How he died: The Ultimate universe was supposed to be a different kind of comic book. With Marvel seeing an influx of new readers with their movie adaptations hitting big at the cinemas, they decided to produce a new line without the decades of back story needed to understand their mainstream titles, whilst also updating their characters for a modern audience. Which mainly meant making everyone younger, sexier, and more violent. The latter criteria culminated in the Ultimatum crossover where most superheroes in the universe got killed off by a vengeful Magneto, who boasted he would unmake the world in four days rather than the forty days and forty nights God took. Amongst that unmaking involved forcing Cyclops and Iron Man to cook Wolverine alive with their energy beams whilst Magneto himself ripped out that adamanitum skeleton with his control over metal, meaning there was no way for Logan to heal himself back. How he came back: He didn't. Following this crossover the Ultimate universe is sparsely populated, with not many recognisable faces left around. Ultimate Spider-Man is now half-black, half-Latino tween Miles Morales instead of Peter Parker, the Fantastic Four have way more than four members (and one of them's Dr Doom), and the X-Men just plain stopped existing. Which might be for the best, because Ultimate Wolverine was a bit of a douche. Even more so than his regular incarnation, he was a randy little so-and-so who was originally hired by Magneto to assassinate Professor Xavier. Then he slept with Jean Grey, fell for her, and defected from the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants to the X-Men. Which might have had something to do with the unseemly end that befell him.
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/
