Marvel Comics

Old Man Logan is Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's definitive post-apocalyptic Wolverine story — set fifty years in a future where the villains won, the heroes are dead, and an elderly Logan who has refused to unsheathe his claws since the night he was tricked into killing the X-Men lives as a broken man on a continent carved up between Hulk Gang territory and Red Skull's new America. The story uses the western genre's elegiac mode — the reluctant gunfighter dragged back into violence one last time — to tell the most emotionally resonant Wolverine story since the original Miller miniseries.

Death of Wolverine is Charles Soule and Steve McNiven's four-issue event series killing Logan after the loss of his healing factor — a premise that forced the question of what Wolverine actually is without the regeneration that made him unique.

Warren Ellis's Wolverine work collects his two acclaimed storylines — Not Dead Yet and Dying Time — along with associated material from his run on the character. Ellis brought the same cold, precise approach to Wolverine that had made his Iron Man Extremis arc so effective: stripping away the mythology to find the essential character underneath, then using that distillation to construct high-concept action stories that worked as character studies simultaneously. McTeigue's Not Dead Yet storyline in particular is frequently cited as the best standalone Wolverine arc of the 2000s.