Marvel 616: Daken/Dark Wolverine

Full name: Akihiro
Aliases: Daken (commonly used as his 'regular' name), Wolverine, Dark Wolverine
Fandom: Marvel

In the forties, Wolverine (Logan – the one everyone knows about) had a Japanese wife called Itsu. Itsu got pregnant, a new supervillain introduced in 2009 called Romulus got the Winter Soldier (Bucky, back from the dead) to kill Itsu just before she gave birth and to cut the baby out of her womb, and then, the baby was basically left on the doorsteps of a rich Japanese couple. (Let's all take a deep breath, now). The couple couldn't have children of their own and took this as a blessing, naming the boy after the husband. However, no one in the household called him Akihiro except for his adoptive parents, everyone else resorting to the nickname Daken ('mongrel' - because he was only half-Japanese). Daken is, by far, the most commonly used name for this character.

Daken is a new character. He was first mentioned in 2006 in Wolverine Origins #5 (we see his baby hand in a flashback and his existence is acknowledged) but was truly introduced in 2007 in Wolverine Origins #10.

Daken is easy to spot in a crowd:



Especially if he's half-naked, which he used to be all the time in Wolverine Origins. He fights his father pretty much naked at some point. These things just happen. He has a 'I'm such a rebel' look to him, what with the tattoo and the mohawk going, and it sort of fits a big part of who he is: he is a seventy-year-old man who has very strong father issues, wants attention and power, and is still trying to figure out who he is most of the time.

The first hint that Daken might not be very heterosexual is in Wolverine Origins 11. He has a girlfriend (sort of) at the time that saw him with a man and confronts him about it.



The truth about this particular encounter is that Daken was luring the man in a private setting to assassinate him. But how many of the manly superheroes we know would go around kissing dudes for that? Then again, he's a bad guy, and a lot of people have a tendency to expand the deviancy of bad guys into them also being sexual deviants, which tends to include not caring about having sex with guys if it gets them somewhere, because that's clearly how those things work. At that point, it might have been nothing else than something a bit offensive (nothing new in the comics world, heh). Let's all be happy that this wasn't the case.

Moments like those didn't happen again much until Marjorie Liu started working on Daken in the Dark Wolverine title (one of the titles brought up during Dark Reign). We do learn something else valuable during Wolverine Origins about Daken, though: he has powers that his father doesn't have. The interesting one is pheromone manipulation. He uses it for the first time in combat to make Deadpool feel secure and make him drop his guard, but the fact is that he can use that to make pretty much any human feel whatever he wants around him. He can make people obey him. He can make people desire him.

This is important because it means that Daken does not need to sleep with people if he wants something out of them. Sleeping with them is not part of a strategy to make them at ease and make them talk about confidential things they shouldn't talk about. If he only wanted secrets, he could get them differently. It seems fair to assume that if Daken sleeps with someone, it's because he feels like it – even if the person he's sleeping with may not feel the same way, what with the pheromones of coercion going on for him. Daken is the kind of character who only does things when he wants to do them, and doesn't do shit if he doesn't.

During Dark Reign, Daken is recruited by Norman Osborn to be part of his Avengers team – the Dark Avengers – and pose as Wolverine, along with other villains posing as good guys. On that team, Venom is posing as Spider-Man, Bullseye is their Hawkeye, Ares and the Sentry are essentially being blackmailed or manipulated into being part of the team, Moonstone is Ms. Marvel and Noh-Varr is Captain Marvel. Quite a team they've gathered up.



Daken doesn't quite trust Norman Osborn or anything, so within his very first issue as Wolverine (Dark Wolverine #75) he has already extracted information from someone important around Norman. It is strongly implied that he also used the time to sleep with the man.






Daken, in Dark Wolverine, gets a level of complexity, and is suddenly written inside storylines that I found myself enjoying a lot. But being badass doesn't stop him from having fun with people around him when he wants to. It's around that time that Daken starts basically hitting on everyone on his team. Everyone! No one is going to escape Daken hitting on them.

He spends a lot of time making Bullseye into an enemy, and then proceeds to drown him under pheromones every time they cross paths so that Bullseye will desire him and be conflicted with himself over it:



Which leads to amazing reactions from Bullseye, by the way. Dark Wolverine #77 is always going to be dear to me because of how Bullseye deals with Unresolved Sexual Tension. When Daken eventually kisses him in the middle of a Big Climatic Fight, though, he doesn't react much other than being frozen in place with wide eyes. I guess Daken must be a good kisser?


(Please note that this is Marvel's second gay kiss on a current total of four.)

Daken tends to have plans that involve a lot of backstabbing, and that also make him spend time buddying up to the F4. This, naturally, leads to him hitting on the Thing:



He also eventually flirts with the Torch (Johnny Storm) over the span of several issues later on in the Daken: Dark Wolverine series, but I sadly can't put all of that within this post.

My favourite page between Daken and Johnny is the following one, though:



I love this page not only because of Daken putting on Johnny's clothes in Johnny's room, but because of the way he behaves. Daken is not shy. He is not coy. But he can play shy and play coy when he thinks he needs to to get what he wants. I like that he thinks he has to behave that way to get to Johnny and that it works. It's very hard to tell when Daken is sincere and when he's not, too. I strongly believe he does not mean it in that page, but when is he real, if he's ever real at all? You end up trying to understand every one of his actions, always. (And then sometimes you realise it's just fueled by father issues... Aww, Daken.)

He hits on Ares, who doesn't care all that much:



He hits on Venom, who makes good faces when it happens:



People think they're very witty when they make jokes about him being on both the Avengers and the X-Men:





When he has people all over him in the middle of a bar, it's half and half guys and girls:



He's been seen in bed once with a woman, once with a man.




(This is Marvel's 4th guy on guy kiss there – making Daken the man who made half of Marvel's gay kisses happen all by himself. Good job!)

And that's probably way enough panels of Daken being comfortable with his sexuality for this post, but there are plenty of others in his books, in between the plot (which tends to be really good).

Mostly the point is: there is no way, ever, to deny that Daken is bisexual. Actually, he's closer to being pansexual (or omnisexual if we go with Captain Jack Harkness' word). His attraction to people is in no way limited by anything that has to do with the gender spectrum. He doesn't identify as bisexual or pansexual or anything, though. The quote going around about that is from SDCC in 2009, where Marjorie Liu said that Daken is "past that kind of identification. He's beyond it. He's no more homosexual than he is heterosexual. It's about control." (source). She obviously knows more about the character than me, but when I read things like that, I still tend to go "of course he's no more heterosexual than homosexual. He's neither at all. He's pan" even when I know this is not what anyone ever means by that.

Either way, no matter what people perceive his sexual orientation to be, he's an incredibly popular character considering he's all of four years old, and there's a reason for that. I have to admit that I'm not quite sure if I like the new direction of Daken's title now that they've changed the writer, but I'll wait for the end of the current arc to decide on anything. (Also take note that I'm biased by the fact Marjorie Liu is in my top 5 of favourite comic writers.)

Recs: If you want to pick him up, go with the Dark Wolverine trades (Dark Wolverine #76 to #90) and the trades of his current run (Daken: Dark Wolverine #1 up).