There was an entire miniseries called Wolverine: The Origin or something similar. I didn't read it myself but it seems to have been pretty well-received.

None of the classic Marvel heroes' origins really stand up to scrutiny in terms of science, but who cares? Worse even when you look at the villains: the number of commie spies that turned villain because of some stupid accident or other is just mindboggling.

Wolverine's origin may have been a big mystery, the X-men were unique in not needing one, being mutants and all.

I agree with Spidey as having a cool origin, the ultimate in wish fulfilment: nerdy teen becomes buff through Science!

Iron MAn's origina is neato too, minus the heart condition, which was just endless smaltz.

The only thing wrong with Spider-man's origin is that its so good and so timeless that writers feel like there must be something wrong with it. Its not tied to the Cold War like many of the rest of the early Marvel heroes, so there's no need to much about with changing when it happened (and no references to "Russians" or "Reds" or "Commies" that need to be cleaned up). It also doesn't involve any odd aliens from space that don't really fit with the character as he evolved (like Thor's origin).

Dr. Strange's origin is also classic and timeless, which is why I assume that JMS felt the need to muck with it. Both Spider-man and Dr. Strange have origin stories that are as much about personal responsibility as they are heroism (I'd guess because Ditko was involved with both of them, but I don't know for sure).

I'd put Wonder Woman's origin up with the classics (along with Batman and Superman). The whole "secret contest on Paradise Island" thing is pretty cool.

While Spider-Man's origin doesn't involve commies or aliens, it does involve radiation giving him powers instead of cancer. The extremely simple solution is to change that to whatever technology is exotic and in vogue at the moment, such as genetic engineering in the movies.

The Wally West origin is a neat form of hero-wish fulfilment. Kid with complacent parents gains the powers of his adopted father figure.

Wolverine:The Origin was horrible. I cannot believe anyone at marvel looked at that script and said "run with it." Well and truly awful. My favorite origin is the reworked origin Alan Moore gave Swamp Thing. That was a fun read.

The rationale of how the hero goes his powers is always going to be sad (why didn't he die from radiation, mutations are rarely beneficial, physics doesn't work that way, etc.), but they're not what's important. What's important is how the character changed from being a normal person to a hero.

Is the key element to the Spider-Man origin the radioactive spider or Uncle Ben? That Superman gets his power from the yellow sun, or that his arrival from Krypton to protect humanity echoes religious saviour motifs? Does Batman exist because of the Wayne fortune, or because of the vow an orphaned child made to eradicate crime?

Origin stories do not necessarily mark a change in character that prompts him to become a hero. Sometimes they merely show the opporunity, but do so in such a mythic manner that there's no doubt why this man is such a moral paragon.

The other elements of an origin story are important, but ultimately it must answer why this person choose the hero's path. I think many problems of character origins is that too many times it explains how the character got the power, but fails in explaining his motivation to fighting crime or neglected it to a minor point in the mythos. I know Nova was created by an Xandrian power ray or something, but have no idea why Richard Rider puts on the bucket helmet. Likewise, we may know that Henry Pym was once "The Man in the Ant Hill!!!", but his motivations to putting on spandex was non-existent, which goes a long way of explaining the problems writers have had with the character. Perhaps one could think Pym might hit his wife, or set up the Avengers to be in peril so he could save the day himself, but one could not think Spider-Man or Captain America of that.

Best origins other than the ones mentioned:

Captain America: A 4F weakling is so outraged by Nazi tyranny that he volunteers the only way he can: by agreeing to be a guinea pig in an experiment.

The Spectre: A betrayed cop is murdered in a gruesome way, but his spirit lives on to avenge him and all other victims of crime.

Green Lantern: An alien member of a sacred order that protects the cosmos from the greatest threats to life crashes and dies on Earth, but not before his ring finds an appropriate successor: the most fearless man on Earth with unmatched integrity.

Moon Knight: An immoral mercenary finally has a pang of conscience and sapres an innocent women from his evil leader. Left for dead, he is inexplicably ressurected and places the credit to an ancient god and devotes himself to atoning for his past evil by takign the god's visage as his own.

The problem with the origin of Wolverine is that it defeats the mystique the character has a man without a past.

Wolverine actually has two origins -- Barry Windosr Smith gave us an origin in the early 1990s that explained how he got his claws and metal skeleton. (Short version: evil Canadian scientists were experimenting on him). A decade later, we got the Paul Jenkins/one of Joe Kubert's kids miniseries in which we delve into Wolverine's childhood and learn all sorts of exciting things like why he's called Logan and where he picked up the habit of calling everyone "bub."

I always liked the origin of Night Girl from the Legion of Substitute Heroes. Short version: she had a crush on Cosmic Boy, so she had her daddy give her superpowers so she could meet Cosmic Boy. Man -- it was all I could do to convince my dad to let me borrow the car when I was a kid.

Grant Morrison hinted that the "Origin" of Wolverine might just have been an implanted momory, or something false like that. At least, that was the way I read it. Also, he did that cool bit where he tied Wolverine's origin in with Captain America's. And then Wolverine learned all the secrets about his past, but he neglected to tell the readers so we can still think he's cool and mysterious. Swell.

I've always found the origins of Batman's rogues gallery fascinating, especially Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" and the modern origin of Two-Face. The most interesting thing is that, like Batman himself, most of them have one specific 'bad day' that turned them into lunatics. Maybe it's just a convention of the supervillain origin story - a 'tragic origin' is always both interesting to the reader and an easy base to start from for the writer - but I've always liked that Batman and his villains are all just victims of a shitty, unpredictable world.

The trick with the whole "man of mystery" bit is, at least for me, the writer needs to convince me that he knows what the real deal is, even if he isn't telling. The second I start thinking that he's making up all the backstory as he goes along, or, worse, stalling for time while trying to come up with something that can fit; that's the second that he loses me. Which explains why I never was that big of an X-fan (*Cough* Wolverine *Cough* Cable). And why my enjoyment of Legion V4 dropped precipitously at the exact moment when I concluded that TM&K had no idea what the SW6ers really were. (Or what was in the unopenable box, a largely unused but extremely annoying Mcguffin that serves as a metaphor for the entire run...)

Brainiac 5 had two simple motivations, which were clear in his first appearance.

1) Make up for what great-great-grandfather Brainiac did as the worst interstellar criminal of the 20th century (I specify the level of relation, since otherwise that's up with me trying to make up for what my 10th century ancestor did, which is absurd. But if my four generations back ancestor was Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, well, I might feel I've got some redemption issues to work out, especially if my father and grandfather were really into it and indoctrinated me).

2) Get close to Supergirl, who simple historical research would show would eventually join the LSH. Yes, this does make Brainy into a more successful (Legion membershipwise, if not romantic relationshipwise) Night Girl. But given Brainy's seeming insta-crush and that his power is intellegence and information based, it's pretty clear to me he had the sense not to let Kara know that he was already crushing on her pre-tryout and knew that getting into the Legion would at some point give him the opportunity to get to know her. Yes, it's the next generation of Internet stalking; time travel research stalking!

Wasn't B5 the first victim of the Superman writers messing with Legion Continuity? (Which is to say, wasn't the revelation that Braniac was a robot made after the introduction of Querl Dox?) At which point his origin stops making sense, loses all moorings, and then you throw Pulsar Stargrave into the mix to hopelessly muddle things further...

wasn't the revelation that Braniac was a robot made after the introduction of Querl Dox?

Yes, it was. In the same issue where they reveal Braniac's a robot, they also explain that he adopted a kid for reasons that escape me at the moment. The kid would be the ancestor of Braniac 5.

Actually, Night Girl's original origin was just: "Daddy, I want to be a superhero!" "Okay, honey. Whoops! Since we have no sun, I forgot to make sure that my strength ray didn't lose its effects in sunlight! Darn." The whole "stalk Cosmic Boy" thing was retcon.

'Course, that kid seemed to get dropped into the memory hole, even well before the crisis. Until we got to L.E.G.I.O.N...

(And nowadays, when Braniac in the present is running around doing Ultron imitations with 8, 12, and 13 running around, things start making less sense. But modern continuity keeps looking more and more attached to the silver age legion than the one that actually shows up in the legion books.)

I've always been a sucker for Mister Miracle's origin.

It was revealed in the last few issues of Weapon X that what Logan discovered on the satellite in "Assault on Weapon Plus" was that the Professor and Dr. Cornelius had unleashed him as Weapon X on a small town, slaughtering the entire population and covering it up.

Jeff, you'll be pleased to know that during Byrne's run on the book with Claremont, he and editor Roger Sterm did know Wolverine's origin.

I can't remember specifics at the moment, but it involved at some point in the past Logan riding horse in the Canadian wilderness and being thrown from it. He landed, breaking his back and shattering his bones alone in the wilderness. But his healing power wouldn't let him die as he wasted away and had animals eat part of him or something. Very easy to understand the berserker thing. Eventually he was discovered (presumably by Mac Hudson) and the Canadian govt reconstructed him by repairing his bones with adamantium in a Six Million Dollar Man type of way.

Of course, once Stern and Byrne left, the entire thing got thrown out the window for whatever Claremont thought of that month.

I think Byrne, in an interview from the period, was supportive of the idea that Wolverine's healing factor made his age impossible to guess. I'd have to check, but I think in the same interview he puts forward the idea that Logan might've known Captain America from before Cap was frozen.

So Byrne seems to have been open to further tinkering on the origin (also, ask Byrne and he'll tell you that he had everything figured out about every character he ever wrote or drew). :-)

--Chris M.

In one of the Jim Lee issues of Uncanny X-men we actually see a World War II Captain America/Wolverine teamup.

Now was it just my imagination, or where there actually hints dropped somewhere Wolvie might be old enough to have met Conan?

The Punisher has the most horrible origin of any "superhero".

Now was it just my imagination, or where there actually hints dropped somewhere Wolvie might be old enough to have met Conan?

There actually was a What If? featuring Wolverine vs. Conan. Technically, Conan really isn't from here so, I guess anything is possible.

"At which point his origin stops making sense, loses all moorings, and then you throw Pulsar Stargrave into the mix to hopelessly muddle things further..."

Uh-oh. I missed this. Did they bring back Stargrave (when I was 11 I thought that was the -coolest- name)? How did he mess things up for Brainy?

Actually, Punisher is a riff on Don Pendleton's "The Executioner / Mack Bolan." Both characters were Viet Nam vets / ex-Special Forces (or Green Beret or whatever) types who snapped after The Mob gunned down their families.

Me, I liked Punisher as a villain, not as a "hero."

The sad thing about John Byrne comics in general is that for myself, who was a HU-UGE fan of his work on the
X-Men is how badly I feel about his overall solo work. He obviously was\is well-versed in comics history but when it came to using it within his own stories on titles like the Fantastic Four it seemed as if he was hell-bent on warping the characters into something other than what was established in that history. In short, nothing happened after...whenever HE DECIDED!

Re-reading his F.F. is like a bad dream made sharply more painful in learning that it really did happen! Where I could get a chuckle or three from Marv Wolfman's tenure or Doug Moench's, with Byrne I get only pain at how dull they really were and anger when I remember some of the things he did (like that whole business with Ben Grimm, Johnny Storm and Alica Masters!! Byrne's run on the Fantastic Four only reminds me of why I will never, ever buy a new copy of that book today. Byrne was lauded for taking chances... I am furious with him for destroying characters I eventually grew to love. Thank Goodness for Marvel Masterworks!!

Jess, when Stargrave appeared, he first led Brainy to believe he was Brainy's father, then that he was his "ancestor," the original Brainiac. Was he? We don't know, honestly...Shooter basically introduced the character, took him to a certain point, then left the book. (Or was asked to leave. Or something. It's all a bit murky, depending on who you talk to.) Other writers continued using the character and, in the end, none of it really made sense. Except to confuse Brainy fans. So yeah, Tyg (as usual) has a good point.

Post-Crisis, Stargrave showed up in L.E.G.I.O.N., I think, but I don't remember much about it offhand.

Well, L.E.G.I.O.N. introduced "Mr. Starr", who may or may not have been Pulsar Stargrave in much the same way that he may or may not have originally been Braniac...