This is "How Can I Explain?", which is a feature spotlighting inexplicable comic book plots.

Today, we take a look at Wolverine's adamantium poisoning.

First off, there doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason why having adamantium in one's body would be a problem. People have metal put into their body all the time. Injured knees, broken hips, people have all sorts of metals like titanium and steel put into their body without any fear of getting poisoned by them, so it's odd that adamantium would be poisonous, and yet, routinely it has been expressed that Wolverine's healing factor has been depressed, a bit, by the fact that it was constantly curing him from adamantium poisoning. It has come up a few times over the years, but one of the more notable examples was in a storyline where the High Evolutionary wiped away all mutant abilities on Earth and the end result was Wolverine slowly dying from adamantium poisoning, as shown here in Uncanny X-Men #380 (by Alan Davis, Terry Kavanagh, Tom Raney and Scott Hanna...

And yet, over the years, this has not affected ANYONE but Wolverine!!

Here are just a handful of people who have had adamantium put into them. I've even omitted mutants who have had adamantium put into them in case you want to argue that they have some sort of mutant healing power just like Wolverine.

You have Bullseye...

Hammerhead...

and the Russian...

Now, later on, right before he died, when Wolverine's healing power failed again (and he began wearing armor to protect himself), the Beast just gave him pills to stop the adamantium poisoning...

So even if you wished to argue that all non-Wolverine people were just taking pills to keep from getting adamantium poisoning, then why wasn't Wolverine ever taking these pills until just now?

That whole thing was just a mess of "Hey, let's throw this plot point out there without really thinking about the reasons or logic behind it." Which, of course, to a certain extent is the very joy of comic books, but still...

If anyone else has a similar inexplicable comic book plot (it can be any comic book plot that did not have a good explanation for it, like the X-Men never letting anyone know that they were alive after surviving the explosion of Magneto's Antarctic base despite multiple opportunities to do so), then drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!