREATEST FICTIONAL BADASSES

#5 – LOGAN/WOLVERINE from Marvel Comics.

He certainly wasn’t the first Canadian super-hero. But he was the best, the coolest, and (unfortunately for him) the most popular.

By now, most everyone (including my poor wife) knows the harrowing tale of James Howlett: a mutant with the ability to rapidly heal and has his skeleton laced with unbreakable steel. He has a mysterious past and no memory of it. He is, as one of his own team members would label him, “a sawed-off psycho” who puts his instinct to slash everything in sight above the welfare of everyone around him. As is most cases, as time went on, his profile became more complex: a berserker, a samurai, a loner, the warrior-poet to Professor Xavier’s dream team.

And then he got popular, and goddammit, popularity for badasses is a dance on the razor’s edge. Popularity not only means a wider audience has discovered you, it means those who own you can make more money off you — and those guys always want more, more, more. It’s like they got kids to feed or something. But for our anti-heroes, it usually means they get gentrified.

For instance, in 1984, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created the satirical super-heroes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. To say their exploits were violent would be an understatement (I remember quite well Leonardo cannonballing through the air and separating Shredder’s head from his body). But by 1988, the Turtles were published in Archie Comics. They shilled pizzas in a van similar to the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine, saying shit like “he’s been shell-shocked” while thwarting a gang of purse snatchers. My wife advises me not to talk at length about their Vanilla Ice team-up.

Gentrification-through-Popularity kills more badasses than machine gun bullets. The original Ghostbusters film was filled with salty language, ghostly blow-, obs and cigarette butts. In comparison, the highly anticipated sequel was as clean as the cartoon.

There’s a clever scene in the often-abysmal RoboCop 2 where Robo’s been uploaded with hundreds of Directives from parent groups to make him more accessible to the community. The best of which are “Don’t say that you are always prompt when you are not” and “Don’t be oversensitive to the hostility and negativity of others” — wise advise when your daily routine consists of stopping child drug lords from tearing you apart with car-magnets. Robo, of course, chooses the possibility of death by electrocution over being a slave to this nightmarish existence.

And poor Wolverine, the ferocious killing machine, the consummate loner, the guy who one comrade said smelled like a wet-dog, is often featured on a kid’s cartoon show where the heroes are pint-sized and quick with a lame joke.

In the comics, he serves on seven super hero teams while being the head administrator at Xavier’s School (just what kids want to read about: a principal at a school! Yay!!). He trades quips with Captain America and Spidey now, and the writers once had him on a lame reality show to discuss his feelings about the latest apocalypse averted. Just barf.

He did bat two out of three in his own cinematic franchise, with the last one being all sorts of amazing. And we’ll always have the early issues to go back to, where he really was the best at what he did, and what he did best wasn’t ever nice. A bottle of Pilsner to you, old friend.

William Stryker (attempting to recruit him): “Your country needs you.”

Logan: “I’m Canadian.”