Wolverine Week Special: The Hair Conundrum
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Happy Free Comic Book Day, folks! And happy Wolverine Weekend! What a world we live in when such joyful occasions can overlap.
I have to say that I was caught a little flat-footed by Wolverine Week. I haven't read many Marvel comics recently (I was enjoying The Twelve but then my curse kicked in) and so wasn't really up to speed on what was going on with the crazy Canuck. Luckily, however, I remembered that I am one of the Internet's top Comic Book Hairstyles scholars1 and so have a surefire way to fascinate and delight you: with a brief illustration of Wolverine's status as a nexus point in the Great Comic Book Hair Continuum.
Now, I'm sure that I don't have to tell you about the Continuum, that vast chart that illustrates the wide variety of hairstyles that exist in the comics medium, their interrelations and influences. It's quite a fascinating field of study, really, and ever more complex as people create new and distinct characters with ever more unusual haircuts. Why, the inclusion of manga characters in the Continuum after the Pan-Asian Inclusion Conference of 1991 caused the Master Continuum Map to start resembling something along the lines of the Snowflake from Planetary.
Back to Wolverine: Mr. Logan is an interesting figure as he occupies a nexus point between five hair families, while even the most complex hairstyles usually incorporate elements from two or three. Here, check it out (sorry, you're going to have to click and expand this):
This is of course a simplified version of the Continuum. The real thing is 3D and requires a supercomputer to properly render. Still, you can see how exciting Wolverine's hair is to the Style Academy.
Speaking of simplification, I don't want to get about a thousand angry comments from Hair Continuum Reductionists, so here's Wolvie's position on the Approved Simplified Hair Continuum:
It just doesn't seem the same to me really, but notice that Wolverine still does very well!
I won't bore you with further technical discussion of the intricacies of the Continuum - if you're interested in learning more you can see my series of articles in Ink and Protein, including The Best He is at What He Grows: Wolverine and the Nexus Point2 and The Arms of Logan: The Case for Incorporating the Body Hair Spectrum into the Continuum3.
1I am actually no such thing.
2This paper does not exist.
3Neither does this one.
Later that Day:
As I was writing this it occurred to me that it might be excessively weird, so here's something a bit more... less weird.
So you know how Wolverine was part of an evil Canadian government conspiracy and had all kinds of conditioning and programming and implanted memories and such? While I was image hunting earlier this week I found the absolute best of those and the best evidence that this was not just an evil conspiracy but a dick of a conspiracy:
Here we have Wolverine beau and fellow conspiracy-victim Silver Fox recovering some memory.
Oh no! people are beating up her date!
Her date Wolverine. That's right: the evil conspiracy felt it necessary to simulate a memory of Wolverine getting beat up at his prom and then being a dick to his date.
Can you hope to compete with this level of dickishness, American conspiracies? X-Files conspiracy? Huh? What do you got, kidnapping Mulder's sister? Go home, girly conspiracy.
Good night, folks.
