X-Men In General

They probably will, given the gimmick of the Ultimates book seems to be building a secret network of rebels and 6160 Storm has already been introduced as a rebel fighter.

If you have any questions about Krakoa that you don't think will be resolved by the end, you can send them to Jordan White for a column he'll be doing. I asked about what was going on with Tier in Alaya's New Mutants!

A post Tom Brevoort made in 2009 about Logan's healing factor

Eh there's ways to render regenerators in risk just fine. Most of the crazy ones aren't exactly able to escape a box if you built it well enough. Sealing is OP.

It is canon that drowning is something a Healing Factor cannot prevent in the Marvel verse.

Didn't Logan only come back from a single cell once, and that was explained as him winning a bet with an angel of death, or something like that?

That began in WW1 and that's when Azrael was using the alias anagram Lazear but they dropped the whole thing. The deal originally was as long as Wolverine is able to defeat him whenever he has a near-death experience, he goes back to life.

Another incident of Wolverine's ridiculous healing factor is during X of Swords when he did the flaming breast stroke in a lake in the Hand's hell dimension where Solem observed Wolverine regenerating from an adamantium skeleton to 100% healthy and whole.

Edited by KRider on Apr 21st 2024 at 7:51:24 AM

To clarify, the recovering from a single atom involved a mystic crystal. The scene was meant to be weird and unexpected, because magic was involved.

The Angel of Death thing came much, much later, and was much, much stupider. Especially since the arc was supposed to make it so Wolverine wouldn't be as unkillable, and it did not even come close to accomplishing that.

But yeah, I do find Wolverine's healing factor to be way too overpowered. I think back to when he first met Jubilee. He had been beaten and crucified, and he was dying. These days? That would be a minor inconvenience for him, before he frees himself and tears through the Reavers.

His healing factor being more limited made for more interesting stories.

Another side effect of Wolverine's supercharged healing factor is you get writers creating scenes like Garth Ennis making Punisher run Wolverine over w/ a steamroller and parking it on top of him and Brian Bendis having The Hood shoot Wolverine in the nuts so he can write Wolverine saying "Mine will grow back. Yours won't." and after the fight Bendis had Wolverine musing whether his genitalia will grow back bigger.

On that note a fun idea would be doing a take that joke to a stereotypical Garth Ennis protagonist, making fun of him like Ennis regularly does to superheroes.

Not Punisher, but a very obvious expy of say Billy Butcher and doing something like "Yo guy, wearing all black and trench coats was already trying too hard to be edgy as a teenager. But now as an adult you just really need a new wardrobe, you look like a guy trying too hard to be young and cool."

The funny thing about Wolverine's Healing Factor being so op is that canonically it's weakened because it's constantly dealing with the adamantium in his body.

That's right, he would be healing even better if he didn't have an adamantium skeleton.

It's kind of like how Nate Grey aka Cable can't use most of his considerable psychic power (hence his reliance on big guns instead) because almost all of it is focused on keeping the Transmode Virus from killing him.

Edit:

Another canon limitation of the Healing Factor that's occasionally addressed is that the energy has to come from somewhere. Logan is sometime depicted as a Big Eater since he needs the calories to fuel healing. Storylines set in various future settings also consistently depict the Healing Factor slowing down as Logan ages. The Healing Factor is why Logan is Long-Lived, but it can't make him immortal.

Edited by M84 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 4:53:10 PM

Though, interestingly, his adamantium skeleton means running Wolverine over with a steamroller actually probably wouldn't do much harm to him. It would wreck the muscles and tendons in his legs, but all his internal organs? Nice and snug.

Yeah, though given the things he regularly survives anyway, I'm inclined to think his healing factor being held back is pretty thoroughly ignored by pretty much every writer of the past 20 years or so.

One other tidbit that writers do sometimes address is that Wolverine's Healing Factor made him sloppy. He doesn't bother to dodge or block a lot of stuff thrown his way because he can just heal it up. Which is a problem whenever his Healing Factor doesn't work properly and he actually has to avoid damage.

That and even he's not sure what the actual limit of his Healing Factor is. A sufficiently powerful attack can overwhelm it and kill him. X-23 nearly died despite having a stronger Healing Factor (due to having less adamantium in her body and being younger) when she took a blast from Nimrod right in the face.

TBH, Wolverine's not the most ridiculous Healing Factor even in Marvel. Juggernaut has him beat in this regard. Sure, Wolverine could recover from being reduced to a skeleton. But Cain Marko? He can keep fighting as a skeleton. And much like the whole Angel of Death deal, the Juggernaut's healing is also explicitly supernatural.

Edited by M84 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 5:10:27 PM

Why is drowning something a Healing Factor cannot prevent?

His body still needs oxygen. The Healing Factor can’t compensate for a lack of something his body needs. Logan once killed his son Daken by keeping his face stuck in a puddle long enough to drown him.

Starvation and thirst are also legitimate threats to him. There was one storyline where he was hunted by Scylla and Bloodscream throughout the Canadian wilderness. Wolverine's Healing Factor didn't prevent him from suffering serious hunger pangs. He only barely survived because he managed to kill a wolf and lived off the carcass. The first thing he did when he found civilization was to order a lot of burgers at a local diner. He made sure they weren't wolf burgers.

Fortunately, his pursuers were also in bad shape — Scylla's cybernetics were running low on energy due to her not eating enough, while Bloodscream's "food"^note he kidnapped an old man and spent the whole journey drinking his blood, eventually bleeding him completely had also run dry. Bloodscream solved the problem by draining Scylla dry, revealing that was the real reason he partnered up with her.

Edited by M84 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 6:10:19 PM

So a surefire way to kill Wolverine is to put him in a box at the bottom of the ocean with no food. XD

Wolverine also has a lot of trouble swimming with all that metal.

IIRC decapitation would also kill him if his head and body were kept apart from each other for some length of time. Can't recall the source though.

Though chopping his head off is hard due to the adamantium.

Hasn't Percy's current "Sabretooth War" arc dismembered Logan?

I remember being a bit surprised because pretty much all previous portrayals show his skeleton holding together even when it was bare bones, both during regeneration and in scenes where it actually killed him (e.g. Days of Future Past).

I half-seriously believe that Logan has just forgotten much of his combat training because of how often his memory has been tampered with.

While we're on the subject of Sabretooth and Wolverine, what are you guys' thoughts on whether or not they should be related. And if so, what should that relationship be? Siblings, father and son, etc?

I mean Claremont wanted Sabretooth to be Logan's father.

I think Austen's X-Men run and Wolverine's Romulus plot arc have soured the idea that all feral mutants should be related.

Edited by Mrph1 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 9:30:20 AM

X6 It was Excalibur Vol. 1, #100. Cyclops, Jean, Archangel, Psylocke and Cannonball went to Muir Island to get ahold of the Xavier Protocols because of Onslaught. Scott, Jean, and Moira had just accessed the one for Xavier and when Warren walked in, it accessed the one from Logan and revealed just how much Xavier plans for and was dependent on Logan's then-lack of adamantium.

Edited by Anicomicgeek on Apr 22nd 2024 at 4:11:33 AM

Wait. was5 the op regeneration from a single cell everyone is talking about a different one than the one during the (first) Civil War era when his entire body save for his skeleton was destroyed by a point blank explosion and he somehow got back up in a page or two?
I thought this was the one the post was referring to.
I think the ridiculous over the top healing factor works for the Juggernaut or the Hulk, but wolverine should be toned down a little.
It also works for Deadpool, but in his case, that's because taking ridiculous amounts of punishment is part of the fun.

Funny enough, I had a conversation about how (among several other flaws with the premise) Old Man Logan should have never been able to kill the X-men of his reality (unless they were all severely weaker and far less numerous than 616).spoiler They have several telepath that could mentally incapacitate him and/or make him realize he was being manipulated. And even if they somehow couldn't, the rest of the team could have easily incapacitated him then sealed him in some way before his healing factor kicks in.
And the excuse that they wouldn't fight back because he is their friend and they wouldn't want to hurt him would work for any other characters, but not for him. All of the X-men know that thanks to his healing factor, they could go hogwild on him and he could walk it off.
All that not considering that while sweet-natured characters like, say, Jubilee wouldn't attack him, that's not true of everyone. Like your not telling me Emma Frost wouldn't mentally fry him the moment she realized he poses a threat. Or that Scott "I'll do what need to be done" Summers wouldn't take out the glasses and pulverize Logan's lower half to stop him.
Even with the "it's not the same reality" it basically require them to be so completely different they stop even being alternate versions and are just something else.