Who Is Hope Summers and Why Does Wolverine Want to Kill Her?

Every week we use the powers of Marvel Unlimited to celebrate a major character's first appearance in the hallowed halls of the House of Ideas.

Throughout their existence, mutants across the world have been feared and persecuted. However, one distinct characteristic seems to separate the ones who embrace that hate from the ones who become staunch defenders of all life: hope.

In this week's UNCANNY X-MEN #15, Cyclops and Wolverine continue their quest to save mutantkind...but the Mutant Liberation Front isn’t going to just wait for it to happen! And leading the MLF is none other than Hope Summers.

After the Scarlet Witch nearly destroyed the mutant population with her "No more mutants" declaration on M-Day, existing mutants lost their powers and it seemed like no new ones would ever be born. Mutants faced extinction in just a generation or two. Then hope came in the form of a new mutant birth, first mentioned in X-MEN: MESSIAH COMPLEX #1, which kicked off a crossover of the same name. This tiny baby also brought about all sorts of attention from the likes of Mister Sinister and his Marauders, the mutant-hating Purifiers and the X-Men.

Born in Cooperstown, Alaska, Hope's mere presence brought all party's to the small town...and destruction. The Purifiers killed two of the three babies born, but no one knew who had the baby. Late to the action, the X-Men were on the back foot, but were still highly motivated to find the child which fueled the entire MESSIAH COMPLEX crossover between 2007 and 2008.

The child, eventually named Hope, finally made her first on-page appearance in X-MEN #205 by Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo. To everyone's surprise, a fourth party actually had the child: Cable!

However, Cyclops wanted the baby under the full protection of the X-Men, so he had Wolverine assemble a new X-Force to track the pair down. The group found their targets just in time to stop Lady Deathstrike from taking the girl, which gave Cable time to steal their Blackbird.

Cable then took Hope to Forge for help, but found Bishop waiting for them instead; he intended to kill the child to stop his own future from happening. Luckily for her, Gambit and the Marauders teleported in and made off with the girl. Thanks to some shape-shifting trickery, Mystique took the baby and tried using her to restore Rogue. However, Professor X and Cable showed up and took the baby away once more. Hope was soon in Cyclops' hands and he ultimately decided that Cable should take her and allow the girl to decide the kind of life she'd lead on her own.

With that, Cable took off into the time stream leading directly into his self-titled series, CABLE, which saw Hope grow from a baby into a young girl and on into a battle-worn teen with the ability to not only kickstart a mutant's powers, but also use those of the mutants around her. Bishop, still wanting Hope dead, continued his own pursuit of them leading into MESSIAH WAR.

Since then, Hope has become an integral part of the mutant world back in the present. She led the Second Coming of new mutants first in "The Five Lights" and then in GENERATION HOPE before becoming a major player in AVENGERS VS. X-MEN. Since then, she's tried living a normal life from time to time, but that never seems to last. She even took over X-Force from Cable.

However, with a younger version of Cable recently killing the older version and X-Man seemingly destroying most of the mutants on the planet, even Hope seems to have lost her namesake. In this week's UNCANNY X-MEN #15 by Matthew Rosenberg and Salvador Larroca, she led the Mutant Liberation Front to assassinate anti-mutant Senate candidate Ms. Prestel...

The resulting events contain a plethora of spoilers, but include deadly consequences for both Cyclops and Wolverine—leading the latter to pop his claws against Hope.

Find out exactly what went down by visiting your local comic shop to read UNCANNY X-MEN #15 today!