How he died: Wolverine: The Best There Is is not a good comic book. It wasn't good when it came out, and it's not good to read now. Looking back, some of the contemporary reviews for this "mature readers" miniseries seemed a little harsh at the time, but turns out they're 100% on the money. Some called it "unbearable". Others pointed out the "unfortunate compromise" it made, since it wasn't part of Marvel's actual mature readers MAX line, but still bore a warning on the cover that it "wasn't for kids". Which it mostly definitely wasn't, since it's probably the goriest and most explicitly violent and splattery comic Marvel has ever produced but, hey, they censored all the bad language, so that was nice of them. The plot, such as it was, involved Logan coming up against a new villain named Contagion and his accurately-named gang of cronies, the Unkillables, Having imprisoned Wolverine, Contagion gives him two choices: either kill his son, Flip, who was super smart but in constant pain, or else volunteer as a human guinea pig to try and find a cure for his disease. Ever the hero, Wolvie opted for the latter, and thus began a rigorous process of testing just how powerful his healing factor was. Which meant he was shot, poisoned, exploded, torn apart, stabbed with millions of tiny needles, and generally tortured in every conceivable, horrible way. Oh, except waterboarding. How he came back: Well, the whole point of the exercise is that no matter how you "kill" Wolverine, he'll always come back. Despite being subjected to basically every form of murder that they can come up with - including some pretty novel ones, owing to their myriad supertalents - the Unkillables are always faced with a fresh-faced new Logan a scant few hours after the fact. This is probably a good time to point out that whilst, yes, Wolverine is pretty much indestructible (except for the all the times he isn't, see above), he still feels pain. Every time he gets hurt, or killed, it smarts. And then some. He is not having a fun time of it in this miniseries. Hence all the censored swears, we guess. At the end of the Contagion story arc, it turns out that the reason Contagion's kid is in such a bad way is because he infected his own son with a super-virus! What a jerk. And Wolverine was actually a guinea pig to try and synthesise said virus to be even more deadly since, well, if you can kill Logan with it, it'll kill pretty much anyone. So he goes after Contagion with Flip's help and gets him infected with some nasty diseases which sap his powers, and then leaves him to die. Because if you try and kill Wolverine - even if you succeed - there's a good chance he's going to repay you in kind. And then some.
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/
