They wouldn’t have to wait for long. In the early ’00s, Marvel started putting out “The End” books. Starting with the excellent Hulk: The End, these books took Marvel’s greatest heroes and gave readers their last big stories. 2004 would see Wolverine: The End come out, from Jenkins and Italian artist Claudio Castinelli. This six-issue series would pick up threads from Origin, giving readers an aged Wolverine discovering a truth about his life that he never expected. 22 years ago, the book didn’t really make a huge splash, but going back and reading it today reveals an amazing Wolverine masterpiece. There are plenty of underrated Wolverine stories, but this one never gets the credit it deserves.
Wolverine: The End Used the Ideas of Origin Brilliantly
Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
Wolverine has had quite a history, and fans had a lot of ideas about what Wolverine: The End would be. I think these expectations are what have kept the story out of the conversation of greatest Wolverine stories. This book was explicitly connected to Origin; if you hadn’t read that story, you’d be lost completely. It kicked off with Logan in Canada, living away from everyone, having his groceries delivered to him by a man from a nearby town. The ol’Canucklehead is given a message: Sabretooth has died. At the funeral, a mysterious smell drives Logan into a quest that will lead him across the world.
This quest leads him to Japan, where he meets a man who is just like him (except taller), with a healing factor and bone claws. This is his older brother John, who he had thought dead. John had seen his mother with groundskeeper Thomas Logan, and the rage caused him to pop his claws and attack his mother. His grandfather sent him to an asylum, and he’d eventually be taken by the precursor to Weapon X. He developed intangibility powers and escaped. He spent years watching his brother, claiming that Professor X knew about him, and he wanted the two of them to work together on a plan to collapse the US economy in order to take over the country. This led to a battle that would see John killed, with Logan going back to the woods.
Wolverine: The End was, in a lot of ways, a pretty basic Wolverine story. It was all about his mysterious past coming back to haunt him, and ended with him killing someone close to him. At the time, this worked against the story. Fans wanted more from it, and it’s since disappeared, rarely talked about by anyone. However, reading the six-issue story today reveals that is basically the perfect Wolverine tale. Jenkins took the pieces he had set up, added them into the classic formula, and created something that works way better than it had any right to. Add in the killer art from Castinelli and this story belongs among the best Wolvie tales ever.
While it might not seem like it had that big of a legacy, it’s actually more important to the history of Logan than most fans realize. John Howlett was gone, but the story introduced ideas that fans would see again in one of Wolverine’s most dangerous villains, Romulus. Much like John, Romulus had the same powers as the ol’Canucklehead, a link to him, and had watched him for decades, engineering the events of his life. Romulus’s design was basically exactly the same as John’s. It’s weird that they didn’t just use John for it, but it shows just how well this story nailed the final tale of the best there is at what he does.
Wolverine: The End Is Unfairly Forgotten
Image Courtesy of marvel Comics
I read Wolverine: The End when it first came out and I thought it was fine. It felt a little too common to me back then, and didn’t feel like it had much impact or said anything new about the ol’Canucklehead. However, re-reading it has revealed just how great it really it is. It’s not the first story of its kind, but the way it used the tropes of the diminutive mutant was effortlessly flawless. Jenkins imbues the story with just the right balance of emotion, capturing an older Logan, his loneliness, and his desire for belonging beautifully. John Howlett made a perfect villain for his younger brother; in fact, he was so good that writers basically created a new version of him. All in all, this story has always been a masterpiece.
Wolverine: The End didn’t reinvent the wheel, and it didn’t do exactly what fans thought it would. Most fans didn’t figure it would be a direct sequel to Origin, and that hurt it for a lot of them. “The End” stories were never meant to be big, character-redefining stories, but tales that told the last story of their various heroes. Wolverine: The End does that adroitly, giving readers a story gave Logan the only ending it could: the broken immortal learning his past wasn’t some idyllic world, but pain to be left behind. It’s phenomenal, and if you’ve never read it, you owe it to yourself to hunt it down.
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