WOLVERINE

In X-Men #25 (1993), the climax of "Fatal Attractions," Magneto committed the most brutal act of his long rivalry with Wolverine. On the space station Avalon, Logan got the drop on him and nearly gutted him — and Magneto answered by reaching into Wolverine's body and ripping every atom of adamantium off his skeleton, the metal oozing out through his pores. Logan nearly died on the flight home. And then, weeks later, something impossible happened: in the Danger Room, he popped his claws — and they were bone.

For thirty years, everyone — readers included — had assumed the claws came with the adamantium. They didn't. The claws were Logan's own mutation, natural bone that the Weapon X program had simply coated in metal. The reveal rewrote the character: his healing factor had burned itself out keeping him alive, his senses dulled, and every time he unsheathed those bone claws they tore through his own flesh and bled. The most dangerous mutant alive, suddenly fragile.

The irony runs deeper: the claws were never even supposed to be part of his body. Artist John Romita Sr. and writer Len Wein originally designed them as weapons built into Wolverine's gloves. It was Chris Claremont who made them anatomical in X-Men #98 (1976) — and it took Magneto, of all people, to prove they were bone. The Master of Magnetism accidentally gave Wolverine his most human revelation.