The big picture
- Wolverine lost his healing powers and died when he was covered in molten adamantium.
- Wolverine was resurrected with the new power to superheat his claws when he was enraged by the mysterious organization Soteira.
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Death of Wolverine
And
Logan
show rare cases where Wolverine actually dies, which gives even more weight to his downfall in the Marvel Universe.
It is an unspoken rule in the world of comics that very few characters – especially in the Marvel and DC universes – die and stay dead. Nowhere was this rule more pronounced than with Wolverine, because his mutated healing factor makes him virtually immortalHe survived a nuclear explosion, a crucifixion, and the ripping of adamantium from his bones. Logan bucked tradition when it was released, showing a Wolverine whose healing powers were fading, and the film eventually killed him off and ended Hugh Jackmantenure as a Canadian with claws (until he returned for Deadpool and Wolverine).
But Logan is not the first time that the Grim Reaper has caught up with Wolverine. Back in 2014, the aptly titled Death of Wolverine Miniseries by Charles Soule And Steve McNiven saw Logan cast off his mortal coil. In a surprising act of restraint, Marvel waited four years before using the same creative team for The Return of Wolverine (with Declan Shalvey Soule also worked with David Marquez on the Hunting wolverines particularly. But how did Wolverine die and come back?
Logan
- Release date
- March 3, 2017
- Duration
- 137 minutes
Wolverine lost his healing factor and had a pretty poetic death
On a mission into the subatomic realm known as the Microverse, Wolverine has caught a virus that has effectively “burned out” his healing factor. For the first time in years, he was mortal, and someone took advantage of this by putting a bounty on his head. Logan ended up battling a number of his enemies, including Sabretooth, the body-hopping warrior Ogun, and Lady Deathstrike. Eventually, he learned that Doctor Cornelius, one of the scientists behind the Weapon X program, was trying to refine the process and needed his adamantium skeleton. Logan freed Cornelius’ test subjects but was covered with molten adamantium in the process. It was an almost poetic death; Adamantium turned him into a living weapon and ended his life.
Wolverine has been resurrected and has received a new superpower
The X-Men took Wolverine’s adamantium-encased body to a private cabin in Canada, but soon discovered that Logan’s makeshift “tomb” was empty. This prompted Kitty Pryde, Iron Man, and Daredevil to assemble teams of heroes to track down Wolverine’s whereabouts. A mysterious organization called Soteira had revived Wolverinewith his leader Persephone intending to use him as a weapon to “remake the world”. Wolverine eventually regained his memories and stopped Persephone, learning of a new power in the process: he could overheat his claws when he was angry enough. The problem was that it “overclocked” his healing factor, making him more vulnerable. “They represented all the bad things he was and could be – death, anger, loss of control. It was no coincidence that he didn’t heal from wounds sustained while going berserk in the same way he normally would,” Soule said when discussing the final problem of The Return of Wolverine on Twitter.
In other universes, Wolverine was depicted dying. The legendary Days of the Future Past In the storyline, a Sentinel burned him down to his Adamantium skeleton, while Old Man Logan showed an aging Wolverine whose healing powers had diminished. Death of Wolverinenext to Loganremains one of the few times Wolverine was actually killed, and they were all the more powerful because of it.
Logan is available in the US on Disney+
Watch on Disney+
