Werewolf by Night: Red Band #3
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeIssue #3 contains the first appearance of Darkwolf, the Hood's Darkhold-infused cloned werewolf, who goes on to become a recurring antagonist and eventually earns a proper name later in the run — making this the key issue for that character's introduction. The issue also deepens the significance of the Red Band publishing format: Werewolf by Night was Marvel's first Red Band ongoing series, extending a mature-content experiment that had debuted with the Blood Hunt crossover, and issue #3 fully commits to that horror-comics lineage by transplanting Jack Russell into the Savage Land and staging a trial-by-combat with Ka-Zar. Together these elements mark the issue as both a character-origin touchstone and a creative milestone in Marvel's early experimentation with explicit-content ongoings. The Savage Land arc planted here runs directly into the Hood's cloning scheme, threading horror-comic violence with a genuinely escalating threat — something writer Jason Loo had explicitly framed as his attempt to recapture the spirit of Marvel's 1970s horror magazines.
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Jason Loo, who had already built a relationship with Jack Russell via the Werewolf by Night: Blood Hunt one-shot, pitched the Red Band ongoing as a direct follow-up to that event, with editor Devin Lewis championing increasingly intense content. Penciller Sergio Dávila, known for prior Marvel work on Venom and Thor, brought the kinetic creature-action, inker JP Mayer refined the linework, and Alex Sinclair provided colors; the creative team remained consistent through the early Savage Land arc. The Red Band format itself — polybagged, parental-advisory-stamped, print-only with no Marvel Unlimited availability — had only just been established by the Blood Hunt event series earlier in 2024, and Werewolf by Night was greenlit as the format's first dedicated ongoing, demonstrating Marvel's intent to sustain it beyond a single event.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Darkwolf (unnamed at this point): a Darkhold-infused cloned werewolf created by the Hood from a scrap of Jack Russell's flesh, introduced as the villain's enforcer against dissident Darkholders.
- Written by Jason Loo, pencilled by Sergio Dávila, inked by JP Mayer, colored by Alex Sinclair, lettered by VC's Joe Sabino, with cover art by E.M. Gist; edited by Devin Lewis.
- Published October 23, 2024 (in-store date); cover-dated December 2024.
- The issue shifts the setting to the Savage Land in Antarctica, where Jack Russell theorizes that distance from the moon might help him control his lycanthropy — the story logic that drives his self-exile there.
- Ka-Zar, Shanna the She-Devil, and Zabu appear as antagonistic forces in this issue, with Ka-Zar defeating Jack in trial by combat and imprisoning him in a vibranium cage suspended in a pit.
- The Hood's cloning of Jack's werewolf DNA — and his plan to extract Darkhold energy from the clone — is established as the central villainous plot of the arc.
- The issue is part of Marvel's Red Band format: polybagged, carry a Parental Advisory rating, rated Explicit Content, and not available digitally or on Marvel Unlimited — a format Marvel debuted with the Blood Hunt event and extended into this ongoing.
- Werewolf by Night: Red Band was the first Red Band ongoing series Marvel published, distinguishing it from the dual-edition Red Band event books that preceded it under Blood Hunt.
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