Wolverine: Origins #26-27 (2008): Son of X

It took almost 20 years to give Wolverine a full origin after the character was first introduced, which made him mysterious and intriguing, and also allowed writers lots of room to grow the character organically over time.

Daken is a one-dimensional character who gets his origin right away. And it’s predictable and boring and very dark.

Daken was adopted. He was bullied. He killed the bully. He then grew claws and accidentally killed his adoptive mother and newborn infant brother, which led his father to kill himself.

He then got adopted by Romulus and raised to be a killing machine, and was told that Logan had killed his mother while Daken was in the womb.

For the framing sequence, Logan and Daken are tracking Romulus. Wolverine remembers how Romulus experimented on interred Japanese Americans during World War II. Then survivors of those experiments kidnap him.

Daken and Logan kill all the survivors, which for some reason opens Daken up and he asks his father to help him figure out his own past, which he cannot remember.

See? Daken is just Wolverine lite. Experimented on. Memory wiped. It’s the same character, only we’re spoonfed him instead of given clues over the course of years so it’s less interesting.

We also learn that Cyber, another cut-rate version of Wolverine, was created by Romulus.