Nicholas D. Wolfwood

About Nicholas D. Wolfwood

Nicholas D. Wolfwood is a travelling priest who carries a cross that is also one of the biggest guns on the planet. Sent to watch Vash, he becomes his closest friend instead: a chain smoking, sharp tongued killer with a soft spot for orphans and a past in the same darkness hunting Vash. Wolfwood is Trigun's conscience in a black suit, and fans have loved him since 1998.

Appearance

Wolfwood is a lean man with messy black hair, stubble, dark eyes and a permanent cigarette. He wears a plain black suit with the collar open, the uniform of a priest who has simplified the job considerably, and he carries the Punisher, a huge cross wrapped in cloth and straps that unfolds into a machine gun, a rocket launcher and racks of pistols. He rides a battered motorcycle and squints against the desert sun. The design sells his contradiction at a glance: funeral clothes, a holy symbol, and firepower enough for a small war.

Personality

Wolfwood talks like a cynic and acts like a guardian. He mocks Vash's pacifism as a luxury, kills without flinching when he judges it necessary, and then gives his money and food away to children. Raised and rebuilt by a murderous cult, he believes the world is exactly as cruel as it looks, and Vash's refusal to accept that both infuriates and attracts him. His dry humour is real, and so is his faith, buried under years of blood. Of everyone in Trigun, Wolfwood may be the most human: compromised, tired and trying to aim his remaining goodness somewhere it counts.

Background & Story

Wolfwood grew up in an orphanage, the same kind of home he now funds with his earnings as a killer. Spotted for his talent, he was taken by the Eye of Michael, a cult serving Knives, and subjected to enhancements that gave him superhuman strength and healing at the cost of ageing him rapidly and shortening his life. Trained as an assassin, he was ordered to find Vash and guide him toward Knives. Travelling with Vash, Meryl and Milly changed the mission into a friendship, and Wolfwood's story became a fight over his own soul: whether a man made into a weapon can choose to be something else, and what that choice costs when the bill arrives. Wolfwood's orphanage sits in the desert in the manga, and his earnings as an assassin are what keep its children fed, a fact the anime keeps in the background of his jokes about money. He also rides with a portable confessional gag in the early episodes, playing the priest for laughs.

Powers & Abilities

• The Punisher: Wolfwood's cross is a full arsenal: a machine gun, a rocket launcher and a rack of handguns in one cloth wrapped package. It is the most famous weapon in the series after Vash's revolver.
• Enhanced body: The Eye of Michael's treatments gave him great strength, speed and healing, fuelled by vials he drinks in battle. The same process ages him fast and is slowly killing him.
• Deadly marksmanship: He is a professional assassin of the highest level, one of the very few humans who can fight on anything like Vash's terms, and the Gung-Ho Guns treat him as one of their own.

Key Relationships

• Vash the Stampede: His target, then his friend. Wolfwood's argument with Vash about killing is the series' moral spine, and each man changes the other more than either admits.
• Milly Thompson: The insurance agent whose simple kindness reaches the parts of Wolfwood nobody else can. Their gentle, funny bond is one of the fandom's most treasured threads.
• Chapel: His mentor in the Eye of Michael, the man who made him a weapon. Everything Wolfwood is trying to outrun wears Chapel's face.
• Livio the Double Fang: A fellow orphan from his childhood home, rebuilt by the cult into a split minded assassin. In the manga especially, Livio is Wolfwood's past coming back for him.

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