Most of the humor on April Fool’s Day was in the annoying variety, especially for those folks who use Gmail to do business. Every person being pranked is partially at fault for said prank, but there are also clever little ideas that come out where nobody is hurt and plenty of fun is had. Take Canada’s sly joke from their Library and Archives, claiming to have dug up the war records for one James “Logan” Howlett.
That’s right, Canada released their records on legendary X-man Wolverine. If anybody was hurt by this prank, they were likely fictional to begin with:
Logan was born in 1882 in Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, to wealthy landowner Elizabeth Howlett and her grounds-keeper Thomas Logan.
Logan’s journals provide valuable insight into his early life in Canada, including work as a miner in a British Columbia stone quarry, a fur trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a homesteader in the Canadian Rockies. His military career spanned multiple conflicts, making his personnel records an unprecedented study in Canadian military history. Logan was gravely wounded in action many times, and gained a reputation as a gritty survivor.
That Thomas Logan certainly liked to sew his oats wherever he pleased, even if it meant that he would lead to the creation of one of the wimpiest children in the history of comics. He gets better, of course.
From there, the records show a bit of Logan’s war record:
WWI: Captain in the Canadian Armed Forces (Devil’s Brigade). Fought at Ypres in 1915. Wounded by a sword through the chest.
WWII: Returned to the Devil’s Brigade in the Second World War, as an allied spy and paratrooper for the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion during the Normandy landings on D-Day.
Cold War: based in Ottawa and Calgary, worked for both CSIS and the CIA.
Logan later changed his operative name to ‘Wolverine’, and worked with various NGOs.
We even get a nice old timey photo for Logan, played by Hugh Jackman.
The only hope is that nobody reads too much into any of this information. If you try to use this as “official” info on the past of Wolverine, you’re likely to be quite disappointed when you get to the whole race of wolf people, alternate universes, and even the confusing, but awesome opening to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Just enjoy this for what it is: a nation’s government recognizing a comic book superhero.
