Logan

When I was a kid, Wolverine wasn’t a “comic book” character. I didn’t qualify my heroes with the medium they came from. For me, they lived alongside the characters up on the big screen, on prime time, and even in those crazy books that didn’t have drawings in them. At that time, most people didn’t feel this way about the funny papers, and in retrospect, I think that made the characters even more precious. I felt like I was special because I understood something about them that other people didn’t.

For better or worse, I no longer feel this way. Comics are everywhere and you could argue that the nuance that used to exist has been exchanged for brightly colored spectacle. Thick nostalgia-tinted glasses rest heavy on my nose as I type sentences like that. And while I can fondly reminisce about a time before time, I appreciate the new world, where access to these stories is readily available. But I still miss the quiet moments with characters that felt like they were created just for me.

This movie made me feel that again.

Wolverine is the character that made me pick up my first comic. I was someone who had trouble making friends and always felt like an outsider and finding comics at a time when my father was no longer part of my life, the relationship between him and Charles was something that felt extremely personal.

The Wolverine of the silver screen has always scratched the surface of the character I grew up with, but never really committed. It’s possible that everything that happened between the panels couldn’t be replicated on screen — at least, not for general audiences. The raw, bold, rough edges that made him so appealing to me were sanded off.

In Logan, you get the rough edges. You feel the struggle. And the moments of quiet reverence the movie spends with him and Charles are all the more meaningful because of it.

To say that I was emotional throughout this movie would be an understatement. It’s a beautiful send-off for two characters that deserve my eternal thanks and it reminded me that there are still stories being made just for me.