The Most Terrible Things Wolverine Has Ever Done

Wolverine. Logan. James Howlett. Patch. Whatever you call him, the facts remain the same: Wolverine is the best there is at what he does — and what he does isn't very nice.

Oh, sure, Wolverine might fight on the side of the angels now — most of the time, anyway — but over the past 120 years he's been hunted, tortured, experimented on, and forced to live in the woods like an animal. He fought in World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. He spent time as a secret agent for the government, and when that fell through, he was brainwashed and turned into a living weapon. Even as a superhero, things didn't get much better. Wolverine has had the adamantium torn out of his body by Magneto. He's literally traveled to Hell — and back. He's died multiple times.

A person doesn't go through all that and emerge perfectly sane, and with Logan's hair-trigger temper and "punch first, ask questions later" attitude, it's no surprise that he's committed some truly heinous acts. Don't judge. Logan has been damaged goods since day one, and while he slips up every now and then, he's doing the best he can.

Wolverine has a whole gaggle of children — that's just par for the course for a near-immortal with poor impulse control — but Daken is one of the few who truly followed in his father's footsteps. Like Wolverine, Daken was born with a mutant healing factor, leaving him impervious to wounds, and sharp retractable claws. Like Wolverine, Daken was trained as an assassin, and like Wolverine, Daken joined the ranks of both the Avengers and the X-Men.

Unlike Wolverine, however, Daken is a straight-up bad guy, and he hates his father. After a number of failed assassination attempts, Daken finally subdues Wolverine in "Uncanny X-Force" #34, after Daken revives the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in order to free the teenage reincarnation of Apocalypse. Daken traps Wolverine in a tank of water — healing factor or not, Logan still needs to breathe — and taunts his father as Logan runs out of air.

But at the last minute, Deadpool gives Wolverine mouth-to-mouth, saving his life, and Wolverine hunts Daken down. The following brawl is violent but quick, and as Wolverine holds Daken face down in a puddle of water, drowning him, he reflects on the life that he and Daken could have had if only Wolverine had been there for him.

Wolverine's vendetta against his own flesh and blood doesn't start or end with Daken. In "Wolverine: Origins," James Howlett — the boy who would grow up to be Wolverine — kills his biological father, Thomas Logan, after Logan murders Wolverine's adopted dad.

And then there are the Mongrels, a team of supervillains that made its big debut in "Wolverine #1," when, thanks to some demonic shenanigans, Wolverine is stuck in Hell. As Wolverine's possessed body causes havoc for the X-Men and Logan himself battles his way out of the underworld (and confronts some unfriendly faces from the past along the way), the Red Right Hand — a group of villains united by grudges against Wolverine  —torment everybody he's ever loved, with the Red Right Hand's leader, the Old Man, and the Mongrels on the front lines.

Once Wolverine returns to the land of the living and gets his body back, he goes after the Red Right Hand directly. Logan dispatches the Mongrels, and as the final Mongrel, Gunhawk, bleeds to death on the floor, he reveals the Red Right Hand's master plan: they don't want to kill Wolverine. They want to make him hurt. The members of the Red Right Hand poison themselves before Wolverine arrives, and as Wolverine wanders among their lifeless bodies, a pre-recorded message plays: the Mongrels, who Wolverine butchered, were his children. "Now, at last, you know what it's like to be us," the Old Man cackles. "Welcome to the Red Right Hand."

"Ultimate Spider-Man" #66 starts off like any old body-swap comedy — Wolverine and Spider-Man wake up and realize they've switched bodies, with hilarious shenanigans to follow — but the story takes a decidedly sinister turn when Wolverine meets Peter Parker's girlfriend, the still-in-high-school Mary Jane Watson.

Wolverine isn't too happy to be in Peter's body when he first rolls out of bed, but that changes when Mary Jane arrives and greets Peter with a smack on the lips. We don't see what happens next, but the way that "Peter" pulls Mary Jane closer — and the downright evil look on his face — tells us all we need to know (at the end of the story Mary Jane asks Peter, "That thing you tried to do this morning, can we not do that till we're older?," just in case it wasn't clear).

In fact, Wolverine spends most of his time in Peter's body leering at underage girls — "They let them walk around like that?" he asks while smirking at some cheerleaders — and it turns out Wolverine's unchecked libido is the reason everything went bad in the first place. The X-Men's Jean Grey (also a redheaded teenager) switched Wolverine and Spider-Man's minds after Wolverine wouldn't stop hitting on her. Jean tells Logan that he's going to learn how to treat women with respect before she puts everybody's minds back where they belong, but when Cyclops asks Wolverine how his day at high school went, Wolverine just smirks — not exactly the behavior of someone who learned his lesson.

There's no question that looms quite as large in the modern age as the one asked by the Watcher in "What If" #24: "What if ... Wolverine had become lord of the vampires?"

In "Uncanny X-Men" #159, the X-Men take on Dracula himself, with Storm delivering the final blow via lightning bolt — but it didn't have to go down that way. As the Watcher explains, in another reality, Dracula kills Storm and turns the X-Men into vampires, who he hopes to transform into super-powered servants. Even undead, however, Wolverine isn't much of a team player: Dracula's head is soon separated from his body and Logan proclaims himself king of the vampires.

Under Wolverine's direction, the infected X-Men go on a rampage, decimating foes (like the Hellfire Club) and friends (such as the the New Mutants) alike. Doctor Strange poses a problem for a hot second, but a vampiric Juggernaut catches him off guard and breaks his spine. As the X-Men feast on the citizens of New York, Doctor Strange's spirit possesses the Punisher, and together they set out to stop Wolverine and his servants.

During the battle, Kitty Pryde gets caught in the crossfire and loses her head, which is enough to snap Logan back to his senses — at least temporarily. Under the Punisher's direction, Wolverine recites one of Strange's incantations, and all of the vampires turn to ash, leaving the Earth free of monsters, but woefully unprepared for any super-powered threats that might head its way.

Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's "Old Man Logan" storyline—the inspiration for "Logan," the third solo Wolverine flick — is a dark and depressing tale filled with superheroes doing decidedly unheroic things (remember, this is the comic in which the Hulk hooked up with his cousin, She-Hulk, and produced a brood of gamma-irradiated mutants). And yet, even amidst all of that misery, the X-Men's fate is particularly grisly, if not overly complex: Wolverine kills them. Every single one.

Okay, so the actual story is a little more complicated than that — after all, these are X-Men comics. Before the Abomination, Magneto, Doctor Doom, and the Red Skull conquer the United States and transform it into a dystopian wasteland, a band of supervillains storm the X-Mansion. With his teammates nowhere to be found, Wolverine takes a stand and fends them off, murdering every single attacker while Xavier's students flee.

Except that isn't the case at all. Mysterio, the master of illusion, just makes Logan think supervillains are attacking — in reality, he's butchering his friends and teammates. Distraught, Wolverine throws himself in front of a train, but that's not enough to take out the self-healing mutant. Consumed by guilt, Logan vows to never unsheath his claws ever again, and settles in the middle of nowhere to live out the rest of his days as a farmer. For 50 years, he's at peace — and then an old buddy, Hawkeye, shows up and asks for a favor...

When you're an X-Man, you get used to traveling to alternate dimensions and divergent timelines. Still, it couldn't have been easy for the main continuity's Wolverine when he travelled to the Age of Apocalypse and discovered that not only did his doppelgänger transform into a supervillain, but that the rogue Wolverine took the place of Apocalypse himself.

The members of X-Force find themselves trapped in the Age of Apocalypse in "Uncanny X-Force" #11, and while the team tries to find a mystical object called the Life Seed, which could save their friend Archangel, Wolverine is forced to face alternate reality versions of his lost loved ones. He flirts with Jean Grey, who was married to the Age of Apocalypse's Logan. He runs into Kirika, the daughter of Wolverine's former flame, Mariko, and that dimension's Weapon X. And in "Uncanny X-Force" #12, Wolverine finally meets himself — a despot who wears Apocalypse's gear and goes by the name Weapon Omega.

Weapon Omega kills Kirika (because, even in an alternate reality, Wolverine isn't going to win any Father of the Year awards), then reveals that he's planning on picking up where Apocalypse left off by helping the ultra-powerful aliens, the Celestials, wipe humanity off the face of the planet. Wolverine and the rest of X-Force escape Weapon Omega and his horsemen and head home, but the Age of Apocalypse's Jean Grey stays behind to fight her husband — or whatever it is he's become.

Wolverine has done many horrible things, all of which seem to catch up with him at some point. Take Frank Simpson, for example. As a young child, Frank was already fairly disturbed — right before Frank and Wolverine crossed paths, Frank's babysitter convinced the boy to kill his mother — but things get even worse for Simpson after Wolverine convinces his father to kill himself and he kidnaps the child, enlisting him in the Weapon Plus program (the same secret operation behind Steve Rogers' transformation into Captain America, Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, and Deadpool's healing factor).

It gets worse, too. While serving in Vietnam, Frank is captured by Viet Cong soldiers. Wolverine intervenes, but instead of rescuing the poor guy, Logan tortures him, slowly stripping away Frank's identity and breaking his psyche into pieces. There's a method to Wolverine's madness, of course — he's actually brainwashing Frank and turning him against his captors — and as soon as Wolverine is out of sight, Frank goes full-on "Manchurian Candidate," slaughtering the soldiers and burning their village to the ground.

Wolverine's brainwashing campaign is a victory for the United States, but things don't end up well for Simpson. Following his stay in Vietnam, Frank resurfaces as Nuke, a psychopathic mercenary with an American flag tattooed on his face, and spends years hunting Daredevil and Wolverine at the behest of the Kingpin, Hydra, the Thunderbolts, and the United States government.

Wolverine's unrequited love for the X-Men's fiery psychic, Jean Grey, played a minor role in writer Chris Claremont's early issues of "Uncanny X-Men," but the love triangle between Logan, Cyclops, and Jean grew increasingly important as his run continued. In the '90s, "X-Men: The Animated Series" made Wolverine's crush on Jean a major character trait, and director Bryan Singer went on to make the Wolverine-Cyclops rivalry one of the cornerstones of the very first "X-Men" feature film.

Still, it wasn't until "Ultimate X-Men" #29 hit stands in 2003 that the soapy romance plot reached its inevitable conclusion. While on a mission in the Savage Land, Cyclops takes a nasty fall off the edge of a cliff, barely grabbing an outcropping in time. That's not enough. Cyclops calls out to Wolverine for help, but instead of coming to his teammate's aid, Wolverine lets Cyclops fall — and then, with Scott Summers finally out of the way, returns home to woo a clueless Jean Grey.

Unfortunately for Logan, Cyclops survives the fall. Stranded at the bottom of the mountain, his bones broken, Scott survives for a month by snacking on plants and insects that happen to get too close. Eventually, Magneto's henchmen rescue Cyclops and nurse him back to health — and when Scott finally returns to the North Pole, let's just say that he's none too happy with his so-called "friend."

If you're concerned that Wolverine only kills his own kids, don't worry: he's got no problem killing other people's either. In "Avengers vs. X-Men," Wolverine tries to kill Hope Summers in order to stop the deadly Phoenix Force from returning. In the pages of "All New X-Men," Wolverine argues in favor of murdering the young time-displaced Scott Summers before he can grow into the war criminal Cyclops. And in "Ultimate X-Men" #41, Wolverine follows through on his words and takes out a young mutant — at Professor X's behest.

The teen, Jessi, didn't ask to be a mutant, and he certainly didn't mean to kill his family, friends, or 265 other people with his developing powers. That doesn't matter to Wolverine, however. Logan tracks the distraught teenager to some caves by the beach, and after a brief talk, kills him — not for Jessi's sake, mind you, but because if the public ever learned that a mutant was behind the slaughter, the government would strike back at the entire mutant population. "So, see, there's a bigger picture kind of thing going on," Wolverine says, and that's as close as he gets to an apology before he murders the young boy in cold blood.

It's not often that a major comics character gets killed off, but that's exactly what happened to Alpha Flight favorite Northstar in early 2005. The stalwart Canadian mutant may not have been one of Marvel's most famous characters, but he's an important one in the history of comics, as the first of many Marvel superheroes who are openly LGBTQ. So it was notable when Wolverine murdered him in cold blood in "Wolverine" Vol.3 #25.

Though certainly not the first time that Wolverine killed an X-Man, it's another instance of him being under the influence of someone or something else. In this case, Logan is brainwashed by a new, dangerous alliance between the devious Japanese sect called The Hand, and Hydra, the age-old enemies of freedom and democracy. Logan's sent in by his new masters to kill old friend and hero Kitty Pryde — aka Shadowcat — but the assault doesn't go as planned. 

Taking a vicious slice at his target with his razor sharp adamantium claws, Wolverine goes for the kill only to have Kitty turn intangible. His claws pass straight through her and impale Northstar, who is directly behind her. Partly Kitty's fault for not clearing her backstop before phasing, Northstar's death is simply Wolverine doing what he does best — and what he does best isn't very nice, after all.

Wolverine's role in nearly a dozen live-action movies also makes him the superhero played the most times by a single actor, even besting Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. And Logan's done plenty of terrible things on the big screen, the most infamous being his killing of Jean Grey in "X-Men: The Last Stand" (which also rates as one of Wolverine's best live-action moments).

Hugh Jackman's version of the ol' Canucklehead has a long rap sheet of bad deeds, from his days working for Stryker (Danny Huston) in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" to his accidental stabbing of Rogue (Anna Paquin) in 2000's "X-Men." But the murder of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) takes the cake. A tragic act of heroism, Logan is forced to do the deed after Jean is corrupted by both the Phoenix force and Magneto (Ian McKellen), who uses her powers to win a war against all of humanity.

With Jean already having killed Professor X (Patrick Stewart), there may be no other way of stopping her, so there's something slightly less terrible about this one. Nevertheless, Logan's killing of Jean, even if for the greater good, ranks high on the worst things he's done on screen — not just because it was murder, but because it was the woman he loved.

Fans have seen countless versions of Wolverine turning bad, and in one alternate reality (in 1998's "What If...?" #111), Wolverine became one of Apocalypse's Four Horsemen. In this instance he was the Horseman of War, who goes on a killing spree nearly unmatched in his history. He goes so far, in fact, that he becomes the target of his former teammates in the X-Men — along with the likes of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four — who hunt him down to stop his brutal reign of terror. 

That lone book isn't the last time we'd see Logan as a Horseman of Apocalypse, however. Back over in the main Earth-616 timeline, Wolverine also came under Apocalypse's spell. In "Wolverine" #145, Logan is abducted by the ancient mutant and given back his adamantium — after having had it ripped out of his body by Magneto. But that restoration comes at a price: After killing his brother and rival Sabretooth in a brutal grudge match at the behest of Apocalypse, Wolverine is granted the title of Horseman of Death, as shown 1999's "Astonishing X-Men" #3.

Wolverine stays in the role for a while, too, though he uses a sword instead of claws and wears a hood to hide his identity, making this more than a momentary misdeed. As the Horseman of Death, Wolverine comes to blows with his old team, who thankfully help free him from Apocalypse's control.

Wolverine has never claimed to be a bastion of righteousness, and has always been seen as something more akin to an anti-hero. That at least justifies his willingness to cross certain moral lines — after all, an anti-hero doesn't operate under the same code as a true justice-seeker. Yet there are just some things he's done that go beyond the scope of an anti-hero, and one of the most egregious is when he stole from easily the most famous and well-respected vigilante in all of comics. No, we're not making this up: Wolverine once stole the Batmobile.

It happened in the company-wide crossover event between Marvel and DC published in 1996, which included a number of epic cross-company showdowns (including Wolverine facing off with Lobo). In issue #2 of the series (whose titles alternated between "Marvel vs. DC" and "DC vs. Marvel"), Wolverine teams up with fellow X-Man Gambit, who's just had his own battle with Nightwing. After besting Batman's former sidekick, Gambit links up with Wolverine who promptly helps the ragin' Cajun get another one over on the Dark Knight and his best friend by stealing the Batmobile right from under their noses. 

It all ends well only because both sides discover a greater threat to the multiverse, but that doesn't change the fact that Logan carjacked Batman. And as even The Penguin learned on three separate occasions, you don't carjack Batman.

Over the years, Wolverine has crossed paths with just about every villain and hero you can imagine, even those who aren't even part of the Marvel Universe. Just as the '90s were getting underway, he also stood toe-to-toe with a hero from an entirely different realm — Conan the Barbarian. We saw it happen in "What If..." #16 in 1990, which was subtitled "What If... Wolverine Battled Conan the Barbarian?"

As the story begins, Wolverine is cast out of the Marvel Universe following a battle with the Shi'ar. He finds himself in Hyboria, the fantastical realm that Robert E. Howard's muscle-bound swordsman calls home. When Logan lands there, he first comes into conflict with Red Sonja, who tells him that because he bested her in battle she must consent to be his lover (cringe). But the real sin is when Wolvie attacks the King of Kalidor, Conan, after Sonja is injured.

Mystified by the X-Man's healing factor, Conan decides that he must be some kind of supernatural demon. The two show no mercy for each other, and Wolverine is forced to go full berserker, slicing off Conan's sword-wielding hand. Like his crime against Batman, slicing off the hand of the heroic Conan the Barbarian is a betrayal we can't forgive. 

If Wolverine attacking some of the most heroic characters in all of fiction wasn't bad enough, there's at least one assault on an ally in the Marvel Universe that's far worse. Because even though he often thinks he's doing the right thing for the greater good, the consequences were far-reaching. That infamous assault was against one of Marvel's most stalwart heroes, too — the time when he killed Hank Pym and sent the entire timeline into chaos.

During the "Age of Ultron" story, the sinister eponymous evil robot takes over the world, and the combined might of the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Defenders, and the Avengers seem powerless to stop him. Wolverine, though, has the brilliant idea of using Doctor Doom's Time Platform to go back in time and stop the creation of Ultron altogether, which he plans to do by murdering his friend and Avengers founder Hank Pym — aka the original Ant-Man. With the help of Sue Storm, Wolverine finds Hank in the past, and after failing to stop him any other way, the two heroes slug it out, with Pym winding up dead.

The problem is, Pym's death doesn't even resolve the situation. Returning back to the present, Wolverine finds the entire history of the Marvel Universe changed and the Earth in ruins. Maybe, finally, Wolverine learns his lesson that killing his friends isn't the solution to his problems.

On the surface, this next incident from Wolverine's '80s adventures might not seem like such a terrible thing — it might even come across as a little funny, in fact. It's 1984, and the X-Men — along with most of the Marvel Universe — are still licking their wounds from the epic crossover event "Secret Wars," which featured a number of notable deaths and universe-shaking upheavals. Colossus had fallen in love with another woman — who ended up dying – while in outer space, leaving his girlfriend Kitty Pryde heartbroken. The overly protective Wolverine isn't happy (he always had something of a big brother-little sister relationship with Kitty) and he wants to get Colossus back.

Instead of doing it himself, however, Wolverine goads Cain Marko — aka the Juggernaut — into a barroom brawl with Colossus. Even though Marko is without his Juggernaut armor, he's more than a match for the steely-skinned mutant. After a brutal bout of fisticuffs, not only do the two do plenty of damage to each other, but they topple an entire building, sending multiple floors crashing into rubble. Though the issue shows the crowds fleeing the scene before the building is destroyed, Wolverine's recklessness still puts countless lives in danger as bystanders are forced to escape by the skin of their teeth. If he wasn't so lucky, things could have ended much worse.

No euphemism here: Wolverine really did stab Jean Grey's daughter — one of them at least, from an alternate future — nearly ending her life. Flashing back to the 1980s and "Uncanny X-Men" #207, we find Jean Grey's daughter Rachel (who comes to be known by the moniker Phoenix) seeking to kill a villainous vampire. Her name is Selene and she's killed a man close to Phoenix, so the time-displaced heroine wants blood. But a strange psychic link with Wolverine brings the clawed mutant into their quarrel.

To his credit, Wolverine starts the conflict in an attempt to stop Phoenix from doing the deed, telling her — somewhat hypocritically, mind you — that murdering the bad guy doesn't really fix the problem nor will it bring her peace. Sure, he's done that very same thing himself countless times, but Wolverine isn't wrong. The problem is that Phoenix insists that Wolverine will have to kill her to stop her. He nearly takes her up on the offer, stabbing Phoenix off-panel, and she only manages to survive because of her own telekinetic power.

Of course, years later, writer Chris Claremont revealed that the real reason Logan attempted to kill Phoenix was that he feared that her own act of vengeance against Selene would trigger the release of the Dark Phoenix, the malevolent cosmic entity that once took over her mother, Jean Grey.

Of all of Marvel's most popular superheroes, Wolverine has perhaps the most tragic backstory. But for more than 25 years his origin went untold, with much of his mystique coming from his mysterious past and even his true identity totally unknown. Then in 2001, the team of Bill Jemas, Paul Jenkins, and Joe Quesada crafted "Origin," a miniseries that revealed for the first time Wolverine's early days. It also provided one of the most terrible acts of violence that he ever committed — an act so heinous that it shaped the very man he was to become.

Set in the late 1800s, "Origin" sees a young boy named James Howlett growing up on a plantation under the thumb of his violent grandfather and his animalistic half-brother known as Dog. Following a violent confrontation between John and the family groundskeeper, Thomas Logan — later revealed to be James' biological father — the future Wolverine goes on the run with his ex-girlfriend Rose. But after a showdown with Dog, Rose trips and accidentally falls into James' bone claws, which kill her.

We've seen Wolverine turn on his friends and allies, and even at times members of the X-Men, several of whom he's murdered — even if he was not in his right mind more often than not. But in one instance, Wolverine did something arguably far worse than just killing an X-Man: he became so obsessed with a personal quest that he left Storm to die. 

The story, titled "Old Soldiers," was presented in "Uncanny X-Men" #215 in 1986. The heart of the story centers on Wolverine and Storm, who are investigating the home of Jean Grey's sister, Sara Grey. At the time, Jean is believed dead, so when Wolverine catches a whiff of her scent at Sara's house he goes into a blind fury, obsessed with finding his former teammate and the object of his affection. The problem is that Storm tries to stop him, and she gets clocked cold for her trouble. 

Though knocking out one of your closest allies isn't great, what really makes this one terrible is that Wolverine abandons her in search of Jean. This leaves Storm at the mercy of the villains, and when she comes to, she finds herself chained up and held captive by Crimson Commando, Stonewall, and Super Sabre, who decide to hunt her for sport. Though she manages to survive the ordeal, the entire affair — and life-or-death battle for survival — is all Wolverine's fault.

If we're going to include the time that Wolverine was chosen by Apocalypse to be the Horseman of Death as one of his most terrible deeds, we'd be remiss not to include another instance when he served one of the X-Men's greatest adversaries. It all went down in the 2023 event series, "Sins of Sinister," which finds the entire Marvel Universe turned into a dark, dystopian nightmare, and where the titular Mr. Sinister has taken control of the X-Men as part of a plan to gain power over the island haven called Krakoa.

With X-Men like Cyclops, Emma Frost, Exodus, and Hope Summers doing his bidding, Sinister takes over, but it's Wolverine who is his greatest weapon. Wolverine is sent on a hunt-and-kill mission by the time-twisted genetic tyrant as part of his complex scheme. His victim, in fact, is Cypher, a former member of the New Mutants who'd been serving on the Quiet Council of Krakoa. To prevent Cypher from thwarting Sinister's plan, Wolverine stabs him through the chest in one of the most shocking moments of the series.