Is Wolverine really dead?

Nah. He’s just too valuable a property for Marvel to kill off for good. We will probably see a break from Wolverine for awhile but then he’ll return to a breathless chorus of marketing materials. See, this is what decades of cynicism does to a person.

I think we could use a break from the former James Howlett for a little while. Wolverine has been overexposed for 20 years. He’s a member of both the X-Men and the Avengers and carries his own solo title. The joke in comics has been that one of his superpowers is being able to serve on every superteam simultaneously. Since the ‘90s, Marvel has been putting Wolverine on the cover of unrelated books due to the associated sales bump.

At the risk of sounding like some hipster, I liked Wolverine back in the ‘80s before he was as cool as he is now. I enjoyed the hint of mystery to his character and the relative restraint. Logan was a man who would kill when necessary but who was valiantly struggling against his more murderous instincts. I read that in the ‘70s, it was a shock to see Wolverine kill a guard off panel. Today there’s a cemetery-sized body count.

At the very least, Wolvie could use a power reduction. Years ago, he could take a punch due to his healing factor, but the punch might still stagger him. He nearly died from poisoning in the classic X-Men #172-73, letting Rogue absorb his healing factor to save her life from a gunshot wound. In the original “Days of Future Past,” a Sentinel fried the skin right off him, leaving an adamantium skeleton. There was suspense in seeing just how much he could take.

Since then, Wolverine has been able to regenerate his body from one drop of blood. He has survived Magneto ripping out his adamantium skeleton. He regenerates his eyes without much trouble. He’s pretty much immortal.

There have been efforts to curb this. In the early ‘90s, Chris Claremont was playing with the idea that Logan’s healing factor was breaking down and it was getting harder and harder to heal. He had taken such a beating over the decades that his body was just shot and the idea was apparently going to be that he would permanently die. Then Claremont left X-Men and Wolverine inched closer and closer to being invulnerable.

I’m fine with Wolverine. He was an indelible part of my childhood comics reading. I just could stand not hearing “Snikt!” for a bit. His death scene looked poetic, with him succumbing as a wave of liquid adamantium washed over him and solidified. This is certainly susceptible to a comics loophole that would bring him back. Who knows? If Jean Grey can stay dead for over a decade, maybe Wolverine will too and they will finally consummate their inconvenient passion in mutant heaven.