I think it was going to be a Legion of Superheroes character once, but it didn’t matter. And Dave Cockrum had drawn a character called Wolverine back then and showed it to me once, I guess. But wolverine had that kind of wolfish sound to it. But badger is just not that good a word, you know? It sounds like you’re annoying somebody - you badger somebody. I mean, it could have been a wolf or something else, but for some reason, badger and wolverine came to mind. Badgers and wolverines are a couple of animals that lived in the northern United States, but also in Canada, so those would make sense. So I thought of a couple of possible names. You couldn’t have a moose - that wasn’t very glamorous. I don’t know if there was Captain Canada by that time but I didn’t want anything like that. So then I started thinking about what should we call it? We named a lot of things after animals. I was always trying to expand things one way or the other, so a Canadian character made a lot of sense. Obviously, the idea was to maybe sell a few more comic books, but I was also the person who had made up the Banshee right after I started on X-Men as Irish and Sunfire as Japanese. But Marvel, DC, and the other companies back in the ’40s and ’50s had never had a Canadian character. I knew there had been that whole line of Canadian comics during World War II with Nelvana of the Northern Lights. And there had never been, as far as I knew, a definitely Canadian character in American comic books.

I’d been to Canada a couple of times and had a few friends from there. I thought about the fact that we had several percent - maybe 5%, 10% - a certain amount of our readers were Canadian. But as editor-in-chief, I was supposed to come up with maybe a good idea for a direction to go with this. Roy: Well, in 1974, a couple months or so before I stepped down as Marvel editor-in-chief, I was just thinking of ways to increase sales. For the modern X-Fans who maybe aren’t aware of Wolverine’s real-life origin, what role did you play in bringing the character to life? AIPT: Welcome to X-Men Monday, Roy! It’s an honor to have you here.

X-Men by Roy Thomas