Guide to Daken AKA Akihiro (New For Patrons!)

Today I get to debut a new X-Men character reading order for Patrons of CK! I’ve wanted to dig into making a guide for this character for years, because I’ve already read every issue he’s appeared in and I love them all! When I realized his newest fiery series is an ongoing rather than a limited series, I knew I couldn’t let another week of my Marvel New Releases posts go by without him having a full guide of his own. That’s right, it’s time for a page devoted to everyone’s favorite pansexual murder son – Guide to Daken – Akihiro, Son of Wolverine!

Guide to Daken – Akihiro, Son of Wolverine

As a new X-Men guide, this page is available exclusively to all levels of Patreon supporters! Thank you for helping me keep this site alive.

First, let’s clear something up about this character’s name.

This character’s given name is “Akihiro.” His code name “Daken” is an anglicization of “??,” a slur about the character’s mixed-race parentage which means “mongrel” or “cur” – a dog of no clear breed. While the slur was assigned to him by others in his youth, he later took it on as his codename of his own accord – and it certainly mirrors his father’s noble-sounding codename of “Wolverine.”

(In a way, the fictional Akihiro’s choice to adopt a taunt as his chosen name is mirrored by how real life drag queen Trixie Mattel reclaimed “Trixie” from being a homophobic slur aimed at her in her youth).

As the character gained wider exposure and began to develop a familial relationship with his half-sister Laura Kinney, fans took exception with his name being a Japanese slur coined by a team of white writers. Increasingly, writers began to refer to him simply by his given name of Akihiro – although he has sometimes taken on other short-lived codenames such as “Fang.”

That said, to many fans this character is still known as Daken, which was how he was introduced and the title of his second ongoing series in 2010. To the best of my knowledge, the term “??” is not a slur that’s an offensive word to simply speak or write – it’s only offensive used in the context of a person.

Furthermore, it is disingenuous to treat a fictional character’s previous name as if it is a real life “deadname” that can cause stress and even dysphoria to a person. Ultimately, people have always searched for “Daken” over “Akihiro,” so in the service of helping people find information about this character I will continue to refer to him by both of his names.

Now, let’s talk about why Daken is my precious pansexual murder son.

I fell in love with Daken from my first time reading Wolverine: Origins (2006) way back in 2010 as I was working on the initial X-Men guides for the launch of Crushing Comics.

Why?

First, I loved the idea of Wolverine finally catching up on his complex history of memories via the outcome of House of M. It felt like 30 years was long enough to treat his history as an unknowable mystery box. I loved that the box was now open with all sorts of surprising and sordid events exposed, including a son he never knew.

Second, Daken represented something increasingly rare in an X-Men comic: a new character that felt truly threatening. He wasn’t threatening because he was all-powerful, but because of his focused rage at a father who had been absent for over 50 years – busy off being a superhero. The threat wasn’t just a physical threat, but the threat of him defying the norms and expectations of other X-Men villains while still feeling distinct from Wolverine foes like Sabretooth and Cyber.

The final reason also has to do with how Daken defies expectations: he was textually, undeniably, proudly queer right from the start.

FINALLY, X-Men was textually queer! Up until that point, most of what we had when it came to out X-Men characters were Northstar, Mystique (who still wasn’t explicitly Destiny’s wife), and a handful of Academy X kids exploring their sexual orientation as teenagers. (No, we’re not counting Claremont-era implications of bisexuality for characters like Rachel Summers, Betsy Braddock, & Yukio.)

Plus, unlike other 00s-era queer characters like Wiccan, Daken wasn’t a perfect queer angel. He was a messy, awful, manipulative person with complicated feelings. He was promiscuous, which is so often the trope of male bi- and pansexual characters, but he was promiscuous with a purpose. Daken was a villain who used people to get exactly what he wanted – which wasn’t just sex, but power.

Plus, he had cool hair!

I drank up every single appearance Akihiro made between 2006 and 2010 in quick order, mostly written by a brain trust of Daniel Way, Marjorie Liu, & Rob Williams. His character is a huge part of why the often-maligned Wolverine: Origins (2006) remains one of my favorite Logan series of all time! Every time I would finish one trade featuring Daken, I’d order the next one with two-day shipping!

However, Daken changed starting in 2012, as he was written by Rick Remender (and, to an extent, influenced by Jason Aaron). Remender leaned away from the complexity established by Akihiro’s 40-issue solo run across a pair of series and focused on a less morally-gray villainy as he sought revenge on his father.

Suddenly, my pet pansexual murder son wasn’t so fun to read anymore. Last week for the launch of my guide to Giant Generator, Remender’s Image Comics imprint, I spoke about how Remender’s cynical nature can really be a turnoff for my sensibilities as a reader. That really begin for me with his treatment of Daken at the end of Uncanny X-Force (2010) and into his Uncanny Avengers (2012). Daken was a character with a lot of trauma and anger fueling his anti-heroism, but it felt like complexity was out and cruelty was in.

I never stopped loving Akihiro, but after Remender was through he seemed to be flattened out to me. In the wake of Logan’s death he turned up in Wolverines (2015) by Charles Soule & Guy Fawkes, but the crackling energy the character had half a decade before had faded for me.

I credit Tom Taylor for bringing Akihiro back to relevance. He did it in just one arc of his beloved All-New Wolverine (2015). That arc, titled “Orphans of X,” explored the rage of the many victims of Wolverine and other Weapon X experiments. With Logan still dead, Akihiro, as well as his sisters Laura and Gabby, were obvious targets for retribution.

Taylor wisely reversed Aaron & Remender’s approach to Daken. Rather than acting as an instrument of revenge against Logan, now he was an object of revenge. Not only did it immediately make Akihiro sympathetic again, but it gave Taylor a chance to deepen his sibling connection with Laura Kinney – another character who shed a prior codename and the implications it carried.

From there, Akihiro felt refreshed for new and different stories – which several authors took advantage of in the Age of Krakoa! Leah Williams, Steve Orlando, and Ed Brisson all made great use of him in team books where he made significant contributions (as opposed to his status as an ongoing cameo star in Bendis’s Dark Avengers (2009)). While I think this Krakoan era of Akihiro can be appreciated on its own, it’s all the more sweet if you had read the 13 years of stories that led to it.

(And, it didn’t hurt that two of those authors – Williams and Orlando – are queer and managed to continue to address Akihiro’s queerness stripped of its violence, even while maintaining him in a relationship with a woman.)

Krakoa ended on much more sour note, with Wolverine scripter Benjamin Percy using Akihiro’s violence death as fuel for his father’s hatred of Sabretooth (as if we needed any more fuel for that particular fire). However, to his credit, Percy had a long-term plan in mind. After Krakoa ended, Percy brought back Akihiro rebranded as “Hellverine,” a Wolverine plus Ghost Rider mashup he first introduced in a crossover between their two titles in 2023.

I was initially skeptical of Akihiro as a Ghost Rider. The initial Hellverine [I] (2024) mini-series seemed to focus on brutality for its own sake in a way that reminded me of the Remender years. Yet, a subsequent ongoing by Percy leaned into Daken’s identity and his history with both his mother’s death and his own death at the hands of Logan.

The Hellverine [II] (2024) ongoing has been reminding me every month just how much I have always adored this character and his potential complexity under the pen of the right author. That, in turn, spurred me on to finally break him out of the footnotes of my Guide to Wolverine – Logan and into his own guide!

Want to read all of that in a perfect order, including a curated list of the 100 issues that tell the full story of Akihiro’s rise, fall, and rebirth? Get instant access to new Guide to Daken – Akihiro, Son of Wolverine and every future guide to Marvel, DC, Indie Comics, and more! Become a Patron of CK for as little as $2 a month or $20.40 a year to gain access to this exclusive guide and nearly 100 other guides months before the general public gains access to them. Plus, in the past year I’ve also updated over 150 of my 200+ guides for both patrons and the general public.

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