Gaiden VS Wolverine

THIS ONE HAD TO BE DONE. Often, when I chat with my buddy Mike Johanis (the real-life inspiration for Gaiden), he throws hypothetical scenarios at me involving comic book versus matches. Sometimes it’s superheroes from the Big Two going head-to-head, other times it’s my own characters battling one another, or even the two idiot pastors from our youth group days fighting over the full tithe. On one of these occasions, we started talking about Gaiden fighting Wolverine (I couldn’t believe we’d never discussed this before!). The more we talked, the more I told Mike there was no way Wolverine would win.

Mike was confident Wolverine had an easy victory, mostly because he was thinking of the super-fast-healing, super-strong Logan from the Fox films. But I told him that to make it more interesting—and authentic—we had to go old school. I picked the Wolverine from the 1980s, with the brown costume (the best costume) and claws that extended from his wrists, not between his fingers. I even went so far as to suggest his claws were bionic implants, as originally established by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller in their classic *Wolverine in Japan* storyline.

Speaking of Miller and Claremont, some of you might notice the swipes I took from that classic tale. Apparently, “swiping” is a thing (or so says Erik Larsen in one of his comics). But really, the main reason I borrowed from that story wasn’t due to a lack of ideas. I wanted to ground both the story and Wolverine in that specific comic book universe.

I truly believed Gaiden could pull it off. But here’s the thing: as much as I was convinced Gaiden could take Wolverine down, the moment I sat down to draw the first page, I knew it was over for Gaiden. To give him a fighting chance and maintain his credibility, I added a crucial rule: Gaiden and Wolverine had never crossed paths before and had no knowledge of each other. I figured if Gaiden had known about Logan’s healing ability, the outcome might have been different.

Geovanni Flores

September, 2014 Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C.