WOLVERINE

Among Logan's sprawling, sorrowful family tree, one branch grows in a place dinosaurs still walk. In the prestige one-shot Wolverine: The Jungle Adventure (1990), written by Walt Simonson with art by Mike Mignola and Bob Wiacek, Wolverine follows the trail of a failed assassin into the Savage Land, the prehistoric enclave hidden inside Antarctica. There the Tribe of Fire takes his dropped lighter for a gift from the gods, and their masked chieftain, Gahck, challenges the stranger to single combat to learn whether he is god or demon.

Logan won the duel, and with it the chieftain's seat. Gahck, revealed as a woman once her concealing garb came off, took the new chief as her mate, and for a few weeks Wolverine lived as a tribal leader — hunting, fighting a cyborg monster the tribe called the Honker of Doom, and finally wrecking a hidden laboratory where a rogue robot wearing Apocalypse's shape had been pulling strings. Then he flew home to the X-Men, knowing he could not keep both lives, while the tribe believed the explosion of the lab had killed him.

Months later Gahck gave birth to a boy — Wolverine's son. Logan never learned the child existed, and for fourteen years neither did readers, at least not by name: the baby appears only as an infant in his mother's arms in the story's closing movement, unnamed in any comic. The name Erista was made official canon only in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: X-Men (2004), which listed him among Wolverine's kin. Erista has still never appeared as a grown character, spoken a line, or met his father.