How You Can Actually Kill Wolverine

3. His Greatest Asset... Is Also His Greatest Weakness

Although Wolverine has been aided by his indestructible skeleton more often than not, it has actually hurt him a great deal over the years. James Mangold's decidedly looser adaptation of the Old Man Logan comic featured Wolverine at the end of his days, suffering from the effects of a declining healing factor and a metal that, slowly but surely, was poisoning him.

While Logan was a lot of things (all of them good), it didn't introduce that concept. One of the earliest and most iconic instances of Wolvie's skeleton being used against him came in 1993's Fatal Attractions storyline, where a dishevelled Magneto - having just recently been attacked by the cigar-chomping X-Man - ripped the adamantium straight from Logan's body. It was a gruesome panel, drawn in full by artist Adam Kubert, and while the event didn't kill Logan, it probably should have.

And yes, while it's equally true that ol' Wolvie has been equally adept in using the metal to vanquish his foes, whether that be through a simple slice and dice in a hallway full of soldiers, or in drowning an assassin in a vat of the alloy's liquid form, it's also been used against him. In 2014's aptly titled 'Death of Wolverine' comic, writer Charles Soule presided over the character's, well, death, by suffocating him in a super-cooled form of the metal.

A healing factor might be fine and dandy, but when you can't breathe, it's pretty much useless. In the comic's closing, decidedly more poignant moments, Wolverine comes to that realisation himself. With no way of breaking through the metal's outer shell, Logan is left to die, enconsed in the very resource that had made him such a proficient killer for well over four decades. It was a fine ending for the character, but with the medium being the medium it is, Wolvie has again returned with an Infinity Stone in his mitts - metallurgy be damned.

As far as plots to kill Wolverine go, Soule's has to be the most concrete. And while previous issues have shown the character regenerating from literally a spec of blood (biology be damned), encasing Logan in an indestructible metal is an unwinnable scenario for the mutant, save for the pesky machinations of Marvel Editorial.

Ewan Paterson

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.

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