Every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without retconnng away the previous story. Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of Abandoned Love. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today, based on a suggestion from reader Blakeastro, we look at a long-running Wolverine plotline in Uncanny X-Men that ended up going nowhere...

Chris Claremont objected heavily to the idea of Wolverine having his own ongoing series. Claremont believed that Wolverine worked best as a part of the X-Men, in the sense that he wanted to have full control over what happened to the character. He was fine with him appearing in mini-series, but even there, Claremont was the guy who would write the mini-series, ya know? So he saw those as basically extensions of the main X-Men title. When Marvel made it clear to him that Wolverine WAS going to have his own ongoing series whether Claremont liked the idea or not, Claremont begrudgingly went along with it, only he said that if it was going to happen, then he was going to write it and he was going to write it in such a way that would not conflict with the regular X-Men book as much as possible. So A. Claremont would write Wolverine out of X-Men to give him time, continuity-wise, for his adventures to take place and B. He would have his adventures take place in Madripoor, far from the X-Men (Wolverine wasn't even going by Wolverine in his own title, but his alias "Patch"). This worked for a while, but eventually Claremont stopped writing Wolverine's ongoing series and the incoming writers just had Wolverine go on various adventures that did not really tie into the X-Men.

Once Wolverine returned to the pages of Uncanny X-Men, Claremont decided to start a long-running plot with the character. It all began in Uncanny X-Men #251, when Wolverine returned to Australia to find that the X-Men were all gone but the Reavers were there and they beat Wolverine nearly to death and then tortured him, nailing him to a wooden X and then leaving him exposed to the elements all day and all night...

Eventually, Wolverine begins to hallucinate stuff...

He has so much resolve, though, that he eventually breaks free, but he is kind of screwed, as he is ALL messed up.

Luckily for him, a runaway mutant girl named Jubilee had stowed away with the X-Men when the female members of the X-Men had visited a mall a while back. Jubilee had been hiding at the X-Men's base ever since. She is compelled to help Wolverine because she's a good egg.

In the next issue, Uncanny X-Men #252 (by Claremont, Rick Leonardi and Kent Williams), we see that two hallucinations stuck with him, his old war buddies, Carol Danvers and Nick Fury...

Even as Wolverine and Jubilee begin traveling the world, trying to find Wolverine's missing X-Men teammates, he continues to be weaker and continues to hallucinate...

In Uncanny X-Men #258 (by Claremont, Jim Lee and Scott Williams), Wolverine frees the brainwashed Psylocke by opening up his mind to her. So now SHE sees his hallucinations!

It's a clever bit, really, having a telepath see and communicate with someone else's hallucinations, and the bit continued in Uncanny X-Men #261 (by Claremont, Marc Silvestri and Dan Green)...

Soon after, the X-Men finally reunite, but during X-Tinction Agenda, Wolverine almost dies due to his lack of healing factor (his powers were nullified), and even when it returns, he is limited, as seen in this classic sequence from Uncanny X-MEn #273 by Chris Claremont and the legendary Michael Golden...

Okay, so this is all going somewhere, right?

Well, go to the next page to see how it was all resolved in the launch of X-Men #1 by Chris Claremont, Jim Lee and Scott Williams...

Yep, you guessed it, it's ALL dropped! No more hallucinations, no more failing healing factor, no more nuthin' It was just unceremoniously dropped. Bob Harras wanted the new X-Men series to be pretty much a good jumping on point, so the plot did not carry over. And Larry Hama, on the main Wolverine title, wasn't doing anything with the idea. So it was just dropped. Claremont originally had a plan to have Wolverine eventually "die," come back as a servant of the Hand and then break free, having cleansed himself of everything, including his adamantium skeleton. But obviously that never happened.

Thanks for the suggestion, Blakeastro! If anyone else has a suggestion for a notable dropped comic book plot that they'd like to see featured here, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!