It is safe to say that Wolverine is one of the toughest, deadliest, and overall most threatening heroes in the entire Marvel Comics landscape as his healing factor keeps him from being killed (more or less) and his indestructible razor-sharp claws means there’s almost nothing he can’t kill–however, despite everything he’s done to prove himself as a literal living weapon, one power change was enough to turn Wolverine into an absolute joke.
James “Logan” Howlett aka Wolverine is a mutant with the powers of heightened senses, a healing factor, and six retractable claws that extend from his fists. While he was born an apex predator, one organization thought Logan could become even deadlier: Weapon X. Weapon X is a branch of the Weapon Plus Program that focuses on turning mutants into controllable weapons by way of regular mind-wipes and memory tampering. With Wolverine, however, Weapon X took things one step further. The program got its hands on adamantium (one of the strongest metals in the world), and given Wolverine’s mutation, the Weapon X scientists figured they could bond the metal with his skeleton–turning his bone claws into adamantium ones while also providing him with indestructible internal armor.
What If…? #100 by Ivan Velez Jr. and Klaus Janson was a 1997 What If…? anniversary special celebrating the 100th issue of the second volume. While there was a storyline involving Gambit, Mr. Sinister, and Rogue that was uncomfortably meta, a great deal of the comic was committed to presenting a number of never-to-be-printed comic book covers based within Marvel’s What If…? multiverse. One of them starred an alternate version of Wolverine named Wolver-Wimp who had a styrofoam skeleton instead of an adamantium one, and whose nemesis was a mean little girl named Maggie Neato–and the cover teased that, within this hypothetical comic, that Maggie Neato would succeed in ripping Wolver-Wimp’s styrofoam skeleton out of his body.
Wolver-Wimp’s Apparent Defeat Mirrors that of Earth-616 Wolverine (In the Worst Way)
The absurdity of this concept is obviously hilarious, but it’s made even more so when considering it is a play on something that actually happened to Wolverine in the main Marvel Universe of Earth-616–when Logan challenged Magneto. In the X-Men crossover event “Fatal Attractions”, Magneto created a mutant safe haven in space known as Asteroid M, and the X-Men launched an attack against him as they thought Magneto was going to destroy the Earth. During the battle between Magneto and the X-Men, the Master of Magnetism finally had enough and took out the X-Men’s deadliest fighter in the most brutal way imaginable–he ripped the adamantium from Wolverine’s skeleton.
It seems as though a similar fate is in store for Wolver-Wimp as ‘Maggie Neato’ is going to rip out his styrofoam skeleton the same way ‘Magneto’ ripped out Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton. However, aside from this multiversal symmetry, the main thing to keep in mind here is that Earth-616 Wolverine could have ended up like Wolver-Wimp if, for some reason, Weapon X opted to coat his skeleton in styrofoam rather than adamantium–meaning that, with just one power change, Wolverine can be turned into a complete joke just like he was in Marvel Comics‘ What If…? anniversary issue.
