Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Wolverine's Heat Claws

I don't know what to make of this one, I really don't. It may very well be the strangest entry on this blog, and may I remind you we've had characters imported before they debuted, characters imported as different characters, characters that technically immigrated but never appeared in the thing they immigrated from, whatever oddness was going on with Venom's Spawn, and more. But first, some backstory.

As you may know, Wolverine died back in 2014 in the aptly named miniseries Death of Wolverine. Everyone knew at the time that his death was a stunt, but what people didn't realize was how long it would take for him to come back. Four years gone for a character of his magnitude is a lifetime, especially since there was a reality reboot in the middle there. Marvel had the perfect opportunity to erase Wolverine's death during the Secret Wars event and they chose not to use it. That's huge.

But now Wolverine has returned, in the equally aptly titled miniseries Return of Wolverine (September 2018), except there's something different about him. His claws, specifically. There's something different about his claws. They're "heat claws".


At San Diego Comic-Con in July, the writer, Charles Soule, stated in a video message that the heat claws are based on Wolverine's appearance in the fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom. But here's where it gets weird: nobody knows what he's talking about.

Basically, Wolverine doesn't have heat claws in Marvel vs. Capcom (1997). He doesn't have special claws of any kind. The closest thing people can figure is that he's actually talking about Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (2011).  In that game, Wolverine's special moves are depicted as a series of flashing slashes. This could've given Soule the idea for Wolverine to have energy claws.


Some other fans have suggested that Soule is mistaken about the video game that influenced him, and that he was actually talking about the X-Men arcade game from 1992. Although Wolverine didn't have heat claws in that, either, his swipes were often illustrated with an energetic effect.


No matter how you slice it, everyone agrees they're a canon immigrant but no one is sure where from. And that's nuts.




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