More than any of Marvel's other superheroes, Wolverine can go from a kid-friendly X-Men leader to a savage fighter in the blink of an eye. Thanks to the complex struggles of his inner life and his gruff charm, Logan has worked equally well in R-rated movies like Logan and in all-ages cartoons like Wolverine and the X-Men. While that kind of flexibility might seem counter-intuitive for a character who literally has knives on his hands, the boundaries between these two kinds of Wolverine stories are usually well-defined. Still, every now and then, some potentially objectionable things have slipped through the cracks between the different kinds of Wolverine stories.

Now, CBR is looking at some of the times Wolverine slipped by the censors, along with some of the times he got caught. In this list, we'll be counting down some of the most questionable moments from Wolverine stories in comics, movies, TV shows and games. We'll also be considering context and taking these stories' intended audiences into account, so kid-accessible stories are held to a different standard than something meant for mature audiences. Even with that in mind, some of Wolverine's most famous stories have a shocking amount of stomach-churning savagery during Logan's most famous moments.

15 GOT CAUGHT: X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES

Starting in 1992, X-Men: The Animated Series gave Wolverine his first successful showcase outside of comics. Even though it was Logan's big break, the show's censors kept Wolverine from getting too wild. Around then, the content of kids' shows was being scrutinized by parental watchdog groups. To protect the Fox network, Fox's Broadcast Standards and Practices department had to approve every X-Men episode and ordered changes to ensure its family-friendliness.

Although X-Men featured mature storylines and killed an X-Man in its series premiere, the show still couldn't show a lot of the action that had been in comics for years, especially when it came to Wolverine. Understandably, he couldn't use his adamantium claws to rip apart people or animals, so he spent a lot of time slicing up robots and walls instead. Other edits kept Wolverine from punching Sabretooth during some of their brawls or saying words like "kill."

14 SLIPPED BY: WOLVERINE GETS EATEN

After comics briefly became a national concern in the 1950s, comic book publishers united to form the Comics Code Authority, which regulated the content of comics under strict guidelines. While the Code got more lenient about what was allowed over the years, Marvel eventually dropped it for its own rating system. In 2001, Wolverine #165, the last issue of the X-Man's series to carry the Code's seal, pushed the limits of the Code by featuring a ravenous villain who ate part of Wolverine.

In Frank Tieri and Sean Chen's story, Logan encountered Mauvais, a wizard who drew power from what he ate. While the sorcerer only bit Wolverine a few times, Logan still lost an eye during the incident. Thanks to his healing factor, Logan recovered fairly quickly. Like Marvel's other people-eaters, Mauvais became the monstrous Wendigo a few issues later and was ultimately defeated by Wolverine and Alpha Flight.

13 SLIPPED BY: WOLVERINE'S SAVAGE GAME

While 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine might've given Logan his first official starring role, it wasn't exactly a high point for Hugh Jackman's Logan. Even though the movie got lukewarm reviews, it still inspired one of Wolverine's better video games, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. While Raven Software's third-person action game incorporated classic X-Men elements into the movie's story, it featured shockingly brutal battles that usually ended in dismemberment.

Although the movie carried a PG-13 rating in the US for "intense" violence, the game featured an adults-only M rating for "intense violence" plus blood, gore and language. While this gave players a chance to really let loose as Wolverine for the first time, it was still an uncharacteristic direction for a hero who usually participates in bloodless combat. From its creative use of helicopter blades to its bloody berserker rages, this game still features some of Wolverine's most savage moments in any medium.

12 SLIPPED BY: LOGAN'S PUNISHMENT

Since Wolverine and the Punisher are two of Marvel's most violent heroes, it's not surprising when their encounters end in an inevitable brawl. Even with that history in mind, their meetings took an especially grim turn in the early 2000s. Over the course of 2002's Punisher #16-17, Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson gave readers a team-up between the two heroes that combined ultra-violence with Looney Tunes-style antics. After shooting Logan point-blank with a shotgun a few times, the Punisher ran over Wolverine with a steamroller.

In 2004's Punisher #35, by Ennis and John McCrea, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Daredevil teamed up to take down Frank Castle. In response, the Punisher hit Wolverine with a bazooka blast that left most of his adamantium skeleton exposed. Although these stories carried parental advisories and ran in the more adult Marvel Knights imprint, they still had especially harsh moments between two Marvel icons.

11 GOT CAUGHT: WOLVERINE UNLEASHED

Before Deadpool proved that R-rated superhero movies could work, director James Mangold tried to take Wolverine into more mature territory with 2014's The Wolverine. While the film was in production, Mangold announced that he'd be making two versions of the movie. Although the film's theatrical cut was still be cut for a PG-13 rating, the movie's "Unleashed Cut" was unrated when it was released on home media.

Mangold's unrated cut of The Wolverine added a full 12 minutes of content to the movie. In addition to that, digital blood was added to several fight scenes, so the claws of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine drew blood for the first time in live-action. Compared to the theatrical cut, several scenes lasted for a few more moments or were otherwise altered to show more brutal detail. While it didn't change the world, this cut helped pave the way for Mangold's Logan in 2017.

10 SLIPPED BY: WOLVERINE'S ANIME

Starting in 2010, Marvel teamed up with iconic Japanese animation studio Madhouse to produce four series starring its heroes. Wolverine starred in two of those loosely connected series, Marvel Anime: Wolverine and Marvel Anime: X-Men. Even though the shows weren't explicitly marketed towards kids, they still featured an astonishing amount of blood.

Since Logan's most recent cartoon had been broadcast by Nickelodeon, this was quite a change. In his own series, Wolverine clawed his way through Japan and had bloody bouts against familiar opponents like Omega Red and Shingen Yashida. In X-Men, a slightly less violent Logan still helped the X-Men fight the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club. While those shows carried a teen-friendly TV-14 rating when they debuted on G4 in the United States, some outlets have retroactively given them an adults-only TV-MA rating.

9 GOT CAUGHT: THE REAVERS LIVE AGAIN

In one of the X-Men's most famous moments, Wolverine single-handedly sliced through a cadre of Hellfire Club guards during Chris Claremont and John Byrne's "Dark Phoenix Saga." While that battle cemented Wolverine as the X-Men's breakout star, it didn't sit well with Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter. The editor famously said that he didn't think the X-Men should be killers, so he told Claremont to retroactively reveal that they had survived the encounter.

In 1981's Uncanny X-Men #252, Claremont and Bob McLeod revealed that these three Hellfire Club guards had been healed and given some new abilities. Cole, Macon and Reese eventually got another round of cybernetic upgrades and joined the second incarnation of the Reavers, a group of mutant-hating cybernetic mercenaries. Since then, they've made several appearances outside of comics, largely as henchmen for bigger villains.

8 SLIPPED BY: WEAPON X WARDROBE

The Weapon X Program is a huge part of Wolverine's background in every form of media. Since the first "Weapon X," by Barry Windsor-Smith, was serialized in the early 1990s anthology series Marvel Comics Presents. That story revealed how Wolverine's skeleton was laced with adamantium by a top secret government program and showed how an amnesiac Wolverine escaped Weapon X.

While "Weapon X" gave Wolverine one of Marvel's best origins, he had a distinct lack of clothes throughout the story. Thanks to bulky technology and well-placed shadows, Windsor-Smith's story managed to stay well within the confines of what was allowed by the Comics Code. While he kept this revealing look in some of the X-Men movies, Logan was given a pair of briefs when this story was adapted in X-Men: The Animated Series.

7 SLIPPED BY: WOLVERINE KILLED WOLVERINE

In the Marvel Universe, time-traveling usually doesn't end well. In the 2013 crossover Age of Ultron, Brian Michael Bendis, Bryan Hitch, Brandon Peterson and several other creators offered a few dark visions of the Marvel Universe. When Wolverine traveled back in time to prevent the robotic Avengers villain Ultron from being created, he inadvertently created a world ruled by the sorceress Morgan le Fay.

After some more time-traveling shenanigans restored everything back to normal, there were two Wolverines from different timelines. Since one of the Wolverines couldn't live with the memories of his destroyed world, he asked the other Wolverine to kill him. While this was an understated moment off-screen in the actual story, the cover of Age of Ultron #9 featured one Wolverine being impaled on the other's claws. Despite this image's shocking violence, it was still bloodless to keep things from getting too graphic.

6 GOT CAUGHT: SMOKE-FREE GENERATION

When Joe Quesada became Marvel's Editor-In-Chief in 2000, he instituted a few new company-wide policies to help bring the publisher back from the brink. While the most famous of these mandates involved putting a moratorium on resurrecting characters, another one of these policies dealt with a more realistic subject, smoking. After seeing the health problems that smoking caused, Quesada banned Marvel's heroes from smoking to make them better role models for young readers.

Of course, Wolverine had been one of Marvel's biggest smokers for years. While Logan's healing factor kept him from feeling the very real side effects of his cigar habit, this policy forced him to quit cold turkey. On Ethan Van Sciver's original cover for 2001's New X-Men #119, Logan puffed away on one of his cigars. Due to the ban, this cover was rejected and replaced by an Igor Kordey cover that featured the young mutant Angel.

5 SLIPPED BY: BABYSITTER WOLVERINE

Without context, Marc Silvestri's cover to 1991's Wolverine #39 looks pretty bad. On the cover, a snarling Wolverine seems set to attack a teary-eyed little girl with pigtails in a room that's collapsing under red-hot flames as Storm looks on in the background. While that could look like a case of reckless child endangerment, a caption on the bottom part of the cover clarifies that the little girl is actually Elsie Dee, who's described as an "awesome android assassin."

Created by Silvestri and Larry Hama earlier in 1991, Elsie Dee was created by the cybernetic X-Men villain Donald Pierce to be a living bomb that exploded somewhere near Wolverine. While the help of a Wolverine-shaped robot named Albert, Elsie managed to deactivate the bomb inside her and became one of Wolverine's occasional allies. Since Logan spent most of that heartfelt issue comforting Elsie, that threatening cover seems especially ill-fitting.

4 SLIPPED BY: THE SABRETOOTH SLUR

While most of the potentially objectionable material on this list was intentionally placed in Wolverine's stories, 1998's Wolverine #131 featured a particularly unfortunate mistake. Since the issue was running late, Marvel editor Mark Powers picked a young Brian K. Vaughan to script a fill-in story based on Todd DeZago's plot that was penciled by Cory Nord. The story was a fairly inconsequential tale about Wolverine climbing up a mountain to steal a virus for his then-wife, the criminal Viper.

Due to a garbled fax machine message and the book's quick turnaround time, some of Viper's dialogue inadvertently referred to Sabretooth by an ethnic slur. By the time anyone caught the mistake, Marvel had already released at least 1,000 preview copies of the issue to comic shops. Although Marvel recalled the comic and released a corrected version, the issue still garnered some bad press and became a minor collector's item.

3 GOT CAUGHT: LOGAN'S CHINESE CUTS

Over the past several years, China has played an increasingly meaningful role in the international film market. While the number of western films released theatrically in the country is still relatively limited, Marvel's superhero movies have done especially well in the growing Chinese market. When Logan was released there in 2017, it featured numerous drastic cuts and was advertised with a first-of-its-kind content warning.

Unlike places like the United States, China doesn't have a film rating system. But to warn parents of younger children about Logan's hyper-violent content, the film's marketing and box offices carried a content advisory and barred minors from attending without a parent. Even with that warning, Chinese censors cut a whopping 14 minutes out of the movie due to violence, language and other objectionable content. Despite those factors, Logan earned an impressive $106 million in China.

2 SLIPPED BY: RADIATION POISONING

In 1982, Marvel launched the Epic Comics imprint, which focused on creator-owned series and titles that weren't bound by the era's content restrictions. In one of the stranger team-ups in X-Men history, Wolverine and Havok co-starred in the miniseries Havok and Wolverine Meltdown. The story was written by X-veterans Walter and Louise Simonson and fully painted by Jon J. Muth and Kent Williams.

In the series' final battle, Wolverine and Havok battled a radioactive villain named Meltdown and tried to stop him from blowing up a nuclear power plant in India. When Logan attacked him, Meltdown shot Wolverine with a blast of nuclear energy that took off the X-Man's arm in gruesome, bloody detail. Acting on instinct, Wolverine used his leather jacket as a makeshift wrap to reattach his arm and continued to fight. Thanks to his healing factor, Logan was miraculously healed by the end of the story.

1 SLIPPED BY: OLD MAN LOGAN

Even though it's barely a decade old, Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's "Old Man Logan" has already cemented itself as one of Wolverine's definitive tales. Although the dark tale of Wolverine's future was published with a "Parental Advisory," it still didn't prepare readers for some of the most disturbing images in Wolverine's history.

Over the course of the alternate future tale, an older Logan had some insane moments with The Hulk and Red Skull. While those moments were well-earned in the context of the story, the book featured an even more emotional flashback to the moment when Wolverine realized that he had taken out the X-Men. In that ghastly image, Logan looked on in horror as he remembered. With brutal efficiency, this moment reminded readers why Wolverine is Marvel's most dangerous hero.