New Brevoort Formspring

“A lot of people seem to have wanted to interpret Cap benching Wolverine because of his health issues (the loss of his healing factor) as booting him off the team. But nothing could be further from the truth.”

Well, that’s a shame. He remains a horrible, horrible fit for the Avengers, considering he’s an unreprentant mass murder many times over. I wonder if we can go back and find out how many times pre-Bendis writers put some version of the dialog that “Wolverine will never be an Avenger” in a character’s mouth.

One person: Mark Gruenwald. And that was right for the time, but not universally right. Mark also wrote the story that indicated that Cap had never killed anybody during World War II, and that was almost impossible to believe even then. But that was the tenor of that era.

I’d also take issue with your description of Wolverine as a “mass murderer.” He’s killed plenty of people, but in almost all cases in the defense of himself or others, and when faced with a threat from superior force. That’s not murder.

To me, it all comes down to this one sequence from the Claremont/Byrne days. This is how Wolverine works: