Yes, but by the time Meltdown came out, Marvel was allowing 'interpretations' of Wolverine. The Frank Miller illustrated mini was the first where artistic license was used.

From then on, the floodgates opened.

And that to me is the tragedy of the 80's comics. We had such amazing stories and art work and to a large part the experiments worked. BUT, what came after, by people who didn't seem to understand that a lot of those experiments still respected the original intent of a character, was just depressing, in so many ways. This led to the 90's where writers / artists just seemed to want to put their stamp on a character, either through ridiculous stories (Teen Tony Stark etc) or just awful costume designs (Throw a dart, any dart, you'll hit a character that started with a really good costume and in the 90's had that costume designed by a blind person (Wasp and Hawkeye are really good examples of this))

Comics survived and thrived for decades doing just that -- making sure that Superman always looked like Superman, Batman always looked like Batman, etc, no matter who was drawing them. When Neal Adams showed up at DC, he was about as different from Carmine Infantino artistically as you could get, and yet his early Batman looked like the same guy Carmine was drawing.

When I took over the X-Men from Dave Cockrum I worried about keeping the characters as close to Dave's version as I could (even tho Dave had, indeed, made changes to Cyclops I did not care for). I even asked for Sam Grainger to continue as the inker, to maintain visual continuity.

Probably wouldn't hurt if this kind of thinking became S.O.P. at Marvel again!

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V V V   V V V (Kinda like so)

The slicing edge is inside like a scythe.

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First published image of Wolverine (excluding house ads):

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Blue and yellow are the colors of the Michigan State Wolverines.

No really. THAT'S why.

I always liked that reasoning when I was a kid and my childhood self actually came up with that long before i heard the story.

Here is how it went for me... I know he was a government soldier, though I didn't get he was a Canadian one. Therefore, I believed he would be given his outfit as opposed to making it himself. So, my kid-self actually got excited at the idea that his commander (because at a young age it made perfect sense that his boss would design a costume too) must be a HUGE Michigan fan just like me.

Looking back it is kind of silly to think that I knew about college football first followed by Logan before I really learned what a wolverine was.

JB, they'll never let you back in the state of Michigan, now.

It's the Michigan State Spartans. The Wolverine is the mascot for the University of Michigan.

Not wanting to sound like a Frank Miller basher (Because I'm not), but .....

Was Frank the first one to give Batman a specialised suit in Dark Knight Returns #4? Was this another floodgate that he opened?

I don't think any artist did it this way, but I picture Wolverine's claws as a combination of blades running smoothly to a taper along the length of his claws. This makes sense to me (if he will use the length of the blade for cutting like a knife).

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Nope. That dates back to before Frank was even born!