How he died: Remember how good Days Of Future Past was? After a good decade or so without a decent X-Men film, original director Bryan Singer came back and knocked it out of the park with a fun, funny summer blockbuster that didn't really have any right to be that good. For one thing, it was attempting to square the recent continuity troubles caused by prequel film First Class and that Wolverine Origins monstrosity, which should've made it nothing more than an exercise in on-screen script doctoring; instead, it ended up being a thoroughly entertaining ninety minutes of superhero cinema. Partly because we got the return of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, headlining the movie and generally being the best there is. Hooray! Which shouldn't strictly have been the case, if the film had stuck more closely to the comic books it was adapted from. Because in the dystopian future of the original Days Of Future Past, where Sentinels have all but wiped out the majority of both mutant and humankind, Wolverine is one of the remaining X-Men struck down as the team desperately attempts to send Kitty Pryde - not Logan - back in time to warn their younger selves of this dark future. Flinging himself at one of the purple killer robots, Wolverine is evaporated by one of its energy, collapsing to the ground as a flame-grilled skeleton. How he came back: We've said it before, and we'll say it again: technically, he didn't. In the Days Of Future Past timeline, Wolverine had all the flesh burnt off of his skeleton by that Sentinel blast, and there wasn't no magical crystal around to help him rebuild himself. He had passed on. He was no more. He had ceased to be. He'd kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Thankfully, the future X-Men managed to avoid such a timeline from ever existing by successfully sending Kitty Pryde back into the body of her younger self, where she helped her team mates of the era thwart an attempt on the life of US Senator Kelly by the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants. With the assassination foiled, anti-mutant hysteria never took a hold of the country, and congress didn't need to pass a bill making it okay to hunt them down with giant, murderous robots. Which means that purple dude who evaporated Wolverine never existed, so that's death cheated one more time!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
