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Marvel's Wolverine was created to be a teenager and not a grizzled veteran - even after he joined the X-Men

Len Wein said Wolverine was supposed to be a 19-year-old kid - but someone after him changed it all.

X Lives of Wolverine #5 variant cover excerpt — Image credit: Russell Dauterman (Marvel Comics)

News by Joshua Lapin-Bertone, Contributing writer

Published on Mon Jun 09 2025

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If you were to prepare a birthday cake for Wolverine, you would need a lot of candles. According to Wolverine: Origin, Logan was born sometime around 1882, making him over 140 years old in the present day.

However, Wolverine’s co-creator Len Wein had a different age in mind when he was developing the character. When the character was introduced in The Incredible Hulk #180, Wein imagined him as a teenager. This made him the perfect candidate for the X-Men, which at the time was a group consisting of teenagers. In fact, Wein made the character a teenager thinking it would help him fit in with the group.

“I decided to make him a teen-age mutant, to be one of the new X-Men if it came to pass,” Wein said during an interview for Fantagraphics’ The X-Men Companion. Later in that same interview, Wein stated that he saw Wolverine as 19 years old.

Wolverine joined the X-Men in Giant-Size X-Men #1 (written by Wein, and drawn by Dave Cockrum), a comic that rescued the group from comic book obscurity. It’s worth noting that during his early appearances, Wolverine didn’t remove his mask.

However, Wein left the X-Men title soon after with Chris Claremont replacing him as writer, and when Wolverine was eventually unmasked for the first time in X-Men #98 he had the grizzled face of a mature adult. This surprised Wein, according to these interviews, but if Claremont and Cockrum hadn’t gone with this design, Wolverine as we know him wouldn’t exist.

I wonder how Hugh Jackman’s career would’ve gone.

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Joshua Lapin-Bertone: Joshua is a pop culture writer specializing in comic book media. His work has appeared on the official DC Comics website, the DC Universe subscription service, HBO Max promotional videos, the Batman Universe fansite, and more. In between traveling around the country to cover various comic conventions, Joshua resides in Florida where he binges superhero television and reads obscure comics from yesteryear.