Here's an interesting article in last week's Slate about Wolverine -- the character, not the movie -- and how he rose from hardscrabble obscurity to become a comic-book persona whose popularity now rivals (oh, let's just say it: eclipses) that of the more well known Batman and Superman.

One thing the article doesn't mention is the scope of the distinction between comic success and that of the movies. Wolverine was created in 1974, and picked up a year later in the X-Men comics just as that series was about to skyrocket in sales. Since then there has not been a month in which Wolverine has not appeared in one or more issues of various comic books -- and often many more, as spin-offs and satellite series and mini-series have been created for the sole purpose of milking the success of this feisty cash cow.

Let's conservatively estimate that Wolverine has appeared in, say, three books a month for those 35 years. That's 1260 issues. Now let's further say that a standard screenplay could probably be narratively expressed in about four issues of your basic comic book. That means that since his creation, Wolverine has been a leading man in the equivalent of 315 full-length feature films -- or 319, if you add in the three actual X-Men movies and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. By comparison, Clint Eastwood did five Dirty Harry movies; Bruce Willis, only four Die Hards.

With all that, the fact that the screen character of Wolverine seems stale after only four features says a lot about either the weakness of movies as a storytelling medium ... or the tolerance of comic fans for recycled stories. I'm just saying.