Was there a reason Wolverine changed from the yellow/blue costume to the brown/tan costume?
Also, does the reason he ditched the brown/tan costume related to Sabertooth in some way?
I read somewhere that the brown & tan costume was originally stolen from Fang, a member of the Shi’ar Imperial Guard.
My erratic memory is backed up by The Wolverine Files which says:
As for the switch back, I haven’t any idea.
IIRC Fang’s costume was the darker color scheme but not the same design (there was a tooth motif at the color for one thing). Back on Earth Wolverine had his existing uniform redone in the darker colors. Nightcrawler asked him about it ca. issue 142 and Wolverine didn’t offer an explanation. Makes sense, though. Kinda silly for a tracker/hunter to wear bright yellow and blue.
Collar. Tooth motif at the collar.
I always kinda liked him better in dungarees, fedora and leather jacket.
Short hairy musclemen in yellow spandex makes the little homophobe in me run home crying.
…What?
I’m pretty sure the brown and tan costume has something to do with his fiance Mariko’s family. In issue 57 of Wolverine where she dies, I could have sworn she asked him to wear the brown and tan again for her family’s sake. I may be wrong, though, it’s been years since I read it.
I am quite sure Logan never explains, and I am quite sure he would never explain it. (Nightcrawler asked him why; his only response was “why not”?
But here’s my explanation. One, he was originally given the yellow & blue togs by the Canadian government; it’s not unreasonable to think that the person who designed it was an idiot. (That’s a bureaucrat slam, not a Canada slam.) He kept the costume for the first several months he was at Xavier’s, but eventually decided the colors were too bright. Though personally inclined to just go the denim & leather jacket route, he opted to stay closer to traditional superhero togs, albeit in colors that made more sense for the woods, where he always feels most comfortable anyway.
Why he changes back I’ll never know. I despise the yellow & blue togs. For team work I’d have him in either in the brown togs or the black leather number he wore during Morrison’s run; for solo work he should just be in denim & a leather jacket.
He changed costumes right after Phoenix died. One of his first adventures in the new costume was an expedition to Canada to make peace with the Canadian government. (Along the way, he and Alpha Flight tracked down and captured the Wendigo, but initially, he just wanted to get Department “H” off his back.)
I think Skald the Rhymer’s theory makes the most sense, from the character’s point of view. From the real world’s point of view, I think John Byrne just didn’t like the yellow-and-blue costume.
I too, prefer the brown costume.
Wow, was he wearing the yellow & blue that long ago? I thought that was from the era when all X-Men suddenly had to wear nearly-matching blue and yellow outfits. IIRC, the characters didn’t like them–I seem to recall Banshee and Jean Grey complaining that they were unseemly–and many readers didn’t either.
I always just assumed that he went back to the brown because, as many on this thread has noted, it makes more sense and it looks better.
The yellow and blue was his first costume. Mid 1970’s, I think. He continued wearing it after he joined the X-Men in the late 1970’s. Phoenix died in 1979 or 1980. Then he switched to the brown costume. He only went back to y&b relatively recently.
Why did he switch back to the yellow & blue?
I remember seeing it again about the time the FOX X-Men cartoon really exploded.
It was odd, because I had a brown/tan Wolverine action figure, and then the cartoon got huge and he was wearing the yellow and blue.
From http://wolverine.x-knights.com/wolverine057.html
"Down below, Mariko wants Logan to restore the honor of the Yashida clan, and gives Wolverine his traditional brown/yellow costume to wear. "
And from a google cached version of answers.com’s Wolvie page:
(Under Costumes, a section no longer on the current page) “Brown and tan suit he wore in honor of the Clan Yashida first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #139, designed by John Byrne and currently used in Wolverine: Origins”
This may be an example of “retconning,” Byrne may have had other reasons to put wolvie in brown and tan, and Larry Hama linked it to Mariko’s clan, but there you go, that’s the best “official” explanation I can find.
Didn’t Jim Lee put Wolvie back in the yellow & blue, like 14 years ago? I think the gaudy costume came back out of a misguided sense of “nostalgia.”
That’s pretty much a guiding force in the realm of comics these days, I’ve found. 
Definitely a retcon. Wolverine first got involved in Yashida clan politics in Frank Miller’s 4-issue Wolverine series. He had been wearing brown and tan for quite some time, by then.
Hey, at least he doesn’t have the tiny whiskers he sported when he showed up the very first time.
::sticking fingers in ears, la-la-la, I-can’t-hear-you::
Wolverine never wore a mask with tiny whiskers; that was a hallucination. Or a coloring error. Or something.
Also they never made any sequels to the Matrix. Or to Highlander. Or any adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentleman. And don’t get me started about Kurt Wagner and communion wafers.
I’m not familiar with what happened with Wolverine’s costumes before Whedon’s recent run on Astonishing X-Men, but in the first issue of “Gifted”, Logan returns to the mansion/school and, in a Danger Room pow-wow about the direction the team is going to take, there’s this exchange:
The later costumed depictions of them in the issue show that all of the X-Men have some yellow/blue (I assume it’s blue for each character–I’m a wee bit color-blind) combination–except Emma Frost. So, again, I don’t know what he was wearing before this issue, but I originally took the “here come the tights” and “black leather” comments to mean that the yellow/blue costumes were new; so, I assumed this was the point where he started wearing the yellow/blue suit again.
Nope. He wore the first version of the yellow & blue togs way back in the 70s in his first appearance in Hulk #181; it had extended ears, though not as high as in later versions, and is frequently hallucinated to include whiskers on the mask. :dubious: Reappearing in Giant Size X-Men #1, he wore a costume nearly identical except for larger ears and no whiskers; he kept that till about X-Men 140 or so, when John Byrne said, “Hey! That old costume sure is ugly!” and gave him a new color scheme but pretty much the same design. That caught on because it wasn’t nearly as ugly or stupid. Sadly, in the early 90s Jim Lee took over the art chores, and, being a moron, went back to the yellow suit that snipers love so much.