LogFAQs > #899071032

Zeus posted...

However, Wolverine is practically a serial killer which kinda goes against Batman's sensibilities (well, at least later Batman, brutal vigilante Batman from the early comics could be Punisher-esque at times).

Wolverine tends to waver on that particular point, though. And at the time the Amalgam stuff was happening, Wolverine was still mostly in his 1980s Claremont/Miller-inspired ronin phase, which maps extremely well to Batman's similar samurai/ninja-esque aesthetic.

And while Wolverine never explicitly has a "no killing" rule (and openly resorts to killing or extreme maiming as a solution to most of his problems a lot of the time), during his time with the X-Men in the 1980s, he was probably at the height of his "I'm trying to be a better man" phase, and was actively trying to avoid killing people (especially since most of the other X-Men were VERY strong with the "X-Men don't kill people. Period.", right up until they apparently stopped caring all that much about it). So at the time Amalgam was coming into being as a concept, Wolverine was probably at his least-killingest (that's a word now, shut up).

Taken in tandem with his tendency to constantly have young girl "morality pets" (Kitty, Jubilee, Armor, etc) around to keep him from going too far and "giving in to his animal side" as part of his "I need to be a better man" ideals, and it's easy to see the parallels to Batman (what with his endless parade of Robin's, and the common interpretation that one of the reasons he allows anyone to be "Robin" at all is more to keep him from sliding too far into the darkness).

It wasn't until the full grimderp of the 90s was in full swing that later writers kind of started to ignore that side of Wolverine and just went full-bore stabby with him, and that sort of peaked with the X-Force comic of the 2000s (where Cyclops literally formed a first-strike assassination hit-squad and put Wolverine in charge) - though they (stupidly) dialed that back shortly afterward, when they (asininely and unrealistically) had him object to the more militant stance Cyclops was taking to become the more anti-violence side of the mutant coin (culminating in the phenomenally stupid premise of him reestablishing the school), mostly just because he was the more popular character (and people liked him in the movies!), so they decided maybe he shouldn't be the leader of a black-ops wetwork team and instead make him more the established "leader" of the mutant community, no matter how at odds with every facet of his previous characterization that was.

So yeah, it's not a huge leap to see Wolverine/Batman as the go-to hybrid, and just assume you have a Batman who is more willing to kill (especially if you cast it in a bushido-flavored ideology) or a Wolverine who is far more strict about using lethal force (which might be easy to justify if you subtract the years of torture and psychological damage from "Weapon X" out of his character).


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