Return of Wolverine Might Have Fixed Logan's Most Unfixable Problem

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Return of Wolverine #5, by Charles Soule, Steve McNiven, Jay Leisten, Laura Martin and Joe Sabino, on sale now.

After Wolverine spent most of the past year sneaking around the edges of the Marvel Universe, Return of Wolverine has officially revealed how Logan came back to life.

The X-Man seemingly died after suffocating in an unbreakable adamantium shell in 2014's Death of Wolverine, only to reappear several years later, healthy and a bit confused. Now, the recently-completed miniseries has filled in the details of Wolverine's mysterious return. In addition to that, the series also gave Logan the ability to make his claws white-hot when he's angry and introduced Persephone, a new member of the X-Men's rogues gallery, a mutant with the ability to raise the dead as her servants whose highest profile target to date is none other than Logan.

When Persephone used her powers to resurrect Wolverine, he was essentially an amnesiac who mindlessly obeyed her orders, but over the course of the series, he remembered glimpses of his life. In Return of Wolverine #5, all of Logan's memories seemingly return as he's fighting Zagreus, one of Persephone's generals.

In that triumphant moment, Wolverine dramatically declares that he remembers 10,000 fights. Putting the bravado of that one-liner aside, the pronouncement suggests that Wolverine remembers most of his life.

However, Logan's two major subsequent chronological appearances have gone out of their way to explicitly point out that Logan doesn't remember every aspect of his previous life. In Wolverine: Infinity Watch #1, for example, which picks up seconds after the end of Return of Wolverine, Logan explicitly tells Loki that he's been having memory problems since his resurrection, a comment that seems to extend beyond the X-Man referring to his memory-less adventure with Persephone.

At the beginning of Infinity Watch, Logan's opening narration makes it clear that he remembers some of his time in Japan, the Weapon X Program, dying in Death of Wolverine and being resurrected by Persephone. Given this issue's setting, it's also clear that he remembers where the X-Mansion is located, and how to get there.

In Uncanny X-Men #11, which takes place after the events of Infinity Watch, Wolverine teamed up with his old rival Cyclops to form a new X-Men team. Logan's recent adventures in that series have indicated that he remembers the nature of his relationships with Cyclops, Black Widow, several of the New Mutants and Blindfold, one of his former students at the Jean Grey Institute for Higher Learning.

But despite all of that, Wolverine tells Kid Cable, a younger version of a time-traveling mutant Logan knew well, that he's still "a bit fuzzy" on parts of his past.

Right now, it's not entirely clear what Wolverine is still "fuzzy" on. In his limited appearances since regaining his memories post-resurrection, Logan hasn't tried to come to terms with the horrific actions he did while under Persephone's control. It's also not clear whether Logan remembers his entire life, or merely the post-Weapon X Program period that has almost entirely defined the character.

Wolverine always works best as a character when there's some degree of mystery in his past. Having a mysterious past isn't necessarily an essential aspect of Wolverine, but it adds a lot to his appeal, and its return opens up intriguing story-telling possibilities.

In the early 2000s, readers learned that Wolverine was born as James Howlett, a frail and frightened boy during the late 1800s in Origin, by Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas, Joe Quesada and Andy Kubert. A few years after that, Logan remembered his entire life story in the wake of the reality-reshaping shenanigans of Brian Michael Bendis and Olivier Coipiel's House of M.

While neither of those stories are inherently bad, it's difficult to deny that Wolverine is at his most compelling when he's asking questions about himself. Whether he wonders if he can conquer the rage within him through discipline and humanity, or needs to figure out whether Sabretooth is his father, these questions give Logan an unknowable, mythic quality that he loses when he remember ever detail of James Howlett's exceedingly long life.

From Wolverine's most memorable adventures to utterly forgettable tales, Wolverine's quest to come to terms with his past was a core part the character in the era that largely defined him. From comics to cartoons and film, the sense of mystery around Wolverine helped him evolve from just another member of the X-Men into an iconic superhero who's more famous than all of Marvel's other mutants combined.