Wolverine: Origin III Takes Logan to the Fifties, on the Road to Weapon X

Marvel will return to explore one of the still little-told periods of Wolverine's long life. The publisher has announced Wolverine: Origin III – The Dark Age, a five-issue miniseries that will take Logan to the Fifties and try to reconstruct some of the events preceding his involvement in the Weapon X program. The first issue will be released in the United States on December 16, 2026.

What makes the project particularly significant is the return of Paul Jenkins, writer of Wolverine: Origin, published starting in 2001, this time joined by artist CAFU. Jenkins thus picks up the character 25 years after the story with Andy Kubert that first organically revealed James Howlett's childhood and a substantial part of Logan's origins.

The Dark Age, however, will not return to his youth. The story is set in the Fifties, after the traumas accumulated fighting in the two world wars. Logan seems to have reached an unusual condition for the character: his berserker rage and violent tendencies appear to have subsided, while his life focuses on tranquility and service to others. During this period, he meets new allies and a young doctor intent on helping him better understand his own mind.

It is precisely this apparent serenity that constitutes the core of the miniseries. Marvel describes Origin III as a strongly psychological story, built around the functioning of Logan's memories and a traumatic experience in the Fifties destined to impact the person he will later become. Jenkins has also directly linked the narrative to one of the great grey areas of the mutant's chronology: the events leading towards Weapon X, without, however, explaining how close the miniseries will actually get to the famous experiment.

The title continues a narrative line that has been dormant for over a decade. After Wolverine: Origin, Marvel published Origin II between 2013 and 2014, written by Kieron Gillen and drawn by Adam Kubert, moving forward the reconstruction of Logan's early years. The Dark Age takes a much larger leap and tries to bridge the gap between those origins and the transformation of the character that readers know.

For Jenkins, this is a long-awaited story: the writer explained that he has wanted to tell it for over twenty years and pointed to the parts of Logan's life “lost in history” and the path to Weapon X as the central questions of the project. Wolverine: Origin III – The Dark Age #1 will feature a main cover by Wes Burt and a variant by Josemaria Casanovas.