Time was that Wolverine wasn't all over everything like a mutant rash. He wasn't the star of multiple blockbuster films, he didn't serve on every superhero comic book team under the sun and have multiple solo series running alongside all the X-books he was a part of, he didn't appear in video games, on t-shirts. He was just a short, hairy Canadian with an attitude problem who rounded out the cast of the second generation of X-Men, mostly the product of the legendary Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum/John Byrne run on the title that defined Marvel's merry band of mutants. He was cool, if a little goofy - why did his hair follow the shape of his mask? - but you were just as likely to dig, like, Storm or Colossus or even Kitty Pryde as much as Wolverine. They all get about the same screen (panel?) time, and in fact Logan was left purposefully underdeveloped compared to many of his compatriots. He was mysterious, and ornery, which meant he had a tendency to fade into the background when he wasn't chopping up Sentinels with his adamantium claws. Or getting tracked down by the Canadian government, who are nowhere near as polite as we were lead to believe. That changes when we get about midway through the Dark Phoenix Saga, the storyline that defined the definitive X-Men creative team and remains the yardstick against which all further comic book epics are compared. In Uncanny X-Men #132, the team has unsuccessfully attempted to infiltrate the villainous Hellfire Club in order to rescue the brainwashed Jean Grey. Where most of them are simply captured, Wolverine appears to be killed off - by a member of the Club who expands in mass until Logan is seemingly crushed and dumped into the sewers beneath the bad guy's mansion. It's the last we see of him until the end of the issue, during which team we're lead to believe that's the last we'll ever see of Wolverine full stop. Then the final panel of the final page has this image of the battered, bruised but unbeaten mutant emerging from the muck, swirling around and growling at the bad guys - or even at us readers ourselves. It's spine tingling, it's perfect, it made the character, and it's absolutely the most badass single panel in comic books.
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/
