Clothes may make the man, but in the case of Wolverine, Hugh Jackman's iconic film character, the claws make the mutant.

Jackman's ferocious antihero returns to the screen July 26 with his second solo adventure "The Wolverine," and die-hard fans will notice right away that his gleaming metal talons have gotten a makeover, according to reports from Inside Movies.

"Yes, we retooled them a little," director James Mangold recently said. "I found that in some of the comics illustrations that I really liked the most, they had these bevel cuts. They were faceted, that would be the best way to describe them. In the last picture, they were pretty smooth, and we decided to take it to a different direction."

Mangold, the director of "3:10 to Yuma," "Copland," and "Walk the Line," was eager to bring a less theatrical appearance to the character who goes by the name Logan.

"I wanted a more real Logan," Mangold said, "not a flashier Logan."

As part of his push, Mangold re-evaluated the arc and shape of the character's signature weapons and went with a shape that looks more crafted for carnage.

"It's more utilitarian," the director said. "The cuts in the blades make them more useful, more lethal, and they also catch the light more and in interesting ways."

The claws in the new film are the closest to the tooled look that comic book artist Frank Miller memorably used in the first solo Wolverine comic book ever published, Wolverine issue No. 1, back in September 1982, says Entertainment Weekly.

The coveted issue was the first installment of a four-issue limited series written by Chris Claremont, and it opened with Wolverine hunting a rogue bear in a frigid Canadian Rockies but soon shifts to Japan, where the loner X-Man seeks Mariko Yoshida, the woman he loves.

Jackman's tenure in the role is a major benefit for Mangold and allowed him to reel in the aesthetic of the character closer to the real world without risking character recognition. That's why there's no superhero costume for the hero and he can get away with a far tamer hairstyle than the early films.

In the comics, Wolverine's hair has at times resembled Dracula in a glam-rock phase or the black tailfins from a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado. Matching that heritage required some elaborate hairspray architecture in some previous X-Men installments, but Mangold was able to go with a shorter, less contrived version.

"I wanted to get away from that Flock of Seagulls meets the Wolfman hair," Mangold said with a chuckle.

"Hugh had worn a wig and extensions in other places and I decided that was going toward something I didn't want. You can do things in the comics when it's a drawing that don't work as well on the screen in a feature film, and I wanted this movie to be Earth-bound."