Daken is Wolverine's long lost son, torn from his mother's womb by the dark figure Romulus. Raised with a warped view on his father's "abandonment" and his mother's murder, Daken was left holding a grudge.
Just going through my thoughts on Daken...from start to current...
Marvel wants to introduce the son of Wolverine, their money machine in Wolverine: Origins. I dont like the idea of it but fine, I've rolled with the punches for this long lets let Marvel run their course with it and hopefully it will end soon.
They start with Daken being very very skilled. Moving so fast (or rather, just knowing where to be) that he clowns some of the best h2h fighters in the MU. Kinda cool but they dont really explain how. It's very cryptic. Whatever. He still kinda sucks. He gets a muramasa claw upgrade? What does that mean? He knocks out HF and it supposedly cuts at a molecular level. If this upgrade is written to its full ability this is more of an upgrade than getting an adamantium skeleton! Too bad the character still sucks.
Dark Wolverine starts up. Wow! This is oddly fun to read! There is a very different then what I would have imagined from the son of Logan. I'm starting to enjoy this character. I love how he reacts to other characters. I love the fact that he isnt a moronic beserker. Holy crap I actually like this guy!
I love me some Frank Castle and I love the whole fight took place. I wish the fight would have been more fair (Frank not having a broken leg etc etc) but all in all well writen and I loved the art! The guy that took out the Punisher! wow!
Daken punks Skaar...in the Hulk book! Every Wolverine Fanboy (including myself) finally feels a bit elated knowing that Hulk fanboys now know how we feel after all this time of Logan getting smacked around. Starting to feel like they made a character that can actually contend a bit more with the heavy hitters!
The bringer of Ragnarok? I dont know much about Thor so I looked some stuff up! Cool! They are swinging him around into the upper tier of the MU! Awesome! Gettin pretty pumped!
He gets his ass kicked by his dad and his muramasa claws removed. I got pumped because it felt like I was finally going to have a street level fighter that I enjoyed reading able to compete at levels that his father couldnt. I feel like I wasted time and money reading Dark Wolverine now. He cant compete with the upper tier without the claws. He cant even put down someone with a healing factor now. If we went against Skaar in a second showing he would get roflstomped. He is once again on his fathers level and unless he gets another upgrade he cannot compete on a level above that. That was a huge reason I started to enjoy this guy!
I will continue to read this for a while but I'm afraid that his character will be very limited now to being a quasi manipulitive gay Logan. Am I alone?
I think you have a common complaint. But I don't think you really liked the character because of the Muramasa claws; you liked him because of how well a few very talented writers wrote him. I think one of the reasons so many people like Daken now, as opposed to hating his guts and praying for his death, is because of his exposure during the Dark Avengers. We saw that he could work nicely in a team setting, and it was fun to see his personality flesh out. We liked how he interacted with other characters who weren't Wolverine. And now that he's kinda back in his own little corner, we are all wondering if the character has staying power. He's only been around for like, what, 3-4 years? That's not long enough to really see if he can stick. And I like the character, but I'm kinda scared that he's just a fad too.
I enjoy where Daken's character has gone, both in terms of ability and personality. He's a refreshing and overdue take on the "feral mutant with a healing factor" concept.
I mean, we've already got Wolverine, the loner who suppresses his feral nature except in combat, and who has been brainwashed and mind-wiped many times over the course of decades. He was angsty and had a hard time relating to other characters or even wanting to do so, for the most part. He's the man with all the primal power of a beast and the soul of a hero. And he's got very heavy bones.
Then we've got Sabretooth (granted, he's dead for now). Sabretooth was Wolverine on steroids in terms of physical abilities. He was larger, so he had greater potential for muscle mass, but he also received enhancements to augment his strength beyond the human level. He's also lately been depicted as having a more effective healing factor than Wolverine, along with arguably equal feral senses, nightvision, and claws that aren't quite as good but are still effective. He also has no sense of morality (though he understands the concept well enough to manipulate it), and genuinely enjoys killing others.
Then we've got (again, not anymore) Wildchild, who is basically just a pastiche of Sabretooth and Wolverine. He's got a healing factor more on Logan's level, teeth and claws like Sabretooth's, the basic enhanced senses package that all feral mutants seem to have, and then he's got enhanced agility, speed, and reflexes instead of strength. And of course, he's got the increased stamina that anyone with a healing factor has. Lastly, he's got the whole good-guy-with-a-dark-bestial-side thing going on, too.
Finally, we've got X-23, who I'm finding quite refreshing. I mean, she's got some interesting differences from Wolverine (claws in her feet, faster healing) that give her some options that he doesn't have, but also take away from her some of the options that he would have. Aside from that, she suffers from more traditional mental abuse, rather than being brainwashed in the same way as Wolverine or Wildchild. She's also very much not used to civilization, in the sense that she just doesn't even understand the concept of a lot of the feelings that she has now that she's integrating with society more, but she doesn't really seem to have trouble with her feral side (except when that pesky trigger scent is around). Oh, and then she's got claws that can slice through pretty much anything, too.
But then there's Daken. He tries to comport himself as a refined sort of guy, one who's above the kind of crazy berserker rages common to a lot of the other feral creatures, but he relies on very primal instincts when it comes to his goals (dominate who you can, kill who you can't), and he actually fails to rein in his bloodthirsty side fairly often. He comes off as someone who wants to be a more methodical killer, one who kills to advance his goals, but plenty of the time, he acts like Sabretooth lite and kills people when it doesn't actually benefit him. Daken is basically a guy who was raised wrong, and now embraces all of that because it gets him the one thing he never had while being a puppet for Romulus: control. Then we have his powerset, which is basically Wolverine's, but no adamantium, and with some weird pheromone powers to alter perceptions and emotions. This is fairly interesting to me, because frankly, an unkillable character who can cut through anything just isn't that interesting. That, and his pheromone powers give him a lot of more subtle options that I'm not used to feral characters have.
@Baddamdog: Yeah, for all we know those things could've did some nasty stuff to even the stronger Marvel characters. Even cosmic if you think about it.
@Baddamdog: Heh, well if you think about it, there's always the old standby to use characters with healing factors: tie them up and keep them underwater for a long time.
" Upgrade? dark Wolverine is a comic book character not an RPG playable video game character. His skills are in hisfighting experience not his claws. "
" Upgrade? dark Wolverine is a comic book character not an RPG playable video game character. His skills are in hisfighting experience not his claws. "
No he was bad ass with the idea of him having muramasa blades. I think the problem was that all the writers knew he could chump his father (the money maker) then one brilliant writer gave wolverine focus to take on his son, from then on they were about even but they also knew Daken would always have the one thing he needed to kill his father (the muramasa claws), so wolverine tore them out, (why new bone claws didnt regrow is beyond me) but as its been stated, i got bummed about it bc he went from this syphcotic murderer that could kill anyone (if the writers wrote the Muramasa claws correctly) to a guy that could kill come people but only has a real interest in killing the one guy he can no longer kill. I hope he finds Muramasa and has a new blade created. I think that is the only way he wont eventually fall off my radar of character i read. He needs something to replace what he lost.
I find Daken interesting in juxtaposition to Wolverine. Superficially, he's the proverbial prodigal son: striving to be different from his father while having many of the same tendencies and personality traits. He plays mind games, practices refinement, and can be just as deadly in a social setting as he is in a fight, and yet at his core he still retains those feral instincts. The Muramasa incident evokes many of the same questions raised when Magneto removed Wolverine's adamantium: what is it that truly defines this character? Is it his weapons and abilities, his ability to kill, his physical resilience? Could it possibly be that their appeal lies in their basic humanity, laid bare when their "powers" are stripped away? It's the story of an absentee father and an emotionally abused and manipulated son, and that's a story that resonates very strongly with modern audiences. You don't have to look very far to see similar dramas being played out all around you, sans superpowers.
@DEGRAAF: Well, he really only lost the ability to make a really visceral and bloody kill on Wolverine. As it stands, all he has to do to kill Wolverine is drown him.
@DEGRAAF: Yup. There's actually an issue of Wolverine - Weapon X where he talks about it in his head. Can't remember the exact issue, but it was when he had to go out to an oil rig and fight a bunch of guys with cyborgy-kinda healing factors and energy claws and stuff. He talks about how his healing factor doesn't do him any good underwater, and how with his adamantium skeleton, it's like he's swimming with an anvil on his back. I also thought that Deadpool was threatening him with it in one of the earlier issues of Wolverine: Origins only a few issues after Daken was introduced (when he was hanging Wolverine tied up over a pool).
@WoundingFactor: interesting, i always figured his regerative ability would some how keep him from suffocating. I figured he could walk across the bottom of the sea like the undead in Pirates of the Carribean
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