The Wolverine of these years is still an uncomfortable person to have in a room. He picks fights, resents orders and seems ready to turn a disagreement into something physical b…

The Wolverine of these years is still an uncomfortable person to have in a room. He picks fights, resents orders and seems ready to turn a disagreement into something physical before anybody else has finished talking. The comic gradually makes staying with the X-Men a choice that means something to him. His past keeps reaching into the present, especially when Weapon Alpha arrives in #109 to take him back to Canada. Whatever his former employers think they own, Wolverine has begun building a life they cannot simply collect. There are glimpses of that life in the way he responds to the others. He needles Colossus, clashes with Scott and grows close to Kurt. The relationships have different textures. He doesn't become polite to prove that he cares, and the team doesn't have to enjoy every outburst to recognize that he is becoming one of them. Proteus gives his confidence a serious wound. An enemy who can scramble reality leaves Wolverine frightened in ways his claws cannot solve. That vulnerability makes his subsequent return to action more interesting than another demonstration that he can take a beating. Then #133 leaves him loose beneath the Hellfire Club while the others are prisoners. The issue gives him the dirty, close-range fight his design seems made for, but the objective is still his teammates. He is trying to get back to them. His hesitation when ordinary Club servants attack also matters: the violent man has distinctions he is trying to preserve, even inside a desperate rescue. This is the stretch where the outsider becomes difficult to imagine the family without. The claws remain dangerous. What changes is the reader's sense of who Wolverine will come looking for when the doors close and everybody else has been captured.