Marvel is getting ready for the official return of Wolverine to the Marvel Universe and the company is celebrating his return by providing the mutant hero with a brand-new costume designed by Declan Shalvey, who will be drawing the last three issues of the upcoming Return of Wolverine miniseries.

The costume has generated its fair share of controversy in fandom, with reactions ranging from enthusiastic support to abject horror, but it must be taken into consideration that Wolverine has perhaps gone through the most major costume changes of any the most popular superheroes. It was a big deal when Spider-Man got a new costume for a few years after having the same one for twenty years. Wolverine changed his costume in his second appearance! He then went through a major change after just five years! With Wolverine, a variety of costumes is his normal state of being. With that in mind, we will share with you his entire costume history in his 44-year (and counting) history!

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THE ORIGINAL

When Wolverine was introduced in 1974's Incredible Hulk #181 (after a brief cameo in the last page of the previous issue), it was at the direction of the then-Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, Roy Thomas. In 1972, Stan Lee moved from Editor-in-Chief and Art Director of Marvel to become the company's new Publisher. Thomas inherited Lee's Editor-in-Chief gig and eventually John Romita took over the Art Director role. Thomas came up with the idea of introducing a Canadian superhero and he told Incredible Hulk writer Len Wein to also name him Wolverine.

As de facto Art Director, Romita designed most of the major new costumes for Marvel characters at the time and Romita came up with the original Wolverine costume, which leaned heavily into looking like an animal (with whiskers on the mask and everything). It is just a coincidence that the colors that Romita chose, yellow and blue, also happened to be the colors of the Michigan Wolverines football team.

KANE'S MISTAKE BECOMES CANON

Similar to how John Romita designed the costumes for most major new Marvel characters, in the mid-1970s, Gil Kane also drew the covers for most of Marvel's more notable issues. He did a lot of covers for Marvel at the time, since he was such a good cover artist, but he was particularly used on notable issues, like debuts and things like that. When Dave Cockrum drew the debut of the All-New, All-Different X-Men in Giant-Size X-Men #1, Wolverine was a member of the team and Cockrum remained faithful to Romita's original design. On the cover, however, Kane dropped the whiskers and gave Wolverine a cowl on his mask.

Cockrum liked it so much that he went back into his interior pages and re-drew Wolverine's mask throughout the issue to have it match Kane's change. That became Wolverine's official costume in the X-Men.

FANG'S FOR NOTHING!

Dave Cockrum's big break as a comic book artist was drawing Legion of Super-Heroes for DC Comics. In the final issue of his original run on X-Men with Chris Claremont, Cockrum helped introduce the Shi'ar Imperial Guard, who were based on the Legion of Super-Heroes (Gladiator was Superboy, Oracle was Saturn Girl, etc.). In the middle of the fighting, Cockrum came up with the idea that Wolverine would gain a new costume. After one of the Imperial Guard burned his costume off, Wolverine attacked another Guard member, Fang (based on the Legionnaire Timber Wolf), and took his costume.

However, incoming X-Men artist John Byrne did not like the new costume and he particularly disagreed with the idea of Cockrum, in effect, "sticking" Byrne with a new costume in Cockrum's final issue on the book. So in X-Men #109, Byrne made sure that Wolverine ditched the Fang costume as soon as the X-Men got back to Earth...

It would not be long, though, before Byrne also decided to change Wolverine's original costume.

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WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?

While John Byrne was initially "just" the penciler on X-Men, he soon began to plot the book with writer Chris Claremont. Eventually, Byrne was driving the direction of the book as much if not more than Claremont himself. One of the areas that Byrne concentrated on early in his run was beefing up Wolverine's role on the team. As a Canadian himself, Byrne wanted to help make Wolverine a better character and soon, Byrne and Claremont had made Wolverine the breakout star of the series. Byrne felt that Wolverine's original costume was a bit too colorful for a character like Wolverine, so in X-Men #139 (by Byrne, Claremont and Terry Austin), Wolverine debuted his new brown costume.

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Wolverine's reasoning for the costume change was a simple, "Why not?"

Amusingly, while Byrne did not like Cockrum changing Wolverine's costume right before he left the book, that was basically what happened in Byrne's case, as well, as he left the series four issues after introducing Wolverine's new costume (Byrne did not know that he was leaving when he designed the costume, though, which is a significant difference).

'PATCH'ING THINGS UP

After Byrne and Claremont helped to make Wolverine the breakout star of the X-Men, his popularity continued throughout the 1980s, including a blockbuster miniseries by Claremont and Frank Miller (with Joe Rubinstein). Wolverine kept his brown and tan costume throughout this time. However, when Wolverine was given his own ongoing series, Claremont was not a fan of the idea. He did not mind Wolverine having solo adventures, but he did not want to detract from the regular X-Men series, so he wanted these solo stories to be as distinct as possible. Working with artist John Buscema, Claremont had Wolverine go to the dangerous island nation of Madripoor and take on the secret identity of "Patch." As part of this new identity, Wolverine would wear a new costume that was a simple dark jumper.

Later artists added a red belt/sash around the waist to give it some more color, like Jim Lee did here in this page from Uncanny X-Men #257...

The "Patch" look would mostly ceased to be used once Wolverine's adventures left Madripoor.

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SHOWING TEAM PRIDE

In 1989-1990, the X-Men slowly broke apart, as the eight members of the team in Australia slowly dwindled down to just Psylocke, Havok, Dazzler and Colossus. Sensing an impending attack, Psylocke used her powers to convince her teammates to each go through the Siege Perilous, the mystical "get out of jail free card" that they had been given by the magical being known as Roma. Rogue had previously gone through it. Once you enter it, you are scattered around the world, in both location and spirit, as the journey will often give you a new personality and life wherever you land.

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Slowly but surely, the team came back together until the different factions (Forge and Banshee were searching for their lost teammates, Wolverine, Jubilee and Psylocke were traveling together and so were Gambit and Storm) came together around the "X-Tinction Agenda" crossover. The X-Men were finally united again. In an attempt to symbolize this new cohesiveness, the members all wore matching variations of the classic Jack Kirby team uniforms from the original X-Men #1, just with a Jim Lee spin on the design.

When the X-Men then merged with X-Factor to form a new X-Men team so big that it had to split it into two separate titles (Uncanny X-Men and X-Men), everyone either went back to their old costumes or got new Jim Lee-designed outfits.

Wolverine went back to the brown costume before then returning to his original All-New, All-Different X-Men costume in X-Men #4...

It would be this costume that he would wear in the X-Men: Animated Series in 1992, thus solidifying it as "the" Wolverine costume for most fans.

AN ALTERNATE DETOUR

We are not going to spotlight every alternate reality costume that Wolverine has ever worn, but it would be unfair to not mention his "Weapon X" costume from the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline that went through the X-Men titles in 1995, when Professor X's son, Legion, traveled back in time to kill Magneto and instead accidentally killed his own father. This woke up Apocalypse out of hibernation decades earlier and so he took over the world before there were any superheroes to stop him. In this reality, Wolverine was known as Weapon X and had had his hand blown off by Cyclops, who was evil in this reality. At least he got to date Jean Grey in this reality!

RUNNING WILD

In the 1993 crossover, "Fatal Attractions," the X-Men decided to take care of business with Magneto once and for all. Professor X managed to wipe Magneto's mind, but not before Magneto used his powers to pull all of the metal out of Wolverine's body. Wolverine discovered that he still had claws even with the adamantium out of his body. However, he also learned that the adamantium was the only thing keeping his body from further mutating.

Wolverine began to seemingly devolve into a feral-like creature. In Wolverine #100 (by Larry Hama, Adam Kubert and Dan Green), the villain from the future known as Genesis offered to give Wolverine his adamantium back, but Wolverine refused. In denying the process, there was an explosion that tore up Wolverine's costume as he took a big step forward (or backwards) in his devolution. He rocked this torn costume look for a while before Elektra and Stick helped him regain his humanity. Later, Apocalypse would force him to re-bond with the adamantium so he stopped any further devolution.

DEATH BECOMES HIM

The downside of Wolverine getting his adamantium back is that he was then brainwashed by Apocalypse into becoming his new horseman, Death. During this same period, the Skrulls (presumably working with Apocalypse) switched Wolverine with a Skrull impostor of Wolverine so that Apocalypse could experiment on the real Wolverine in peace.

The problem was that Apocalypse then sent "Death" after the X-Men and Death killed "Wolverine" and when the X-Men did an autopsy on him they discovered that he was a Skrull. This led to them fighting against Death and finding out the horrible truth behind Death's identity...

Luckily, they were able to cure Wolverine's brainwashing.

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ULTIMATE WOLVERINE

In 2000, Marvel launched the Ultimate Universe, which was a brand-new take on their classic characters with a brand-new continuity. Essentially, it was an attempt to start fresh without decades of continuity dragging the characters down. The idea was that with all of the new superhero movies of the early 21st Century, that these Ultimate versions of the heroes would be better "jump on points" for the new readers. The X-Men all had new costumes in Ultimate X-Men, including Wolverine.

NO MORE COSTUMES!

Soon after the creation of the Ultimate Universe, Marvel then added new Editor-in-Chief to their main line of comics, Joe Quesada, and Quesada brought in outside writers who dramatically revamped the Marvel Universe. In the case of Grant Morrison, he took over the X-books and had Frank Quitely design new costumes that were more like uniforms than costumes in New X-Men. This was to go along with the general black leather uniforms that the X-Men wore in the then-recent X-Men film.

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Wolverine basically just wore a black leather jacket with an X on it.

OKAY, A UNIFIED COSTUME

Eventually, Marvel realized that it did not make sense to have Wolverine wearing one outfit in New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men and a whole other outfit in Ultimate X-Men, especially as the Ultimate X-Men version was becoming very popular. That was a problem with licensing, as which version would you offer up for licensed products like balloons, candy, stuff like that. Therefore, Marvel decided to come up with a unified look for Wolverine across all titles. It took a lot of elements of his Ultimate X-Men outfit, but not precisely. He did have to suddenly have a soul patch in the regular comics because that it what he wore in the Ultimate Universe.

OKAY, COSTUMES AGAIN!

After Morrison's run ended, Joss Whedon took over the "main" X-Men title, which was a newly launched series called Astonishing X-Men with artist John Cassaday. Whedon had the X-Men decide that they needed to be more active as outright superheroes to make the public no longer fear them. So Cyclops put together a team of recognizable X-Men and had them go back to wearing superhero costumes. Wolverine's new costume was a riff on his original All-New, All-Different X-Men costume.

DARK SECRETS

In 2008, Cyclops decided that the X-Men needed their own special black ops "murder team," who could secretly kill threats to the X-Men. Cyclops enlisted Wolverine to lead this secret X-Force squad in the pages of X-Force (by Chris Yost, Craig Kyle and Clayton Crain). Eventually, X-Force got sick of Cyclops keeping them a secret and just sending them on missions without their input, so they split off from him and formed their own version of the team in Uncanny X-Force (by Rick Remender and Jerome Opena).

Wolverine adopted a more grey costume at this point...

Perhaps to reflect the "grey area" where this team resided.

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TIME TRAVEL OUTFIT

In Age of Ultron, the present was altered by Ultron attacking the Earth in the near past from an attack point in the future. He soon conquered the planet. The remaining superheroes left traveled to a stronghold that Nick Fury established in the Savage Land. There, they discovered Doctor Doom's time machine. A group of heroes decided to travel to the future to attack Ultron in his own time. Wolverine, though, decided to travel to the past to stop Hank Pym from ever creating Ultron. During this time, he wore a unique costume designed by Bryan Hitch.

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He ultimately decided to kill Hank Pym in the past in Age of Ultron #6 (by Brian Michael Bendis and Carlos Pacheco). That, though, made things even worse, as it turned out that Hank Pym was actually rather helpful in the grand scheme of things. So Wolverine traveled back in time again in Age of Ultron #9. With his costume destroyed, he had to wear his original costume when he confronted himself in the past.

They let Hank Pym come up with a solution to their problem instead and everything worked out. However, the Marvel Multiverse was badly damaged by all of that excess time travel.

FAIL SAFE MEASURE

Soon after that storyline, Wolverine suffered a great loss when his healing power was shut down by an alien virus attack. Without his healing powers, Wolverine was now in constant pain and had difficulty carrying his adamantium skeleton. So he had a special armor designed for himself to both protect him and also aide him in lifting his skeleton.

He was wearing this armored costume in the Death of Wolverine series, where one of the scientists from the Weapon X Project tried to use Wolverine's healing power on a new batch of subjects. Since Wolverine did not have such a power, the plan was foiled. Wolverine freed the other subjects and killed Professor Cornelius, but not before he was seemingly killed by a vat of molten adamantium falling on him, sans healing power.

THE RETURN!

Obviously, somehow Wolverine was brought back from the dead. We shall soon find out exactly how it happened, but one thing we know for sure is that in the second issue of the upcoming Return of Wolverine series, he will be receiving a new costume from new series artist, Declan Shalvey. It will be a while before we find out why he has a new costume design. It might just be a throwback to the John Byrne era when the answer was simply, "Why not?"