This is it -- The Death of Wolverine is upon us! Marvel Comics is killing off one of their most popular characters in a four-issue mini-series by writer Charles Soule and artist Steve McNiven. With the first issue hitting tomorrow, we've prepped a guide with everything you need to know to pick it up and start reading.

His Healing Factor Doesn't Work Anymore

He's Headmaster of the Jean Grey School

He Doesn't Kill Anymore (Or At Least He's Trying Not To)

The Weapon X Program Will Play a Big Part

Here's What You Should Read

Death of Wolverine #1-4

Death of Wolverine: Deadpool & Captain America #1

Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy #1-3

Nightcrawler #7

Wolverine and the X-Men #10-11

Death of Wolverine: Life After Logan #1

Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy #4-5

Death of Wolverine: The Weapon X Program #1-2

Nightcrawler #8

Storm #5

Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy #6-7

Death of Wolverine: The Weapon X Program #3-5

You probably know how Wolverine's powers work. He's the best there is at what he does, and what he does is constantly bring a bunch of knives to a gun fight and come out the winner. That's mostly because of his incredibly useful healing factor. Wolverine's body can heal from almost any injury or disease. He remains eternally spry and youthful despite being over 100-years-old. And he has the smooth, unblemished liver of a baby despite consuming enough liquor on a daily basis to poison a herd of buffalo. For all intents and purposes, Wolverine is immortal.Or he was, anyway. The big development in Paul Cornell's ongoing Wolverine saga is that Wolverine's healing factor has become broken. It was shorted out when he was possessed by a sentient virus from the Microverse. He still has his adamantium claws and enhanced senses and decades of fighting experience, but Wolverine is now subject to the same dangers ordinary people are. He can be hurt or killed. Logan's struggle to deal with the idea of being mortal and his unexpected fear of death has been a heavy focus of Cornell's work over the past year.The loss of his healing factor has also put a giant target on Wolverine's head. Every villain in the Marvel Universe wants a piece of him now that they know he's vulnerable. Wolverine faced a gauntlet of foes during the "Killable" storyline before finally confronting Sabretooth and losing. In the current Wolverine series, Logan has broken away from the X-Men and Avengers and joined up with a team of mercenaries working for a villain called The Offer. The Offer (whose mutant ability is literally to make someone an offer they can't refuse), has given Wolverine a high-tech suit of "ablative armor" to make up for his broken healing factor and promised him the chance to claim his revenge on Sabretooth.For a while it seemed as if Logan's recent hardships had pushed him over the edge and away from the path of the hero he had been trying to walk. But it was eventually revealed that he's actually been working as an undercover agent for S.H.I.E.L.D., with the real goal of stopping Sabretooth from harnessing a reality-warping artifact. The series finale hits stores this week, so we'll soon find out whether Wolverine is successful and whether he can prove to Sabretooth once and for all that he's the better man.Wolverine has tended to be more of a soldier than a leader. He's been happy to follow the orders of men like Professor Xavier or Cyclops on the battlefield. But lately he's found himself becoming the unlikely face of the X-Men and the mutant race as a whole. It all started during the 2011 mini-series Schism. Schism introduced a new Hellfire Club and brought back the Sentinel program. Wolverine and Cyclops found themselves diametrically opposed in how to handle the situation. Cyclops believed it was the duty of every young mutant to stand up and fight evil, while Wolverine felt it was the responsibility of the X-Men to teach younger mutants, not turn them into soldiers. Their relationship crumbled as they came to blows even while a giant Sentinel arrived to wipe the X-men off the map.In the aftermath, the X-Men were split down the middle. Some sided with Cyclops and his desire to make the X-Men into a proactive force that would defend the dwindling mutant population. Others sided with Wolverine as he reopened Xavier's school and renamed it "The Jean Grey School for Higher Learning." Wolverine suddenly found himself the headmaster of a school and the leader of one faction of the X-Men. And much to everyone's surprise, he's done a pretty good job of things.Wolverine's mission to educate young mutants has only grown more important since the events of Avengers vs. X-Men, where a Phoenix-possessed Cyclops killed Xavier. Needless to say, that did nothing to repair their shattered bromance. Most of the X-Men have now returned to the Jean Grey School or gone off on their own. For his part, Cyclops now operates underground and has formed his own school - The New Charles Xavier School for Mutants.Though things are going well for the Jean Grey School, Wolverine's brush with mortality has forced him to reevaluate his own place in the school and its future. He recently turned control of the school over the Storm. Interestingly, though, the series Wolverine and the X-Men has frequently shown flash-forward sequences of an aging but still very much alive Wolverine presiding over the school decades into the future. Is that merely one more alternate future that will never come to pass, or is it possible Wolverine will cheat death once again?If Wolverine's long life has been defined by any one struggle, it's to prove that he's a good man who can rise above his bestial tendencies. He's a wandering samurai - a lone warrior with tarnished honor - but the fact that he never stops striving to be a better person is what makes Wolverine who he is. And with Charles Xavier gone, Logan is ever more mindful of the lesson that killing usually isn't the best answer to a conflict. Not that he hasn't made some missteps in recent years.Together, writers Jason Aaron and Rick Remender have focused a lot on Wolverine's darker nature, his efforts to rise above, and the terrible consequences violence can have on him (Aaron in books like Wolverine: Weapon X and Wolverine Vol. 4 and Remender in Uncanny X-Force and Uncanny Avengers). Both writers have written stories where Logan has killed members of his own family. In Aaron's "Wolverine Goes to Hell" storyline from 2010-11, Logan's soul was banished to Hell while his body was possessed by demons. After escaping, he went on a warpath of revenge against a cult called the Red Right Hand (comprised of members who had lost family and loved ones to Wolverine in the past). He engaged in a bloody battle with the cult's bodyguards, only to find that the Red Right Hand had committed suicide before he could kill them himself. The cult leader left behind a video message revealing that the bodyguards Wolverine had killed were his own bastard children. Needless to say, Wolverine went a little insane and lit for the hills for a while.In Uncanny X-Force, Wolverine and his X-Force teammates faced a resurgent Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (one whose members were proud to label themselves as "evil") led by his son, Daken. Having clashed with Daken many times before and failing to turn him from his dark path, Wolverine felt he had no choice but to kill Daken by drowning him in a puddle of water. Only after did he realize that the whole ordeal was a ploy by Sabretooth to manipulate Wolverine into killing his last remaining child.At some point, you murder enough of your children that you start to realize that maybe killing doesn't solve anything. These ordeals have convinced Wolverine to lead a more honorable life. He's disbanded his X-Force team and tried to live up to Xavier's ideal as part of the Avengers Unity Squad in Uncanny Avengers. And even though Daken was resurrected as a Horsemen of Apocalypse and spent several years burning his father alive, Wolverine has avoided repeating past mistakes.We actually know very little about the conflict in Death of Wolverine or the enemy that will finally be ending Wolverine''s long life. However, based on cryptic comments so far from writer Charles Soule, as well as the announcement of the epilogue series Death of Wolverine: The Weapon X Program, it seems that a big element of the story involves the return of Weapon X.Weapon X was a clandestine research project operated by the Canadian government. Built on the foundation of Mister Sinister's early 20th Century research into the mutant gene, Weapon X was dedicated to finding ways to harness and weaponize mutant abilities for military use. And as was revealed in Grant Morrison's New X-Men, Weapon X was part of a larger operation called the Weapon Plus program. The "X" moniker was chosen because it was actually the tenth in a series of programs aimed at creating super-soldiers (with the first being Project Rebirth that created Captain America). Weapon X was the first offshoot of Weapon Plus to experiment on mutants.While Wolverine was one of the mutants Sinister originally studied, he came to the attention of Weapon X again when he was recruited to join a black-ops CIA unit called Team X. The members of Team X (which also included Sabretooth, Maverick, and Silver Fox) were experimented upon and given false memory implants. This is part of the reason the history and relationship between Wolverine and Sabretooth is so murky. Eventually, Wolverine was chosen as a test subject for Weapon X. His healing factor made him the ideal candidate to test a radical new adamantium-bonding procedure. He survived the procedure, though most of his memories were wiped as the Weapon X scientists tried to mold him into the ultimate killing machine. The process worked a little too well, though. Wolverine escaped, killing many scientists along the way. With the death of Weapon X's director, Professor Thorton, the project collapsed and Weapon Plus moved onto newer and ever more terrible projects.Weapon X and its research has often resurfaced to plague the X-Men over the years. X-23 is the result of repeated attempts to clone Wolverine. And in the series Wolverine: Weapon X, Wolverine squared off with a mercenary group called Blackguard whose members had artificially replicated versions of his powers.As far as Wolverine or the X-Men know, the Weapon X program is dead. Cyclops and his X-Men team are even using the old Weapon X facility in Canada as their base of operations. But no evil in the Marvel Universe stays dead forever, and Weapon X may be the final ghost from Wolverine's past he has to confront before he can rest in peace.Death of Wolverine is pretty unique as far as event comics go. The core Death of Wolverine mini-series is only four issues long and will ship weekly during the month of September. There are tie-in comics, but they're all epilogue stories hitting after the main event wraps up.There aren't really any direct lead-ins to Death of Wolverine either. Paul Cornell's Wolverine series can be considered a prologue in terms of setting up Wolverine's broken healing factor, but the overarching conflict between Wolverine and Sabretooth in that series looks to be independent of the struggle in The Death of Wolverine. As for the epilogue tie-ins, all of them involve various people in Wolverine's life (heroes and villains) reacting to the fallout of his death.Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy is a seven-issue mini-series beginning in October. Each issue will feature a different creative team and tell a standalone story about a different character (X-23, Daken, Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, and Mystique) that connects to a larger storyline. There have also been two separate one-shots announced so far - Death of Wolverine: Deadpool & Captain America #1 and Death of Wolverine: Life After Logan #1 - that tell more standalone stories about characters grieving and tying up loose ends. Not to mention various ongoing series like Nightcrawler and Wolverine and the X-Men that will acknowledge the fallout of Wolverine's death.Finally, there will be a mini-series launching in October called Death of Wolverine: The Weapon X Program. This series will deal with a group of mutants who escape the clutches of Weapon X and struggle to remain free. Because this series is written by Charles Soule, it may end up being the most relevant and essential of the post-Death of Wolverine books.The following is a list of all the Death of Wolverine comics announced so far:Basically, if all you care about is reading Wolverine's final adventure without worrying about tie-ins and spinoffs, you can read Death of Wolverine #1-4 and leave it at that. The various Death of Wolverine tie-ins are more concerned with exploring Wolverine's legacy and setting the stage for various other characters going into 2015.

Are you ready for the death of Wolverine? Will you be picking it up on Wednesday? Let us know in the comments!

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