Logan: The Five Best Comic Book Stories Starring Wolverine

Wolverine

Wolverine #1-4 (1982)
Chris Claremont and Frank Miller

If you can believe it, there was a time when a comic with the name Wolverine on the cover wasn’t guaranteed to be a best seller.

Shocking, I know.

However, back in 1982 that was exactly the case. The character had begun to gain a following, but Marvell still wasn’t 100 percent sure what they had in Logan. So why not have him star in one of those new limited series things Marvel had begun publishing and see what happened?

They enlisted Uncanny X-Men scribe Chris Claremont to write it and Daredevil writer/artist extraordinaire Frank Miller to provide the visuals.

And Wolverine was never the same.

Now regarded as the definitive take on Logan, it’s tough to put into words just how important this book is to the evolution of the character. Between its covers Claremont showed Logan’s ties to Japan as he battled Lord Shingen and began his doomed romance with his daughter Mariko. He established much of the tone and style that every Wolverine writer since has tried (and oftentimes failed) to emulate.

Wolverine is where Logan started to become less of a comic book character and more of the complex, three-dimensional antihero fans have come to love. The miniseries gave Logan a depth that, at that time, was unusual for comics. In many ways it laid the groundwork for books like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, which as we all know changed comic books forever.

Must Read: 100 Greatest Superhero Stories Ever

Wolverine is a as essential a book to have on your shelf as either of the ones I just mentioned. It is just an astounding piece of graphic literature that no fan of Logan should go without.