Wolverine Biography

Logan was apparently born few years before the turn of the century in Alberta, Canada - at any rate, Alberta is where he spent his first years.

Even after the Origin series, his family is very muddled. Beginning life under the name of James Howlett, his family was wealthy, the fortune coming from his grandfather who made his fortune in copper ore. His mother was Elizabeth Howlett - with a past as shrouded as her youngest son's. His father is not definite as his mother was married to John Howlett, but seems to have had a man named Thomas Logan as a lover. Logan also had an elder brother (also named John) who died under unknown circumstances at a young age - his tombstone gave John Jr's year of birth as 1885, so we know Logan was born after 1885. Depending on his parentage, he might have a brother or half-brother in Thomas Logan's son, Dog.

The Howlett family changed for good in 1897 - in that year, the Howlett estate was finished and John Jr. died suddenly at the age of around twelve. The story given out was that it was illness, but Elizabeth was sent to a madhouse immediately afterwards, so the event seems to have been more traumatic than a simple illness. We also know from one scene that her side was disfigured by three long scars that appear to have been from claws similar to Logan's own. On Elizabeth's return from the madhouse, she went into seclusion and paid little attention to her remaining son.

James (Logan) was a very sickly child who was forced by his health to spend the greater part of his time indoors, so John Howlett hired a young orphan girl from the nearby village to be a companion for him. Rose was twelve when she joined the household. To make a long story shorter (for full details, hit the 'Origin' series), a few years later, James (Logan) walked in just in time to see the man he at least believed to be his father (John Howlett) murdered by Thomas Logan. Only Rose's intervention kept Dog from killing James (Logan) when he got to his father's side. The events triggered something inside of him and his bone claws erupted for the first time - he slashed his attacker (Dog) across the face, then killed Thomas Logan.

What remained of Elizabeth's sanity snapped - she threw James (Logan) out of the house and killed herself immediately afterward. Rose ran after James (Logan) to take care of him and Dog told the authorities that Rose was the one who had gone crazy and done all the shooting. The elder Howlett (his grandfather) knew better, but refused to give his grandson shelter. Instead, he gave Rose money to take herself and James (Logan) to another area of Canada. She got the two of them to the still mainly unsettled wilds of British Columbia, taking up residence in a mining town called Coalville. From Canadian history regarding a boom period of mining in that region, odds are that they lived there sometime around the 1901-1910 timeframe. Again, cutting to the chase and leaving out many details, due to being 'on the run', Rose gave out his name as Logan (because it seemed to be the only name she could pop up with on short notice) and that was the name he went by from then on.

His healing factor and other senses began to develop during the years working the mines and although he got over being constantly ill, his healing apparently couldn't compensate for the years of missed growth and Logan remained on the short side. He followed the example of the mine foreman, Smitty, in many aspects as he grew up, but he taught himself hunting and learned how to handle himself in the wilds by trial and error - eventually joining up with a wolf pack that he would run and hunt with. It was during his teen years at the mining camp that one of the men started referring to him as a wolverine - a name destined to stick like glue. After the accidental death of Rose on his claws, Logan retreated from the mining community and humans in general, going off into the wilderness to live with the wolf pack.

Until they come out with 'Origin II', we have a rather large gap and don't find Logan again until the 1930s. Sometime prior to the outbreak of World War II, Logan had already found his way to the island of Madripoor where Seraph (the woman who built The Princess Bar) took him in. Seraph only came up to about Logan's waist, but she didn't take sass off of anyone. She took him under her wing as a mentor/lover and is credited by Logan as being the one that shaped a brash, headstrong punk into a man. Logan was still associated with her in 1941 when he first met Captain America and the future Black Widow.

Backing up a little, Logan was already part of the war effort before then. In 1936, he went to Scotland to help protect part of the royal family from Nazis trying to affect who would be sitting the throne to gain a monarch that would support the rising Nazi party (see 'X-Men: True Friends' for details) - it was also established at that time that Logan had already made the acquaintance of and had previously worked with Raven Darkholme (Mystique, at that time traveling in male guise) and Irene Adler (Destiny).

Sometime after the fall of Shanghai in 1937, Logan was there (apparently as a visiting merchant seaman) and ran into an captain of the Japanese Imperial Army - Ogun. Ogun killed a sergeant who he considered to have disgraced his uniform and was about to do the same to another soldier when Logan intervened. Ogun was impressed that an unarmed man would dare to face him with his sword at ready and sheathed his sword - offering Logan the chance to study martial arts with him at the Ogun Ryu Dojo in Kanazawa. At that time, he had no such interest and headed back to his ship.

Logan spent at least part of 1941 in Madripoor (the above mentioned meeting with Captain America) - and he was already aware of and fighting against the Hand by that point in time, though how their running battle started still hasn't been shown that I'm aware of.

In 1942, he was a Corporal in the Canadian forces and in Greece, helping to train the Greek resistance fighters. Sometime after that, but before the Normandy invasion of 1944, Logan was in Nazi occupied Paris on a mission (see 'WildC.A.T.S/X-Men: The Golden Age' for details).

Speaking of Normandy, it is also 'Marvel fact' that Logan was there on June 6, 1944 as part of the 1st Canadian parachute battalion that jumped over Ranville, Normandy.

Immediately after the war, a wandering Logan was recruited by Chang to become an agent of Landau, Luckman & Lake. After a currently undetermined amount of jobs for them, Logan left to study the martial arts. He was pulled back into Landau, Luckman & Lake by Chang again when that didn't work out and afterwards, did occasional jobs for LL&L, but never again as a full-time agent.

Another gap of unknown time - then we land in 1964. Logan is back in Canada, working for the Canadian Special Services and is part of a joint US/Canada effort to stop the first North American Hydra operation (see 'Fury' #1 for details). Sometime during the 60's, Logan also met Nick Fury (then with the military), Carol Danvers (who was around 19 the first time they met) and Ben Grimm (Air Force test pilot).

Sometime between 1964 and 1968, Logan was teamed with Victor Creed (aka Sabretooth) and David North (aka Maverick) to form the core of what came to be known as Team X - a multi-national CIA backed group. Other members of the team included Silver Fox, John Wraith and Mastodon. Just how much of a relationship Logan and Silver Fox had is up to debate - part of his memories of her are definitely false, but the cabin that he built and that they lived in together does exist. At any rate, by 1972, Silver Fox was long gone from Team X and was an active member in Hydra.

Backing up again, sometime after 1968, Team X split apart when a mission where they were out to steal a cabonadium synthesizer (and ended up fighting Omega Red) went very bad and Sabretooth shot Janice - a double agent. Logan was furious and refused to leave Janice's body. Logan seemed more than passing fond of Janice, but if the two of them had a relationship outside of a working one is a matter for debate. I assume that there was simply because Logan had seen Creed kill many times before - with even less cause - and it never broke up the team. But after that mission, Maverick said Logan left and never looked back. He was also apparently the one that buried Janice.

It was around this timeframe that Logan joined forces with another friend/lover of Carol Danvers and the pair ignored all orders to the contrary to break Carol out of a Russian prison.

For currently unknown reasons, Logan began to drink heavily and left the Canadian Special Services after an incident (resulting in death) on a shooting range. Not long after that, Logan was attacked by agents of Department H outside of a bar and taken to become a 'volunteer' in the Weapon X program (see Marvel Comics Presents #72 - 84). ((Sidenote: The Weapon X storyline seems to be set around 1964 - but Logan couldn't have had the adamantium during his Team X days as he got his leg broken during one of their missions.))

After escaping from lab rat status, Logan roamed the Canadian wilds for another blank period, during which time he rescued the creature known as Hunter in Darkness from a leg trap. Logan had a distinct dislike of hunters and was following the trail of a group of poachers when he stumbled across newlyweds, Mac and Heather Hudson, who had crossed the trail. They had guns with them and Logan mistook them for the poachers he was after. Heather shot him after he attacked Mac. Romantic soul that he is, Mac then left his new bride alone in a remote cabin with Logan while he left to go find medical aid.

During her less than ideal honeymoon, Heather and Logan bonded as she nursed him - and it was probably as much to please her as any desire of his own that he became a Canadian operative again. On his first mission, he ended up involved in a fight going on between the Hulk and Wendigo (see Incredible Hulk #180-182 for details). He soundly got the snot beaten out of him.

Soon thereafter, he joined Mac's new-forming group codenamed 'The Flight'. The group's first and only mission came before they were really prepared and resulted in the death of one of the team, St. Elmo. The Flight was divided into different levels of experience with the most experienced going into Alpha Flight. By this point, Logan had pretty basically quit using the name Logan except among close friends and simply went by Wolverine.

Shortly after this, Charles Xavier paid a visit to several mutants - including Wolverine - to recruit help for his first group of students (see Giant-Sized X-Men #1 for details). Wolverine rather forcefully resigned his commission and left with 'Chuck'.

Not that life with the X-Men was trouble-free - although the mission to free Xavier's first set of X-Men was successful, all of the rescued X-Men left to try life away from the mansion with the exception of Cyclops (although it wasn't long before Jean Grey rejoined the group and set into motion one of the longest running triangles in comics). The next mission of the new group of X-Men didn't go very well either and resulted in the death of John Proudstar aka Thunderbird (see Uncanny X-Men #95 for details).

Prone as he is to pop them out, believe it or not, none of Wolverine's teammates figured out that his claws were part of his body until Uncanny X-Men #98 - when one of the bad guys made the mistake of striking Jean in front of Wolverine and Banshee saw the claws erupt from the back of his hands (apparently, they had assumed that the claws were a mechanism in his gloves).

On the way back down from outer space, the real Jean Grey ends up getting replaced by an entity called the Phoenix who seals Jean in a sort of cocoon to heal and takes her place (although it will be many issues before that's revealed). Wolverine did note a change in her scent, but mistakenly attributed it her power changes.

Very shortly thereafter, some of the team (Moira, Banshee, Storm and Colossus) decided to relax with a picnic - Wolverine tagged along so that he could do his version of hunting (stalking up close enough to a wild animal to touch it) in the surrounding woods. His sport was interrupted by the unwelcome appearance of Mac Hudson - now sporting the costume and name of Weapon Alpha. Mac was determined to drag Wolverine's runty behind back to Canada whether he wanted to go or not. Mac did succeed in knocking Wolverine out cold, but had no idea that he had joined a new team - or that some of those teammates were nearby. Colossus moved to block Mac while Storm ran to Wolverine's side, but what really drove Mac off was an attack by Banshee, who was furious after a shot from Weapon Alpha (whom he was calling Major Maple Leaf) bounced off Colossus's armored form and struck Moira.

After a few more adventures, the X-ers got separated with Jean and Professor X mistakenly believing the rest to be dead. Far from it, the six of them (Wolverine, Storm, Banshee, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Colossus) ended up stranded in Japan. On the plus side for Wolverine, that little sidetrack enabled him to meet the woman with whom he would have the longest, deepest relationship to date - Mariko Yashida (Uncanny X-Men #119). On the negative side, their plane back to the States was pulled off course by Alpha Flight in an attempt to bring Logan back to Canada permanently.

The fight between the X-Men and Alpha Flight was ended when Wolverine volunteered to go with them in exchange for the X-Men being allowed to reboard their plane and go free. They should have made him promise to stay - Wolverine escaped and beat his teammates back to the plane. Somewhere just after this period of time, Mariko left Japan and took up residence in the Japanese embassy in New York - she and Logan began dating on a regular basis.

Shortly on the heels of that, Kitty Pryde met the X-Men for the first time (see starting at Uncanny X-Men #129 for details). And fast after that, the Dark Phoenix saga which culminated when the X-Men fought the Shi'ar Imperial Guard in a trial by combat for the life of Phoenix - it ended when the Phoenix allowed herself to be killed (Uncanny X-Men 137).

Back on Earth again and possibly motivated by Phoenix's death, Wolverine decided to head back to Canada to mend the fences between himself and Mac. To Nightcrawler's shock, the intensely private Wolverine let the elf come along for the trip. And when Heather burst in on the unexpected pair waiting for her in her kitchen, she called out Logan's name and rushed to him - making Nightcrawler the first X-Man to find out what Wolverine's name was (Uncanny X-Men 139).

Somewhere in this neck of the timestream comes the ill-fated fight between Rogue and Ms. Marvel (aka Carol Danvers - yet another of Logan's occasional lovers) where prolonged contact made Rogue's absorption of Carol's powers and memories permanent. Professor X was able to restore Carol's memories, but unable to replace the emotional connections to them that she once had. In other words, she could remember that she and Logan had been lovers, but not how it felt to be in love with him.

On his return to the States, Logan called on the Japanese embassy only to find that Mariko had returned to Japan - and when he couldn't get so much as a call through to her, he hopped a plane and headed overseas only to discover that Mariko's lost father had returned and made Mariko enter into marriage (see the Wolverine limited series for details). Again, in a nutshell, at the end of the episode, Logan's got another occasional lover (Yukio) and he and Mariko are engaged.

The X-Men journey over to Japan to attend the wedding - Logan was less than thrilled to find that they were accompanied by the newest X-Man, Rogue. Mariko welcomed Rogue however and it turned out to be well that she did. Viper poisoned the visiting X-Men, leaving just Logan and Rogue as the only ones of the team not in the hospital. Rogue repaid Mariko's kindness when she took a shot from Viper that had been intended to kill Mariko - at which time Rogue found out she wasn't quite an invulnerable as she'd thought she was. Logan dropped his past grudge against Rogue and repaid what he considered his debt to her by kissing her and transferring his healing ability to her even though he wasn't in great shape himself after the fighting.

The X-ers finally get out of the hospital and the wedding finally gets underway - but Logan gets left at the altar after Mastermind manipulates Mariko to reject him in order for Clan Yashida's resources to be able to be used for criminal activities (Uncanny X-Men #173). When Mariko later came out from under his influence, she still refused to marry Logan - but not because he wasn't worthy of her. It was because she felt unworthy of him so long as the taint was on her Clan. She then set about starting to look for ways to re-separate Clan Yashida from the underworld so that they would be free to marry.

The Secret Wars saga erupted soon afterward (see Secret Wars mini-series for details) - after it was over, the X-Men found themselves in Japan along with a dragon (who was enamored with Lockheed and decided to use pieces of the city to build a nest - see Uncanny X-Men #181 for details). The X-Men joined local authorities in rescue efforts. Logan discovered a dying woman who had used her own body to protect her daughter from the falling debris. The woman knew she was dying and was naturally concerned over what would happen to her child (whether the father was already dead or if he got killed during the same incident is never mentioned, but clearly, he was out of the picture). Logan promised her that he would raise her as his own. Knowing his own dangerous lifestyle, he didn't keep the girl (Amiko) with him, but instead asked Mariko to take the girl in. Mariko accepted the role of mother with enthusiasm.

Not far off from this point, Kitty took a break from the X-Men to give herself a bit of space away from Piotr, who had quite effectively broken her heart. She accidentally discovered that her father was up to his neck in illegal activities and stowed away on a plane to Japan to see if she could help. She quickly got in way over her head and made a call back to the mansion. Logan answered the phone and Kitty was so embarrassed that she hung up without telling him what was wrong. Not one to let a thing like that stand in his way, Logan was soon in Japan himself and found himself battling his own former sensei, Ogun, for Kitty's soul (see Kitty Pryde and Wolverine mini-series for details). Kitty nearly killed Logan at one point, but overall, the whole experience bonded the two far deeper than before. Kitty also left the name Ariel behind and took up Shadowcat as her new name. Other major changes occurred while the two of them were away - Mac of Alpha Flight was presumably killed and Storm lost her powers when a weapon designed by Forge and intended for use on Rogue hit her instead.

As for Ogun - as mentioned before, Ogun had made an offer of instruction in the past, which Logan obviously took him up on at a later date during one of his blank periods. When Kitty threw off Ogun's influence with help from Logan, she ended up fighting the master, but was not a match for him. Ogun gave her the chance to rejoin him - Kitty refused. Logan intervened at that point before Ogun could kill her and ended up killing him himself. Not that that got rid of Ogun permanently, but more on that later.

Meanwhile, with Mac dead, Heather Hudson donned the uniform and took over leadership of Alpha Flight. She went to Logan for advice and ended up being present when Logan was attacked for the first time by Lady Deathstrike. She claimed that he father had developed the process for bonding adamantium to bone and wanted to claim his formula by claiming the existing example of the process - namely Logan's skeleton. Being none too keen to give up his bones, fighting ensued, ending when Lady Deathstrike broke her sword against the protective field of Heather's uniform (see Alpha Flight Vol. 1 #24 for details). The whole run-in with Deathstrike made Heather start to question just how deeply Mac might have been involved with what happened to Logan - and if running into him on their honeymoon had really been a coincidence.

A rather nasty episode comes in around this timeframe known as the Mutant Massacre (see Uncanny X-Men 210 - 213 for details). Logan runs into both the Power Pack kids and Sabretooth while fighting in the tunnels. Sabretooth was one of the Marauders killing the Morlocks. Sabretooth eventually finds his way to the Mansion and attacks Betsy (Psylocke) until Logan gives him a new sparring partner. Unknown to Sabretooth, Betsy uses her powers to read his mind for information on the rest of the Marauders while he's distracted by the battle with Logan. When Sabretooth figures out that he's been had, he makes his escape going off a cliff - with Logan still after him. Rogue pulls the runt out of the water, but Sabretooth isn't spotted and gets away.

Somewhere during this period of time, Logan took some time away to himself and went to Hong Kong, where he met a woman he was highly attracted to named Wong Ai-Chia. He decided to hang around for awhile and as Ai-Chia's father, Wong Tak-Wah, was making a movie involving Ninja, Logan worked with him for the next three months providing behind-the-scenes editing help while dating her. McLeish and Logan had become acquainted at the local bar - and unknown to Logan, McLeish had been hired by a rival film producer to kill Ai-Chia's father. Finding out when Logan and Ai-Chia were going out next, he planned to kill Tak-Wah while they were gone. Unfortunately for him, Ai-Chia didn't care for the movie they went to see and the couple left the theater early. They found Tak-Wah's body far earlier than McLeish had intended and Logan left in pursuit - an explosion during their fight left Logan assuming that McLeish was dead. Ai-Chia couldn't deal with the violent aspects of Logan's past that she now had to face and broke up with him.

Back in the states on the anniversary of what should have been his marriage to Mariko, Logan went out and did his best to become roaring drunk - not great timing as a being called Horde attacked him and the others in the mansion (Storm, Dazzler, Psylocke, Longshot, Rogue, Havok as well as the visiting Captain Britain and Meggan) to make them steal a crystal for him from a place called the Citadel of Light and Shadow (for details, see Uncanny X-Men Annual #11 from 1987).

Hopping forward to what was called Fall of the Mutants (X-Men #225 - 227), Logan was part of the group of nine (the others being Storm, Colossus, Dazzler, Rogue, Longshot, Psylocke, Havok & Madelyne Pryor) that agreed to allow themselves to be used as a component of a spell by Forge to undo the damage he'd done years before when he'd cast a spell with nine unwilling souls. The nine appeared to have been killed but were in fact restored by Roma and taken to Australia. Feeling that they might be able to do more good as free agents, they chose to allow the world to continue to believe that they were dead and used an old criminal base as their headquarters - which worked well from a time. Their link to the rest of the world was often Gateway - an aboriginal shaman with the ability to open portals to just about anywhere. On one jaunt out by the X-Women of the team, Logan's future was changed when a young orphaned mallrat named Jubilation Lee followed the ladies back through the portal and found herself stuck in the Outback. Instead of revealing herself to them, she created her own little hideaway, living on what she could filch from their living areas.

Backing up again a bit, Logan began to take sidetrips away from Australia, returning to his old haunt of Madripoor. In one of the blank spots of Logan's life, he, Seraph and Viper (in her freelance, pre-Hydra days) tangled with Sabretooth. Seraph attacked Sabretooth to try and protect Logan - Sabretooth predictably killed her. While dying, Seraph had Logan to promise her that he would pay his debt to her by allowing Viper to be able to call in a marker for a favor down the line - he swore and earned a debt he'd eventually come to regret.

Back to Madripoor, with Seraph dead, The Princess Bar was under new ownership. Logan met them and took up the identity of Patch during the 'Save The Tiger' storyline (see Marvel Comics Presents #1 - 10 for details). Logan also gained a new lover - Madripoor crime lord, Tyger Tiger. As he spent more and more time with her in Madripoor, he encountered Cyber - a foe from his past he would have preferred to stay in the past - exactly when the two of them first tackled is an untold tale so far as I am aware. but their second confrontation came in the storyline 'Blood Hungry' (see Marvel Comics Presents #85-92 for details).

The time in Madripoor also brought Logan back in contact with Karma of the New Mutants, who was being forced to work for another of the Madripoor crimelords - her uncle, General Coy. He was, at the time, her best hope for finding her lost brother and sister. Jessica Drew (aka Spiderwoman) was another he tended to run into a great deal as well as Jessica's partner, Lindsey McCabe.

Every thing came to a screeching halt for Logan on one of his returns back to Australia when he was attacked and captured by the Reavers and mutant hater supreme Donald Pierce. They crucified Logan and their torture of him drew Jubilee out of hiding. During an extremely heavy storm, Logan managed to pull himself free, but didn't have much strength left. Despite her many misgivings, Jubilee put herself at risk to help him out and managed to get him down into her hiding place.

Pierce was far from pleased about his favorite torture victim going missing and started an all-out hunt. Lady Deathstrike did spot the pair, but didn't want to fight Logan while he was so far down. Logan and Pierce finally fought, but Pierce didn't know that Logan had help. With Jubilee's help, they escaped together.

Jubilee became Logan's frequent companion during the next period and eventually joined the X-Men when the group dropped all pretense of being dead.

Late 1990 found Logan back in Canada taking a little R&R. His privacy was interrupted by pair of mounties trying to track a killer named Athabasca Ike, who had a teenage girl as a hostage. Logan volunteered to help them find the pair. Athabasca Ike spotted the mounties vehicle, shooting and killing the younger mountie. Ike had made the mistake of choosing to make his get-away in Hunter in Darkness's territory. During the fight that followed, Hunter remembered Logan and left him alone. Ike shot the remaining mountie (Sgt. Doolin) who had a flashback as he was dying to when he had been in Normandy during WWII - Logan's voice had triggered the memory because Logan had been the corporal that jumped with him that day. He spoke Logan's name outloud as he died which puzzled Logan as he hadn't mentioned his name.

In 1991, Donald Pierce made another bid to kill Logan by taking a new tact - he created a pair of android. The first (Albert) was made to resemble Logan and was meant to draw Logan out. The second (Elsie Dee) was made to resemble a young girl and even had the personality/mind patterns of a girl imprinted on her for realism, but she was a tiny, powerful bomb. Almost part of Elsie Dee's body was made out of plastic explosives and she was programmed to detonate when she came in contact with Logan.

Pierce's plans went wrong from the start. He made the mistake of leaving a pair of the Reavers in charge of watching Elsie Dee's downloads - they were supposed to limit her reasoning to child levels, but they goofed and gave her genius levels which allowed Elsie Dee to develop independent thought. One of Elsie Dee's first breaks with her programming was when she decided to work on Albert to increase his intellect as well. Then the actual plan went bad. Albert wasn't able to defeat Logan and just managed to get himself away to go off for repairs. Elsie Dee wasn't happy with the idea of blowing up, but hadn't been able to figure out a way around her programming yet, so began to go through with the rest of the plan. Setting the building she was in on fire, she called out for help - and as hoped, Logan responded. But Pierce's other mistake had been to give Elsie Dee the responses of a real child. She had the desire of a child to be loved and cared for - and the sight of Logan getting himself badly burned in order to reach her triggered a bonding - and she tried to get Logan to leave before her programming forced her to explode. Logan refused to leave her alone and had Storm clear the area of bystanders while Elsie Dee fought against her directives. She was aided by Albert, who managed to figure out the override codes and transmitted them to her even as he was being damaged by shots.

Logan took Elsie Dee to Forge to try to figure out a way for her to permanently get around the detonation problem - and Jubilee became highly jealous of Elsie Dee (who thought of herself as Logan's girlfriend). Albert mistakenly thought that Logan was doing something to Elsie Dee and tried to kill him. Elsie Dee set him straight, but the plane that the three of them were on went down.

As Jubilee and Forge tried unsuccessfully to locate Logan in the water, Elsie Dee managed to drag him out of the water in the tunnel system used by the Morlocks, but panicked when she couldn't get him to wake up. While she was looking for help, Logan came to and ran in Sabretooth. Sabretooth took that opportunity to tell Logan that he was his father as he attacked. Elsie Dee ran into Cable (the tunnels were busy that day). The Morlock tunnels were flooding and all four ended up trapped against a grate system. Elsie Dee separated her head from her body and detonated her body to blow a hole in the grating to save the others. Logan kept the head with him as they were hauled into a S.H.I.E.L.D. chopper. Sabretooth tried to attack again once the chopper was in air, but Elsie Dee clamped her teeth onto him and the two fell out and into the water. Elsie Dee's head was saved by Albert (still in the water from earlier).

Sabretooth and Lady Deathstrike both turned up to complicate Logan's life when he went to see the now-captured and on display Hunter in Darkness. During the fight, the daughter of Sgt. Doolin (the mountie that had been with Logan in Normandy) shot both Logan and Sabretooth with mercury bullets. The heavy metal poison caused both to have hallucinations, although in Creed's case, it seemed to clear away part of his fog. He told Logan the whole father bit was memory tampering, but left before Logan could ask anything else. The Hunter in Darkness escaped and moved into the Morlock tunnels - where Albert was in the process of making Elsie Dee a new, non-exploding body.

Logan goes searching for some clues to his elusive past in the next storyline 'Shiva Scenario'. Major developments from this one - Logan finds that a good number of his so-called memories involve areas that are no more than movie sets, but he finds one big chunk of reality in the form of the Shiva robot - a fail-safe mechanism designed to go after and eliminate the former members of Team X.

Jubilee came along with Mystique and Spiral as Logan joined them to fight against Mojo in the 'Crunch Conundrum' storyline (Wolverine #51 - 53). Elsie Dee, Albert and Hunter in Darkness all ended getting thrown back in time by Spiral as they tried to sort out a timeline thread. The aftermath of Crunch Conundrum started a chain of events that led to one of worst sections of Logan's life.

None of the participants in the Crunch Conundrum kept their memories of what happened - and Jubilee ended up in Japan with Logan's Harley. After the police arrested her (for several things, including a motorcycle with no import stamp), Jubilee called the States to get Logan to come bail her out - Gambit tagged along with him. The storyline that follows is a complicated mix involving Jubes, Logan and Gambit plus Clan Yashida, the Hand, Hydra, Silver Fox, Mariko, Yukio, Sunfire, Silver Samurai, Matsuo, Cylla (a Pierce construct) with a lady named Reiko from Logan's time in Madripoor thrown in for good measure.

In a nutshell, Mariko was finally about to divest Clan Yashida of the last of the holdings that were fouling the Clan's honor - which would have left the path clear for her and Logan to wed at last. While Logan was kept away from her due to a large scale fight, Mariko was betrayed at the final deal and poisoned by a blade coated with blowfish toxin (the assassin was ironically a friend to Logan sent in by no-one else than his former teammate/lover, Silver Fox - who was working with Matsuo). Logan abandoned the fight and ran to her when he heard her scream of pain, carrying her into her family's shrine at her request. Both of them knew there was no antidote and rather than let her suffer a long, agonizing death, Logan fulfilled Mariko's wishes and ended her life quickly with his claws (see Wolverine #55 - 57 for details). He spent a rather lengthy time after her funeral at her gravesite, refusing to leave it for quite some time.

Back with the X-Men, Logan's past erupted with a vengeance again when the team suffered an attack with the opposing forces having Dr. Cornelius (from the Weapon X program), Matsuo (who had ordered Mariko killed) and Omega Red. Logan also gets a less than grand reunion with Sabretooth and Maverick - and everybody is after that cabonadium synthesizer that Team X stole years before that Logan had claimed was lost during their escape. He had actually hidden it - and buried it with Janice. Plenty of action, but the end results are that Logan reclaimed the synthesizer from Janice's grave and gave it over to Maverick (see X-Men #7 for details).

Logan didn't get much recovery time before he got a major shock after remeeting up with John Wraith - Silver Fox, who was dead so far as he remember, was still very much alive and kicking. Team X was back together again briefly to fight a joint enemy, Aldo Ferro aka Psi-Borg. Major development - Ferro uses his mind control powers to force Logan to watch as he has Silver Fox and Sabretooth enact the scenario from the implanted memories. But this time, Silver Fox died for real underneath Sabretooth's claws. Wraith told Logan afterward that he'd found the location of the cabin he used to live in with Silver Fox and Nick Fury transports the body there. Logan has everyone else leave and buries her himself near the cabin, not really happy but somewhat content to discover that he had a few good memories that weren't all fakes.

The next major trauma in Logan's life came courtesy of Magneto - he forcibly pulled the adamantium out of Logan's bone through his skin - overloading his healing factor and nearly killing him (see X-Men #25 for details). Xavier's reaction and response to Magneto's attack set the stage for the Onslaught episode.

In his usual bull-headed fashion, Logan pushed himself back into the Danger Room way too early against Moira's objections. The exercise wasn't going very well at all when anger and frustration broke out in Logan - in the form of his bone claws erupting. His healing factor was still basically shot and Moira rushed to stop the bleeding as Xavier shut down the program (see Wolverine #75 for details).

A few days later, Logan decided that he wasn't able to pull his own weight on the team anymore and left during the night after leaving Jubilee a note and his hat.

Next period of Logan's life definitely had more lows than highs. The insides of building gave him severe willies and he traveled around re-visiting old haunts and old friends. One visit took him to Japan to check on Amiko, his ward.

After the death of Mariko, Amiko had been taken by the Japanese Child Services and placed with a man named Tosh and his wife. Logan was sending support checks to Amiko through LL&L, but was furious to find out that Tosh was spending all the money on things for himself and treating Amiko like a beggar. Tosh made the mistake of taunting Logan that there was nothing he could do about the situation because he was a powerless gaijun - which goes to show he didn't know Logan very well. Logan returned in a makeshift costume during the night and removed Amiko from the couple, taking her to Yukio. Yukio agreed to keep her, but mentioned that she doubted Child Services would allow her to keep the child. Logan had already made arrangements for that though - through Mariko's half-brother, Silver Samurai. He agreed to watch over Amiko in exchange for Logan's return of the honor sword to Clan Yashida.

Fast on the heels of that, the Phalanx Covenant occurred with Logan teaming up with Jean, Scott and Cable for the fight (multiple issues including Wolverine #85).

Back at the mansion, Sabretooth was a prisoner behind a field. Logan was watching a television show - and something on the show clicked with him. He went downstairs and was present when Sabretooth ignored the pain and forced his way put of the cell. The fight between the two was nothing short of savage, but Sabretooth pushed Logan over the line when he started in on how he was going to kill those Logan cared for just for kicks. Logan snapped - and his middle claw popped right into Sabretooth's brain (see Wolverine #90 for details).

Logan moved himself outside after that. He went overland for a short visit with Jubilee - that didn't go too well. Mac and Heather came down to look in on Logan -- as usual, Heather ended up having to referee.

Meanwhile, Logan's old enemy Cyber was being freed from incarceration by Genesis and the Dark Riders. Cyber would've been far less likely to go along with them had he known exactly what they were freeing him for. They wanted the adamantium attached to him and sealed him in a area with flesh eating bugs to separate him from it. Not the way any self-respecting villain would want to go, I'm sure.

Logan had a pleasant trip with 'Ro, Sam Guthrie (Cannonball) and Caliban, hiking and climbing in the wilderness (see Wolverine #96 for details) - but that was just a very brief rest-stop. In rapid order, he found himself facing a powerful, but nutty woman named Chimera (who tended to have conversations with her hand on a regular basis), ended up back in Madripoor where he came to in the middle of a blood bath at The Princess Bar (which was the end of several of Logan's old friends including O'Donnell, Rose Carling and Archie Corrigan) and Logan was being framed for causing it. By the end of the issue (Wolverine #98), the body count had risen to include the Prince of Madripoor, General Coy and Police Chief Tai.

If all that wasn't enough to make it a bad year, Logan and Sam ended up with Genesis whose plans were to make Logan into one of his own troops and use the adamantium that he'd gained from the now-dead Cyber to replace that Logan lost in the fight with Magneto.

The process worked - to a point. Logan fought and everything exploded - and Logan came out in an altered, feral form. Aid came to him from an unexpected source - Elektra came to him to help bring the man back to the surface. The two grew very close for a period with Logan taking Elektra with him to visit Silver Fox's grave and Elektra taking Logan to visit her home in Greece - her family's gardener turned out to be one of the Greek resistance fighters that he'd help train during WWII. He didn't recognize Logan due to the changes Logan had recently undergone and didn't know the name because they'd simply called the Corporal 'Canada' (Wolverine #106).

With Elektra's help, Logan regained enough of his control to feel safe in going back to Japan to see how Yukio and Amiko were getting along. He found that they had been taken by a criminal named Akatora and he ended up teaming with a woman calling herself Pale Flower to free them. Amiko was subjected to brainwashing during her captivity and led to believe that Logan had been the one responsible for killing her mother. She was given a blowfish toxin coated blade hidden inside of a stuffed toy to use against him when the time was right (Wolverine 107 - 109).

Ogun's spirit came back to annoy Logan - possessing everyone from a mime to Lady Deathstrike along the way. Logan didn't have long to worry about him though as the Zero Tolerance storyline began in mid-1997 (multiple comics, including Wolverine 115 - 118).

Hot on the heels of that, Logan ran into the not-as-dead-as-he-would-have-hoped assassin named McLeish that he'd thought he killed about ten years before back in Hong Kong. McLeish set quite a few traps for Logan (including one that destroyed his downtown apartment), but the nastiest surprise he prepared was leaving the now-dead body of Logan's former love, Ai-Chia, for him to find. McLeish died of his own body giving out rather than on Logan's claws (Wolverine 119 - 122).

If Logan thought things couldn't get worse, he was wrong. Viper finally called in the old marker from Seraph and the favor demanded was that Logan marry her so that she would be able to take control of Madripoor as the new ruler. When he gave in, he made quite a few of his lady friends (who had been manipulated by Viper to get him to come to her) extremely angry - Jean let him have it with both barrels and Jessica Drew stopped considering him as an ally. Two who didn't reject him even though they didn't understand were Jubilee and Kitty. Kitty stayed with Logan and he told her about Seraph and the vow before the wedding.

Kitty attended the wedding as witness - and ended up saving Viper when Sabretooth decided to crash the ceremony. Unknown to them, Sabretooth was now augmented with adamantium, but the all-out war was interrupted when Kitty, Logan and Sabretooth were taken by Matsuo and the Hand. Long story, but to make it shorter, Sabretooth and Logan joined forces against the common foe and went their separate ways for a little longer. Prevented from killing Sabretooth by Kitty and Logan, Viper made all three of them wanted in Madripoor. Not an auspicious beginning to the marriage (Wolverine 125 - 128).

While Logan was relaxing with Carol (now no longer with the power of Binary and sporting a new name of Warbird), an alien woman named Aria (with the power to possess other bodies) forced Logan to come along with her in a bid to free her own body and her fellow prisoners from a being called The Collector. What Aria didn't know was that The Collector had been shielding them from the ever-hungry Galactus. In freeing the area, they inadvertently drew Galactus to the planet, which was destroyed with considerable loss of life (Wolverine 133 - 138).

Very shortly after this, Logan's place on Earth is taken over by a Skrull - his adventures, we won't follow, but instead focus on what was going on with the real article.

While the X-Men were in status for their trip back to Earth from the Skrull homeworld, their ship was boarded by Skrull who took the real Wolverine with them and left behind one of their own who had done as complete a shift as a Skrull can do to take Wolverine's place - and one he wouldn't be able to undo (Uncanny X-Men 371).

Meanwhile, Logan found himself being taken to Apocalypse, who had another 'guest' - the still-adamantium enhanced Sabretooth. Apocalypse's intent was for the two of them to fight for the privilege of becoming his newest horseman: Death. Knowing that Creed would take far too much pleasure in the role and cause countless deaths if allowed to, Logan fought back hard. Sabretooth relied too much on the adamantium, but Logan knew the limitations of that far better than he did and succeeded in defeating him. Apocalypse stripped the metal from Sabretooth and remelded it to Logan's bones - a process that had to be massively painful for both men (shown as flashback in Wolverine #145).

The X-Men were ignorant of the swap - until the masked Death killed 'Wolverine' and while Moira and the Professor were examining the body, they discovered the one thing that the Skrull impostor didn't have - the X-gene. Soon thereafter, in a fight with Death, his mask was broken and the team discovered exactly where Wolverine had gotten off to.

Through the joint efforts of Angel, Psylocke, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat and Jubilee, Logan's memories got jogged enough to break Apocalypse's conditioning (see Wolverine 146 - 147 for details).

The timing for regaining the adamantium stank for Logan because the High Evolutionary picked this juncture of time to 'fix' the world by removing the mutant factor out of the world. The effect was widespread and, for some suddenly former mutants, fatal. Without his healing factor to fight it, Logan began to quickly suffer the effects of adamantium poisoning. The team headed to space to confront the High Evolutionary - but his plans had been taken over by Sinister who was planning genetic chaos on a massive scale. Leaving the rest of the team, Logan followed a scent and a hunch along with Storm and Shadowcat to where Sinister had the High Evolutionary trapped in the control room. In the course of the fight, enough controls got smashed to free the High Evolutionary who then destroyed his own work. With the X-gene no longer suppressed, the X-ers soon returned to normal (or at least as close to normal as they get).

Following that, Logan found himself unwillingly involved with a family power struggle in the Kaishek family when the Silver Samurai went to the apartment where Yukio and Amiko live in Tokyo and soldiers of one of the Kaishek brothers followed him there. Logan tried to send Yukio and Amiko out of harm's way, but they were captured. Messy story - for details, see Wolverine #150 - 153.

Logan and Hank McCoy (Beast) spent a stint in prison following the death of Senator Drexel Walsh. Hank came near to getting killed but they managed to get out with the help of a character called Shivers Man, who was sent in by Logan's long-time pal, Nick Fury. The other development from this storyline was the introduction of a thoroughly nasty type named Mauvais.

Late 2001, Logan headed back to Madripoor to take place in a fighting tournament at the 'invitation' of his wife, Viper. Other than a series of fights (some of which signaled the messy end for a few Marvel characters such as Oddball), the other main event was the return of Ogun's spirit again. Viper asked Logan to do what he could to help her be rid of him and said she'd give him what he really wanted if he did - namely, a divorce. He couldn't pass that up and the fight was on with Ogun moving from one host body to another. Then Ogun tried to possess Logan, but Logan's mind was far too chaotic for him to latch onto and he fled from his body in pain. Ogun jumped next into the only other person around - Viper. He mistakenly believed Logan wouldn't attack her, but all things considered, Logan probably enjoyed being able to let loose on her. And since she'd asked him to get rid of Ogun's spirit, he was able to do it without violating his oath to Seraph. Ogun couldn't stay with the badly wounded Viper and didn't dare try to jump into Logan again, so with no other hosts near enough to make another jump, his spirit went screaming off - hopefully for good.

Viper was still alive, if not by much. She said that the divorce was off, but finally agreed to it because Logan wasn't about to get her medical aid until she swore to follow through with her earlier offer.

Mauvais showed up again in Canada and headed north to combine forces with Alpha Flight to fight him in the 'Staying Alive' storyline (see Wolverine 170 - 172 for details).

Most recently, Logan's been having grief with the new-but-not-improved Weapon X program and Sabretooth. Creed recruited Lady Deathstrike and Omega Red to do some dirty work for him resulting in several unpleasant developments. Mac and Heather's plane was attacked and the pair barely escaped serious injury, Nightcrawler was attacked and left for dead, Yukio is in a hospital and possible crippled, Amiko was also nearly killed. Logan himself went into a limbo state and met a few ghosts of villains past - as well as got to fight one last time with Piotr at his side. He also saw the red-haired ghost he's seen at other near-death times, but this time, the woman told him that her name wasn't Jean. At this writing (July 2002), he still hasn't learned her identity.

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