Well over a century old, Wolverine has several lifetimes of experience, but the full extent of James "Logan" Howlett's past remained a mystery even to himself for the formative decades of his comic book career. The iconic member of the X-Men's traumatic ordeal in the Weapon X Program has erased memories of his life before, leaving Logan as one of the deadliest figures in the Marvel Universe at the expense of his past. And while Logan's memories eluded him for much of his comic book history, they came flooding back all at once shortly after Wolverine served as a co-founding member of the New Avengers during the 2005 crossover event House of M.
As established by Paul Jenkins, Joe Quesada, Bill Jemas and Andy Kubert's Origin #1 in 2001, James Howlett was born in Alberta, Canada in the late 19th century. Wolverine's powers emerged when his bone claws popped out of his hands to kill his illegitimate father, Thomas Logan, after he murdered his presumed father John Howlett. Taking on the moniker Logan, the aspiring superhero lived as a drifter around the world as he enjoyed staying physically at his prime, with his accelerated healing factor slowing his age. Sometime after World War II, Logan joined the black ops organization Team X, where he was given false memory implants. After briefly escaping and working elsewhere for the Canadian government, he was recaptured and enrolled in the Weapon X Program, which transformed him into the ultimate, unstoppable killing machine. In addition to bonding his skeleton with indestructible adamantium, the program wiped Logan's mind clean of his preexisting memories to provide a clean slate for them to reprogram.
While Logan managed to escape from Weapon X and eventually created the superhero mantle Wolverine while working for the Canadian intelligence agency Department H, his past before Weapon X remained a mystery to him. Among Logan's early assignments was a planned assassination of Charles Xavier before the powerful mutant telepathically tampered with Logan's memories further before he joined the X-Men.
After the events of "Avengers Disassembled," which saw the Scarlet Witch temporarily descend into madness and bend reality against Earth's Mightiest Heroes, it was decided by the X-Men and New Avengers that Wanda Maximoff was too powerful and unstable to be left alive. As a joint strike team tracks Wanda to the ruins of Genosha, they find her reality-warping once again, consuming the entire planet.
In the world of House of M, created by Wanda and Xavier, many of the heroes were granted their greatest desires. For Logan, this meant the full restoration of his memories, including his life before being subjected to the horrors of the Weapon X Program. This had the unintended side effect of Logan remembering the world before Wanda and Xavier's tampering, and Wolverine led the heroes in their efforts to restore the Marvel Universe as it once was with the help of the mysterious teenage hero Layla Miller. When the dust settled and the world was saved, at the expense of much of its mutant population, Logan retained his memories amidst all the wholesale changes to reality in Brian Michael Bendis and Olivier Coipel's House of M #8.
Just in time for Logan to regain his memories, many elements of his formerly forgotten past resurfaced to menace him, most notably his twisted son Daken and the shadowy villain Romulus. Initially overwhelmed by the sudden rush of memories restored to him, Logan has been able to come to terms with his past, no longer an enigma to himself. These changes have continued into Dawn of X, with Wolverine forging a new future for himself and the Children of the Atom on the mutant nation-state of Krakoa as a man no longer haunted by the missing memories of his own life.