On her tumblr yesterday, Colleen Coover related a rather strange but intriguing tale. In it, she explained how in the 1990s, an “unknown hopeful” sent in a try-out page to Marvel showing off his skills. The page, posted by Steve Bunche two years ago, featured Wolverine lost in the woods searching for something, only to find former Queen lead-singer Freddie Mercury. There is no further explanation than that; is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy? This fabled meeting is forevermore an enigma wrapped in a puzzle and sealed away in a cryptex, like from the Da Vinci Code.
Coover, on the other hand, is trying to make some sense of it. Not only that, but she is going to make sense of it:
The story as presented raises a number of questions. What is Wolverine looking for? Agents of AIM? Peace and solitude? Or, as my other studiomate Memorial artist Rich Ellis suggested: is he looking to find Somebody To Love?
And how and why does Freddie Mercury appear at the end of his search? Was his tragically fatal illness miraculously cured, perhaps by an alien symbiote? Has he just returned from sailing the Seven Seas of Rhye? Or more simply and perhaps most logically, has Logan found himself in the presence of the worldly manifestation of a literal God of Rock?
And so, I have decided to explore these mysteries by recreating the original story, correcting some of the technical blunders on the way. I invite other artists to do the same, by which exercise we may one day come close to the fictional Truth of the matter.
I think I speak for everyone on the internet when I say I would love to see a collection of Wolverine meeting Freddie Mercury pages, so consider this a secondary call to arms. If you do a version of the classic sequence, let us know about it and we’ll share it here on Multiversity. We also would accept Wolverine obscurely meeting any pop stars for that matter, such as a meeting with Lionel Richie that we’re sure you can fill in the blanks for.
Additionally, as fellow MC-er Brandon Burpee points out, the “New X-Men” leather jacket wearing Wolverine might have been even more appropriate for this sequence, if any artist is feeling so inclined as to give this a go.
