If you know me at all, you know that I am a Detective Comics guy and not a Marvel one. Superman and Batman and Green Lantern and The Flash were always my favorites and Spider-Man and the X-Men were campy and / or sort of reject second-class heroes. I always thought of Marvel’s universe as the Pepsi to DC’s Coke, if you know what I mean. I certainly didn’t hate them or anything; they just weren’t my bag.
There was one notable exception, though. In February of 1987 I picked up a copy of Spider-Man versus Wolverine Vol. 1 at my local comic shop for the sole reason that it was the first issue and I thought it might be valuable someday. I knew Spidey from The Electric Company, of course, and pop-culture in general. But I had never heard of Wolverine and assumed he was a villain based on the fact that he was, y’know, fighting Spider-Man. I remember reading the comic and loving the story very much. It was as good as any of the Batman or Superman stories I’d read and I – obviously – really dug the idea of an invulnerable metal skeleton, rapid healing, and those adamantium claws. (I was very disappointed to learn that adamantium is not real.)
But that was pretty much that. I wasn’t about to betray my allegiance to DC and start reading Marvel comics, too. It was like a quick little infidelity, meaningless and soon forgotten. I always remembered how cool Wolverine was, but I was a die-hard DC kid.
So when Marvel started pumping out X-Men movies with Hugh Jackman as Logan, I was somewhat interested. I remember I watched the first X-Men movie and maybe the second, but I didn’t love them enough to consider myself a fan or to feel any sort of need to devour the barrage of them that were released over the last decade or so. I knew they’d even made a spin-off Wolverine movie or two, but didn’t pay much attention.
Then I started seeing ads for Logan and the trailer looked awesome. I didn’t want to jump into the middle of anything, though, so I Googled “in what order should I watch Wolverine movies” and found lots of conflicting answers. I finally settled on a Quora article and some other Q&A sites like that and they all suggested it wasn’t important to watch all the X-Men films to enjoy the Wolverine ones, and that it also didn’t really matter what order you watched the two previous Wolverine ones to enjoy Logan.
So one night after my wife and kids were asleep I purchased the X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) / The Wolverine (2013) double-feature on AppleTV and watched them both. I finished around three in the morning and thought they were absolutely fantastic. Hugh Jackman is really a great actor, I think, and the writing and plots of both were excellent. Now I just need to get around to seeing Logan!
And, yes, I still have my copy of Spider-Man versus Wolverine Vol. 1 and hundreds of other comics. They’re all stored neatly in 3-ring binders and some day not long from now probably I will let my son start reading them.