The locals talk about Logan like he’s an animal running around with packs of animals, resembling some kind of Bigfoot more than he does a mutant human with adamantium claws and a lust for booze.
On Tuesday, Marvel released a trailer for its new podcast series, Wolverine: The Long Night, and in it, the locals of a fictional Alaskan town suspect Logan of slashing some of the locals to “ribbons.” The start of the trailer, narrated by some kind of Alaskan hunter, notes Logan’s bloody face as he wanders the woods with a bunch of wolves.
Logan (played by Richard Armitage, who also voiced Dracula in the Castlevania anime) won’t exactly be the main character of the podcast. At least, not directly, as the story will instead focus on Special Agents Sally Pierce (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and Tad Marshall (Ato Essandoh) as they investigate a series of strange deaths in the seaside town of Burns, Alaska.
Their prime suspect is a grouchy stranger with gaps of memory and unbridled rage.
Listen to the first 2-minute trailer right here:
Initially announced in December 2017, The Long Night will launch something a Marvel Podcast Universe outside of the comics, MCU, and X-Men movies. Novelist and comics writer Benjamin Percy, who’s created this new story, explained to Mashable that they’re creating a unique continuity.
But when approximately does the story take place?
“There are glimmers that people will recognize,” Percy explained, “references to Weapon X and wartime Logan, Japan and past relationships that he’s had. But he himself is not able to really work through his moth-eaten memory until the conclusion of this first season.” This version of the character, like some of the early X-Men movies, has been “mind-wiped again and again.”
So it sounds like the version of Wolverine we get here is something like the wild version from the beginning of The Wolverine (2013), in which Logan began as a grizzly hermit tormented by his past in the Yukon territory of Canada. But, he’s already had his adventures in Japan.
He’s at a new point in Logan’s endless cycle of self-isolation in the Canadian wilderness, except this time, he’s accidentally wound up in Alaska. (To be fair, it’s an easy mistake to make.)
In an interview with Vulture Tuesday, Percy cited inspiration not only from the obvious Serial and S-Town mystery model but also True Detective Season 1 and Unforgiven. “Like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Percy explained, “Logan has separated himself from the world. There’s no better place to do that than Alaska, the last frontier.”
It’s starting to sound like a very familiar Wolverine story told in a totally new way, which is just about the only thing they could do with the character after decades of stories.
Wolverine: The Long Night will be released on the Stitcher online radio service in Fall 2018.
Who knows, maybe Stu or somebody just like him will have an appearance in The Long Night:
