Marvel has decided that now is the time to make a big splash in the comic book business by killing off a major character. This might be the biggest death that Marvel has tried as they have announced that this fall will be The Death of Wolverine.

Spoiler-ish Alert: Well, you know that he’s going to die. The rest of the post goes over the publicly released details of when and how he dies.

The whole death of Wolverine story arc will occur over a several month stretch this summer. It will start with the 3 Months to Die story arc as part of the Wolverine series. Reportedly, issues 8 through 12 will be encompassed by this story. That leads into a weekly September miniseries called The Death of Wolverine.

The 3 Months to Die story will see Wolverine stripped of his healing powers and this will lead to his downfall.

The announcement of the new Marvel story arc was through pop culture publication Entertainment Weekly which implies that this is a pretty transparent headline grab by Marvel. After all, using EW as an exclusive outlet indicates they wanted this to be as big a splashy headline as possible.

Yet, as this is a comic book, death is but a pause. We’ve had countless heroes and villains seemingly shed their mortal coil only to come back later. Heck, Marvel just did that with the thirty issue Superior Spider-Man arc and things with Peter Parker are back to normal as of this week’s new comic book releases.

Marvel will get a quick boost from this story as people come back to read the miniseries (or part of it). I don’t know if killing off your most popular character is a good idea for bringing back readers for a long stretch of time. Well, as long as they come back when you bring back Wolverine, it might work.

Still, can’t anyone come up with a better storyline than “let’s kill this guy this year?”

Sources: EW, Geeks of Doom