About Wolverine
The superhero character known by most as Wolverine, often called Logan, was actually born under the name, James Howlett. The core of Wolverine's powers is his enhanced healing ability, which results in not only being able to heal almost any wound, but also in heightened senses and increased physical prowess. He eventually gets his Adamantium skeleton and claws after being captured and experimented on by a government project within the Canadian Goverment known as Weapon X.
After recovering from this experience, Logan becomes known as one of Canada's first Superheroes, Wolverine. After working in Canadian Intelligence for some time, he eventually takes up Professor X on his offer to join the X-Men, where we see him to this day.
About Wolverine's Costume
His costume was initially created with the more commonly seen yellow and blue. However, it first had a much smaller mask. Gil Kane drew the cover of the comic that Wolverine had his second appearance in. By accident, he drew the mask with much larger headpieces than originally envisioned. Dave Cockrum ended up liking this new alteration so much that he decided to keep it for good old Logan.
Later on, the artist John Byrne, who fought to keep Wolverine around (others were considering dropping him) designed and drew a new costume that is well known as one of Wolverine's alternatives. This costume is the one you may have seen him wearing occasionally, the one that is very brown and tan (my personal favorite).
The black costume you see Logan wearing in the movies was created specifically for the first X-Men movie. Some seem to think it was first created for Ultimate X-Men, but that particular comic series didn't start until after the very 1st movie in the franchise was created. The writer of that comic, Mark Miller, had only seen the first movie and read none of the comics, so he used the movie largely as his basis for information (and thus incorporated the black costume).