Carrying on the legacy of its predecessor, X-Men ’97 leaves no stone unturned when it comes to adapting and remixing the great X-Men comics of the 1980s and ’90s. And the final moments of this week’s episode, “Tolerance is Extinction – Part 2,” are no exception.
If you’ve seen it, you know, and if you haven’t you should go watch it, because what comes next is one of the strangest swerves Marvel Comics ever tried to take with Wolverine.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for “Tolerance is Extinction – Part 2,” the penultimate episode of X-Men ’97 season 1.]
Image: Marvel Animation
At the end of “Tolerance is Extinction – Part 2,” Magneto rips the adamantium out of Wolverine’s body, in a moment ripped straight from the pages of 1993’s X-Men #25, and originally inspired by an offhand comment in a Marvel writers’ meeting. Comics writer Peter David recalled the moment to Comic Book Resources in 2007:
What happened was that we were all discussing how we were going to have Magneto’s return be a big deal. The other writers were bouncing around the notion of a huge Magneto/Wolverine slugfest and I said, thinking out loud, “Boy, y’know, if I’m Magneto, I don’t even bother with Wolverine. I just yank out his skeleton and be done with him.” And there was dead silence for a moment, and then everyone looked at me and said, “That’s a great idea.”
And so the adamantium-less Wolverine era was born. Losing his metal didn’t put much of a crimp in his snickt-ing; to all of the X-Men’s surprise (Wolverine included, thanks to his history of memory loss), it turned out that Logan’s claws were actually a part of his mutation, not a modification from the Weapon X program that laced his skeleton with adamantium in the first place. Underneath the metal, he had a sextet of jagged, retractable claw bones.
So he could still cut the hell out of a guy — but recall that the whole point of adamantium is that it can cut through anything but more adamantium. Wolverine was no longer the slice and dice anything guy, and while his healing factor was still around, it was now possible to, say, lop off his limbs.
Since X-Men ’97’s version of this happens at the end of the episode, we can’t say for certain where the show is going with a no-adamantium Wolverine. But the comics offer one, somewhat dubious, path forward: Wolverine’s beast era.
That time Wolverine lost his nose
Image: Marvel Comics
After losing his adamantium, Wolverine gradually became more and more animalistic in manner. Like, he started living in the woods outside the X-Mansion instead of, you know, in a house. After a failed attempt to put the adamantium back in him, he started to physically transform as well, most notably losing his nose. Eventually he stopped talking almost entirely and was just… kind of a weird dog man? That the X-Men knew? There’s a comic where he licks Cyclops’ face in an attempt to revive him.
The idea behind the slow redesign was that now that some portion of Wolverine’s healing factor was no longer constantly occupied by keeping his body from rejecting the pounds and pounds of inorganic metal stuck inside it, it had room to show it’s full “potential” as a mutation. And that potential was… this.
Image: Marvel Comics
Wolverine’s feral slide only lasted a couple of years, but it was, as you can see, pretty memorable.
How did Wolverine get his adamantium back in the comics?
Eventually, just as the decade was closing in 1999, Wolverine did get his adamantium skeleton back, thanks to Apocalypse. The big blue villain wanted a new Horseman of Death, and pitted adamantium-less Wolverine against his long-time adamantium-laced nemesis Sabretooth in single combat to see who was more worthy. Wolverine won the fight, and Apocalypse — a villain who never misses an opportunity for ironic flare — yanked the adamantium out of Sabretooth’s body and stuck it in Wolverine’s.
With just one episode left in its season, X-Men ’97 season 1 doesn’t have time for a whole feral Wolverine arc, or for Apocalypse to show up and go through a whole horseman trial. But the show has been greenlighted for a second and third season.
You might not have to say goodbye to Wolverine’s nose just yet, but maybe get used to the idea, just in case.