A closer look
Because nothing screams 'gritty antihero' quite like a literal angry woodland critter granted magical human consciousness. In his very early conceptual stages, the iconic clawed mutant was legitimately supposed to be an actual animal that the High Evolutionary violently mutated into a bipedal humanoid. Thankfully, someone at Marvel realized that having an actual, literal badger fighting alongside the X-Men might be slightly too absurd even for comic books, so they just made him a grumpy Canadian man instead.
