Tom Grummett / Sean Chen — He’s Dead, Jim
X-Men Forever #10, December 2009
As noted earlier, John Byrne had returned to X-Men with X-Men: The Hidden Years.
His original collaborator, writer Chris Claremont, returned much later on in 2010 via a more direct route, in X-Men Forever.
Basically picking up after he left off in 1991 — and then immediately diverging — Claremont quickly killed Wolverine and had the remaining X-Men team deal with the ramifications of his death.
Tom Grummett’s character-packed cover deals with the team laying their fallen comrade to rest. Grummett was the many artists on the Forever series, which also included X-men mainstay Paul Smith on this issue, and others.
It’s an interseting choice — and a good one, commercially — to leave Wolverine’s uniform on top of the coffin. Contextually, of course, it makes little sense.
Sean Chen’s variant cover takes a look at an imaginary one moment later — when “zombie” Wolverine breaks out of his coffin(In uniform). This event is not in the series. Wolverine in fact stays dead. This image seems a tribute to the popular (and multiple) Marvel Zombies series.
It’s a clever set-up, and one of the few times a main cover and a variant are done in this manner. Kudos to editor Mark Paniccia — or whoever came up with the imaginative idea.
