By d. emerson eddy — A creepy cult. A shady family that seems to own the entire town. The legend of an ancient terror. Missing girls. Bizarre deaths attributed to a bear. The cold desolation of Alaska. And multiple deaths on a fishing vessel that bear a familiar three claw pattern. All of these come together to form a mystery that is unravelled in what I think is one of the best Wolverine stories in decades, Wolverine: The Long Night by Benjamin Percy, Marcio Takara, Matt Milla, and Joe Caramagna.

The Long Night began its journey as a serialized podcast adventure, and as such there's a large focus on dialogue and recounting information and telling of stories. That latter portion also largely coming into play due to the nature of the story as mainly being an investigation being performed by federal agents. Overall, a large part of this story is told through flashback and I think that once-removed nature gives it a very unique feel.

It's very interesting how that dialogue is broken down across the story. Comics typically has limited space per panel/page for overall text, too much and the story and art feels cluttered and clunky. Here, Percy and Takara masterfully break it down. Rather than necessarily cutting down a lot of the dialogue from the original podcast, large spoken pieces are broken across multiple panels, giving Takara an opportunity to really show off both structure and the characters' expressions. The story opens with a crotchety fisherman recounting discovering the fishing vessel of the dead in a nine-panel grid before diving into flashback scenes just beautiful. 

The artwork overall from Takara and Milla perfectly captures the cold and isolation of Alaska, along with the mystery and deadliness of what's occurring in the story itself. Takara uses a style here that reminds me a bit of both Rafael Albuquerque and Stuart Immonen, blending simplified characters with shadows and scratchier lines. It's very well suited for the darker aspects of the story and adds a bit of spookiness to the overall feel. Milla's colours add to that atmosphere further with a palette of whites, blues, greens, and purples that make the world feel cold and somewhat strange.

The sequences with large amounts of dialogue could well have felt cluttered, but on top of the breaking for the panels, the word balloons and narration boxes from Caramagna are well spaced and represented. Even as it changes at one point to an even more text heavy letter.

Overall, Wolverine: The Long Night by Percy, Takara, Milla, and Caramagna presents an impeccably paced tale with an incredibly captivating mystery. It features a Wolverine largely unfettered by his X-Men or Avengers careers, set in a nebulous time while his memory was still Swiss cheese. It allows for people who are just casual fans or unconcerned by larger continuity to jump into this self-contained story.

Wolverine - The Long Night

Wolverine: The Long Night
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Marcio Takara
Colorist: Matt Milla
Letterer: VC's Joe Caramagna
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Marvel’s hit scripted podcast comes to life on the printed page! Following a string of mysterious deaths in Burns, Alaska, Special Agents Sally Pierce and Tad Marshall investigate — but soon find more going on than meets the eye! A rundown cabin in the middle of nowhere. Feral children lurking in the trees. A sinister cult worshiping in a cathedral of night. And a serial killer on the loose. Everyone has their own suspicions about the culprit, but the evidence keeps pointing investigators back to a certain clawed loner. As the body count climbs and the small town spirals further into chaos, one man — one monster — sits at the center of it all! It’s a Logan story like no other!
Release Date: July 17, 2019
Price: $8.99
Buy It Here: Wolverine - The Long Night

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d. emerson eddy is a student and writer of things. He fell in love with comics during Moore, Bissette, & Totleben's run on Swamp Thing and it has been a torrid affair ever since. His madness typically manifests itself on Twitter @93418.