A big part of Wolverine’s schtick is the regeneration thing. He’s apparently nearly immortal because of it. So my question is “Is Wolverine something like an earthworm?” That is, if we were to cut Wolverine in half, say right along the median, would each half regenerate giving us two complete Wolverines? If not, around which of his body parts is the regenerative power centered?
Professor X has been noted as saying that if he had to “deal” with Wolverine permenantly, he would have him beheaded and the head taken far away from the body before both were destroyed completely. From that, I would gather that the key piece is cranial and/or spinal in nature. IOW, If the cranium and spinal cord are intact, he will regenerate.
In the Ultimate Marvel cannon you can rip Wolverine in half and he’ll regernerate again.
I don’t think regeneration isn’t the right word…It’s always been calling a healing factor which limits how much damage he can take and heal.
So if he loses his head and it can’t be reattached with x amount of time, he dies, as his body couldn’t regrow a brain, nervous system, etc. before his body functions ceased.
I don’t think that’s true of earthworms, as it happens.
I think silenus is right, at least in practical terms. Technically from the stuff he’s survived having more than one Wolverine regenerate is a possibility, but I don’t recall it ever being hinted at as possible.
Healing Factor, particularly in the Marvel-verse (e.g. Wolverine and Deadpool in particular), has always been up to what story the writer wanted to tell. Healing Factor borders on the ridiculous. For the Hulk, though, I’m willing to make excuses. I’ve read stories where Wolverine miraculously heals from point blank high caliber machine gun fire, bombs that would level buildings, and he once regenerated from a drop of blood that managed to touch some super cosmic crystal or the Cosmic Cube. The only thing that seems to stop Wolverine is if one is able to incinerate him in one fell swoop. Though, in one “What If?” story, the Hulk hit him so hard that he severed his spinal cord (though I’m sure if it were reconnected he would regenerate).
Not if you bisect them along the median. If you bisect them transversely, it works.
Nope. In the recent Civil War story arc, he as incinerated by some villain who’s power is similar to the Human Torch’s (I forget his name.) Wolverine was just an adamantium coated-skeleton lying on the ground, and he regenerated from that.
His healing factor really has gotten pretty out of hand lately. During World War Hulk: X-Men, a super-charged Hulk admitted that the couldn’t kill Wolverine.
Instead, he held him with one hand and repeatedly punched him with another until his brain turned to jelly from banging around inside his adamantium skull.
He healed something like ten minutes later.
Are you talking about when Nitro blew him up?
That was how that series began, but they never got around to explaining how he put himself together (and might never do so).
I seem to remember him crawling towards his lower body, which was tossed some distance away. I can only assume he found it, pulled the two parts together and waited for it to knit back together.
In “Days of Future Past” (X-men 142-3 IIRC) Wolverine was incinerated by a Sentinel, burned down to his adamantium skeleton, and was not shown to have regenerated nor did his surviving teammates appear to expect him to.
Well, from what I understand, a lot of mutants are getting more powerful lately. It’s because the readers like really powerful characters, and the “in-universe” explanation is secondary mutations, or something like that. I know that after Decimation, there was a lot of people wondering where all that energy from the mutants who are no longer mutants went, so it’s possible that the energies from millions of mutants are no in just the few hundred, so they all have ramped-up powers, or something.
Yes, but he was an older Wolverine too. His temples were grey, indicting to me anyway, that his healing powers had begun to ebb, as he was showing the signs of aging.
Well that’s just neat. :eek:
It’s probably worth pointing out that X-23 is technically supposed to have an even greater capacity for healing than Wolverine himself, since she doesn’t have to cope with full-skeleton-adamantising.
How far in the future is that? Wolverine is hundreds of years old in the present day, right?
That’s just dumb. It’s sort of similar to IIRC Roy Thomas’s post-Crisis theory that the “super-heroic energy” of the various Golden Age heroes who were retconned out of existence was floating around to be used to create the Young All-Stars. Which was also kind of dumb, but not as dumb as the idea that there’s free-floating genetic energy zipping around the Earth looking for a good home.
The issues were 141 and 142, not 142 and 143. The story was published in 1981 and the future action was set in 2013. So 32 real years, unknown comics years.
I don’t think it was supposed to be no more than 20-30, but I’m going by memory. Franklin Richards was an adult, but I think he was in his 20’s or so.
It’s likely that the Days of Future Past Wolverine had been living with his mutant power suppressed for quite some time, though. Because all of the mutants had been living with their powers suppressed.