Like A Fine Wine...

Wolverine's getting better with age.

Actually, let me rephrase that. Like a two-day old steak, Wolverine's getting tougher with age.

Nowadays, Wolverine can have his flesh roasted off his bones by Nitro - and I mean all his flesh - and be good as new (physically) in an hour or two. But once upon a time, he wasn't nearly as Wile E. Coyote-ish. You could stab him, burn him, maybe beat on him some (OK, a lot), and it would take issues for him to recover completely. In the meantime, he'd be hobbled, trying to get by with a body that was less than whole.

Of course, that didn't prevent him from still getting into fights with things like Nimrod, but nobody ever said Logan had much common sense.

The best explanation I can come up with is that when Apocalypse reattached Adamantium to Wolverine, he went ahead and amped his healing factor up. The tougher he is to kill, the better a Horseman he makes, and the abilities are already there. It's just a matter of goosing them up a little (or a lot).

Of course, the "really fast healing Logan" phenomenon is more recent than that, now that I recall it taking about five or six issues for one eye to finish regrowing, around issues 160-165 of his previous series. He had the metal back by then, so I guess that's another theory out the window.

So is his greater resistance to damage a result of writers thinking that's the best way to tell good Wolverine stories? The more damage he's dealt, the better it'll be? Or is it a case of the writers just feeling kind of silly? They've got a toy they can subject to almost anything, because they can argue that it can bounce back from all of it.

Oh, and I guess I should mention all the posts are labeled now, for what that's worth. And I hope you had a Merry Christmas, or at least a nice Sunday and Monday, if you are not of the Christmas-celebrating persuasion.