The Greatest Wolverine Stories of All Time #10-7

We’re celebrating Wolverine’s 50th anniversary by counting down YOUR picks for the best Wolverine comic stories of all time! You all voted, I tallied up your votes, and now I’m counting down your votes, no matter how long it takes you to get to #1!

These Wolverine stories come from his own solo series, as well as notable team-ups with other superheroes, as well as issues of X-Men where he was the main character of the story (this was of course especially common in the time before he got his own solo series).

10. “24 Hours” (Wolverine Volume 2, No. 10)

First of all, I would like to note that it is quite funny that the tenth story on the list is literally wolverine #10. Speaking of Serendipity! While this was an excellent comic book issue, it’s funny how it lost some of its “specialness” over the years, as Chris Claremont’s original intent when he wrote this issue (with art by John Buscema and Bill Sienkiewicz) was overtaken by later writers. See, Claremont and John Byrne, back when they were working on X-Men together they invented a backstory for Wolverine and Sabretooth in which Sabretooth was supposed to be Wolverine’s father. However, due to circumstances beyond her control, Claremont was effectively forbidden from using Sabretooth in this way at the time, and so the story simply simmered behind the scenes. Note that in the comics, Sabretooth and Wolverine hadn’t even met at the time, as Sabretooth was instead an Iron Fist villain and then a Power Man and Iron Fist villain.

Finally, Wolverine and Sabretooth engaged in an epic battle during the “Mutant Massacre,” which we featured earlier in this countdown as one of Wolverine’s greatest stories. Now, with Claremont writing Wolverine’s ongoing series, he slowly began to develop two major concepts that he and Byrne had developed but never really pursued – 1. the whole Sabretooth thing, and 2. the idea that Wolverine was very old.

In the last edition of Claremont and John Buscema’s run on wolverine (I can imagine that Claremont simply wrote too many books at that time, especially with Uncanny X-Men (published biweekly in the summer), BOTH concepts were developed, Buscema’s last issue was inked by the great Bill Sienkiewicz, making this issue absolutely GORGEOUS.

The plot is told in two timelines, both set in the same 24-hour time frame. It turns out that Sabretooth visits Wolverine every year on his birthday to torment him. At some point in the past (and it seems like it was quite a while ago, which adds to the mystery of Wolverine’s age), Sabretooth murdered Wolverine’s girlfriend Silver Fox. In the present, Wolverine is involved in a fight with some crooks in Madripoor. In the past, we see that Sabretooth eventually pushed Wolverine too far and the Canadian mutant threw himself and Sabretooth off a cliff, hoping to finally put an end to the suffering. Sabretooth was impressed, but in the end he picked himself up and set off, ready to return the next year to torment Wolverine even more…

And today we see that Sabretooth killed some of the guys who were after Wolverine, since only HE can kill Wolverine. Fans were intrigued by the idea that Wolverine and Sabretooth apparently had a relationship that spanned decades and was almost a father-son relationship, right? A twisted father-son relationship, but one nonetheless. Unfortunately, that idea backfired and as of this writing, there is no direct familial connection between Sabretooth and Wolverine.

9. “Kitty Pryde and Wolverine” (Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #1-6)

One interesting thing Chris Claremont did back when Wolverine got a miniseries was that the miniseries was worked directly into the plot of the regular series, in that Wolverine wasn’t with the X-Men to star in his first miniseries, but was absent from the comics. When Claremont did a sequel to the miniseries, this time also featuring Kitty Pryde, it was also written into the regular X-Men comic why Kitty and Wolverine were in Japan (and in fact, there’s even a moment in the miniseries where Wolverine learns about some then-current events in various Marvel comics that were coming out at the same time. It’s bizarre that he learned about Guardian’s death in the pages of a miniseries, for example.

The highlight of the series by far is the introduction of Ogun, the magical samurai who was Wolverine’s mentor until Wolverine broke up with him because Ogun was, you know, EVIL. Ogun seeks revenge on Wolverine by capturing and corrupting Kitty Pryde and using his telepathic powers to turn Kitty Pryde into a ninja that he can send after Wolverine to kill him. Of course, that didn’t work, but Kitty Pryde was forever changed by what Ogun did to her and took on the codename Shadowcat over the course of this series. She has retained her ninja skills ever since. Kitty decides to get revenge on Ogun and sets out alone. She is clearly Ogun’s inferior, but by this point he is shocked at how much she has evolved in the short time since he first took control of her mind. This time, when he tries to take control of her mind, she fights back and succeeds.

Of course, as a villain, he plans to kill her then, but Wolverine shows up at the last moment in an excellent sequence at the end of the penultimate issue of the series…

Al Milgrom, the artist on the series, had big shoes to fill when he created the sequel to the Wolverine miniseries by Claremont, Frank Miller, and Joe Rubinstein, but Milgrom does an excellent job of arting the series. The addition of Ogun to Wolverine’s rogue gallery was a great addition, and the relationship between Wolverine and Kitty Pryde developed well here. They already had a sort of big sister/little sister relationship, but now that relationship was deepened, and Kitty became closer to Wolverine than to her other X-Men teammates, with whom she ALSO has sisterly relationships.

8. “Enemy of the State #3” (Wolverine Vol. 3, No. 20-31)

After the blockbuster success that Jim Lee and Jeph Loeb had with Batman Hush, it was a big hit in the mid-2000s to launch a title with a structure like Hush, which was something like a larger-than-life event within an ongoing series. Almost like a maxiseries within a regular series, and that was definitely the case with Enemy of the State by Mark Millar, John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson, which consists of two story arcs of six issues each that together form an overall narrative.

The opening arc deals with Wolverine being killed and then resurrected by the Hand as their new chief assassin (they are now allied with Hydra). An evil Wolverine is an extremely terrifying sight, and Millar squeezes plenty of drama out of the idea of ​​Wolverine being a villain. There are plenty of guest stars as the evil Wolverine faces off against the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and in one particularly dramatic issue, the X-Men. Elektra is drawn into the story, and in a major twist, Wolverine is captured by the other heroes at the end of the first arc. Elektra has since been killed and resurrected by the Hand and Hydra, and is now evil herself.

Captain America is the one who delivers the final knockout blow to Wolverine, and Wolverine ends up in SHIELD custody, where they’ve been running simulations to see if they can free Wolverine from the Hand’s brainwashing, and they’ve been slowly but surely making progress, but of course Elektra then attacks with an army of formerly dead superheroes that Wolverine had killed and then brought back to life as agents of the Hand. The most famous resurrected superhero was Northstar from the X-Men (there was this bizarre turn of events where Northstar was killed in about three different X-Men comics within a single month. The other two were different continuities, but still, it was weird).

In the second half of the story, the now-cured Wolverine becomes an agent of SHIELD and sets out to get revenge on the Hand and Hydra by killing ALL the remaining members of the villainous group. It was wild and over-the-top action with a number of great scenes (like Wolverine’s fight with Daredevil, which turns out to be a ruse to lure Elektra out, and Wolverine’s fight with the X-Men, which sees Wolverine having to fight Kitty Pryde again while one of the two is a brainwashed assassin).

7. “Vicious Circle” (The Incredible Hulk No. 340)

This issue is of course best known for its iconic cover, but the inside of the issue is also notable. Written by Peter David and drawn by Todd McFarlane (this was McFarlane’s first major series for Marvel), the issue takes place in the middle of two major storylines for Hulk and Wolverine. As for Hulk, Bruce Banner discovers that the U.S. government has been stockpiling gamma bombs, and Bruce, Rick Jones, and SHIELD agent Clay Quatermain have gone rogue (with Hulk and Banner working together) to travel the country and eliminate all of the stockpiled gamma bombs (the problem, of course, is that the Leader himself is trying to gain access to the supplies for nefarious reasons). For Wolverine, this takes place during the events of The Fall of The Mutants, and Storm has left the X-Men to try to get her powers back, leaving Wolverine to take command of the X-Men. This is Wolverine’s first time serving as the leader of the X-Men, and the team was fairly inexperienced under Wolverine (Havok, Rogue, Psylocke, Dazzler, and Longshot didn’t exactly have a long history with the X-Men, with the exception of Havok, but he was barely part of the team during his time on the team). So he felt like he needed to set a good example for the others, and when he encounters Hulk, his first instinct is NOT to fight him, as he has too many other commitments to rush ahead and get into a fight.

The Hulk, for his part, however, WANTS a fight. This is the first time the Hulk has fought Wolverine since the original version of the Hulk returned. Grey skin and a smarter personality instead of a wild, angry beast, so he wants to fight Wolverine THIS way, and he won’t take no for an answer as he taunts Wolverine about how easily he can get Wolverine to drop his pretensions of respectability and fight with him.

We get an incredible fight between the two, with McFarlane’s art being extremely dynamic. The whole thing is eventually broken up by Hulk’s allies, but it really was a brutal fight, one of the most brutal fights the two have ever had. David later had the Hulk fight the Thing in a similar fight where the two swapped their traditional status quo (where here the HULK was the smart one who just wanted to brawl while Wolveirne wanted to be left alone). Similarly, in the fight between the Thing and the Hulk written by David, the Hulk was in his weakened state while the Thing was at the peak of his strength, so the usual nature of the fight was reversed, just like here).