Jokin’ with Wolverine

Yesterday’s article had a cool fight, but you know what it was lacking?  Banter.

What makes battles even better?  When the heroes are cracking jokes during it.  And we’re going to explore that today with Wolverine and a few of his buddies.  You remember Wolverine, right?

Yeah, this Wolverine:

I like him.  He’s short, hairy, grumpy, deadly, and has easily the worst haircut in the Marvel universe. His history is lengthy and complicated, but I’m sure you’ve heard of his unbreakable claws and speedy healing factor.  We’ll save the back story for another day.  Let’s have some fun in Wolverine #17 through #19, written by Jason Aaron.

Introducing his team up partner for this arc, Gorilla-Man:

Gorilla-Man’s an easy superhero to figure out.  He’s got the body of a gorilla, but the intelligence of a human.  The end.  Strangely, Gorilla-Man (real name Ken Hale) has been around since 1954.  Hale liked being a mercenary, but didn’t like the idea of dying.  In his travels, he heard of an African legend that stated if you killed the Gorilla-Man, you get to be immortal.  So he did.  And unfortunately, one of the side effects turned him into the next Gorilla-Man.  Though on the plus side, he is immortal.  Like from old age and disease, not an adamantium claw through the chest.  As you can imagine, Gorilla-Man isn’t a terribly popular superhero.

An old kung fu master and a child dressed like a Charles Dickens character follows them around. Because why not?  Onward with the banter!

Regardless of their witty repartee, the fight doesn’t go well.  The two non superheroes get captured. How sad.

Before we get to the second part of our story, I must point out this Wolverine story is delightfully refreshing.  Y’see, he has a bunch of skeletons in his closet, so Wolverine stories tend to be dark, depressing, and violent.  When you come across an arc where he travels through the center of the earth with a smart gorilla fighting dragons, that breath of fresh air cannot be sweet enough. Unfortunately, with the old man and child out of the picture for a while, who’ll take their place?

Fat Cobra, one of the Immortal Weapons!  Do you know who Iron Fist is?  He’s a billionaire blonde American who traveled to a mystical city in Asia and became their kung fu champion.  He gets to project his chi into energy blasts or whatever someone uses chi to do.  Luckily, a whole bunch of other magic Asian cities exist, each with their own kung fu champion and crazy chi powers.  Together, they’re the Immortal Weapons.  Iron Fist became an Avenger and for a long time fought crime in New York City as a mercenary with Luke Cage.  And Iron Fist”s girlfriend looks like she stepped right out of a blaxploitation movie.  But if you exclude all of that and the fact that Fat Cobra’s first appearance in the Marvel universe was only four years ago, Fat Cobra totally takes the crown as the best.

Continue the dragon fight:

Wolverine’ll be fine.  But you know the best part of fighting ninjas in the earth’s core?  They’ve never heard of The Illiad.

Primates wielding machine guns and obese guys punching each other rocks, right?  But see how much better the fight has become with banter?  It’d be hard to argue that Spider-Man wouldn’t be half as popular as he is today without the sheer amount of one-liners that man spews.  Jokes during battles make them more fun, keep readers interested, and help justify convincing your wife that the boxes of comics in the basement will totally last the test of time.

So what do superheroes do after a successful mission?  Drink?  Yes, of course.  They’re only human/gorillas after all.

Luckily there isn’t a no shirt, no service rule in the bar, right?  I’m sorry, this is why I don’t write comics.