Marvel’s latest Wolverine-mash-up anti-hero makes his debut in Hellverine #1, written by Benjamin Percy, drawn by Julius Ohta, colored by Frank D’Armata and lettered by Travis Lanham.
If there is one thing that Marvel can never get enough of, it’s relaunching books as soon as possible to get a juicy new #1. If there were two things that Marvel can never get enough of, it’s resetting characters to some semblance of ‘classic’ status quo that brings nostalgia to a dwindling comic book reading fan base.
Somewhere on that list of things Marvel can never get enough of would be a bevy of flavors of Wolverine, which are used to pump out as many books with the clawed one as possible. Enter, the Hellverine.
In case you missed it, and it’s understandable if you did, there was a whole crossover story between the recently ended Wolverine and Ghost Rider volumes (both written by Benjamin Percy). It featured a kid bonded to a hell demon, a newly inserted Wolverine/Ghost Rider past team-up, and a present-day hunt for this murderous human/demon combo. Long story short, the demon ended up in Wolverine’s body (creating the Hellverine) before Ghost Rider yanked it out and it was left for dead.
While Marvel is tossing the logical easy to use resurrection of Krakoa out the window, dead has never meant dead in the Marvel Universe, even during a period of the 2000s where the publisher claimed otherwise. Never one to let things like death stop them from cashing in on an idea, the Hellverine has returned, wreaking a sort of havoc across the Marvel Universe in a very familiar form.
Conceptually this story is right up my alley. A Wolverine running around slicing and dicing, but with Hellfire. Toss in some typical government shadowy bullshit that blows up in their face and the lies they tell to get a superhero to clean up that mess. On paper, it’s a recipe sure to deliver a piping hot hearty meal fit for a Canadian berserker mutant.
Execution wise though, it’s a bit of a mess. Some ingredients were substituted with backups that don’t quite mix as well as the originals. The timing was a bit off once the meal was in the oven. Add in any other cooking mishap scenarios in this space.
Percy likes narration, which was clear during his time on Wolverine’s main series the last five years. Sometimes following this format worked wonders, other times it missed big time.
This time, it’s not an either-or situation, but more unsteadily in the middle. At some points the sheer number of captions come close to a tell not show situation. Except that Julius Ohta’s artwork does a pretty solid job of showing, in most cases.
Moody and dark are good ways to describe a Ghost Rider or Wolverine book, and this is a child of the two. Ohta and Frank D’Armata take advantage of that. Rough, overly dark, slick, and able to showcase the extreme violence in a graphic but not gory way. Just what the doctor ordered really.
I guess I have to give props to Percy for cleaning up a dangling bit from the recently concluded Sabretooth War from Wolverine. Despite numerous other mutants being resurrected (many off-panel) in Rise Of The Powers Of X series (which took place after Sabretooth War despite their concurrent shipping), Logan’s son Akihiro was apparently not one of them. Torn into pieces by Sabretooth, he was one of the earliest and few actual non-Sabretooth gang deaths in the event.
Hell, even the massacred and decapitated (with his head still used) Quentin Quire is getting to come back to headline in the X-Men series of the From The Ashes relaunch.
Akihiro/Fang is back now, but a stitched together mess possessed by the demon Bagra-ghul, to be some Punisher-esque Hell rider. (Huh, that’s funny, Akihiro caused the Punisher to be a stitched-together Franken-Castle mess almost fifteen years ago. Talk about a full circle kind of situation, and a nice eye for history.)
Look, at the end of it all, even with the caption heaviness, there is enough here to keep me intrigued for at least another issue. These days that feeling is worth something, with how many of these books Marvel is churning out. This year is the 50th anniversary of Wolverine, so there are a lot of these books out there already and a lot more to come.
Some of those books are or will be good, and some of them are surely stinkers.
Percy has made his home the past few years in the zone of Wolverine and friends, to mixed results. But overall, it’s clear he has a passion and plentiful ideas for the clawed one. If this ends up with Akihiro fully back or in a new role moving forward, that might be enough to elevate this mini above the rest.
Not that the bar has been set all that high. Right now it’s so low the Mole Man uses it for limbo, which is a joke I might have already used in regard to these Logan type books. Oh well, if repeating the past is good enough for Marvel, it’s good enough for me in this respect.
Scott Redmond
Scott Redmond is a freelance writer and educator fueled by coffee, sarcasm, his love for comic books and more "geeky" things than you can shake a lightsaber at. Probably seen around social media and remembered as "Oh yeah, that guy." An avid gamer, reader, photographer, amateur cook and solid human being.
