6. Turning The Tables Against The Hellfire Club - Uncanny X-Men #132
Marvel Comics/John Byrne
After moving from the pages of the Incredible Hulk to those of the X-Men, Wolverine immediately cemented himself as a cool customer. He was ex-military, roguish and was unquestionably lethal, his metal claws promising a more intimate and brutal kind of violence than anything the other X-Men had on hand.
Be that as it may, Wolverine was still a superhero. He was decked out in a yellow and blue outfit and was still relatively cartoonish, filling out the tough-guy persona on Len Wein and Dave Cockrum's Giant Size X-Men. When Chris Claremont and John Byrne took over however, the character soon developed into the animalistic fury fans have since grown accustomed to, exemplified best in the concluding pages of Uncanny X-Men #132.
Byrne's panel depicting a half-submerged Wolvie turning the tables on the Hellfire club has been parodied and homaged repeatedly over the years, and there's no denying it's an iconic moment.
The artist elected to play to the primal connotations of Logan's alter-ego, and while Wolvie only manages to turn the tide briefly, this was still the first time the character's bad-side ever looked truly menacing.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
