Wolverine: Revenge - Red Band #5

History

The series was announced in May 2024, timed explicitly to Wolverine's 50th anniversary as a character, and positioned as the vehicle for Capullo's first Marvel interior artwork since returning to the publisher — prior to Revenge, his post-hiatus Marvel work had been limited to covers. Both Hickman and Capullo described the editorial mandate as unusually permissive: Marvel gave them significant creative latitude to produce an unrestrained, explicitly violent story, which is why the Red Band edition exists as a parallel polybagged release containing exclusive pages with elevated gore not present in the standard edition. Capullo's working method on the series was notably collaborative — he has described Hickman crafting much of the dialogue after seeing the finished pages rather than before, giving the artist unusual freedom to drive the visual storytelling.

Trivia · 9 facts

• Released March 26, 2025; cover-dated May 2025. The fifth and final issue of the five-issue limited series Wolverine: Revenge – Red Band (2024–2025).
• Written by Jonathan Hickman; pencils by Greg Capullo; inks by Tim Townsend; colors by Alex Sinclair; letters by VC's Cory Petit; edited by Mark Basso and Drew Baumgartner.
• The Red Band edition is a parallel polybagged release of the standard Wolverine: Revenge #5, containing exclusive additional pages and more graphic violence not included in the standard edition.
• First appearance of S'ym (the alternate-timeline Earth-47301 version) in this issue, per the Marvel Database. Also the first appearance of Limbo (Otherplace) and the Archipelago of Anguish and Redemption within this continuity.
• Death of Sabretooth (Victor Creed, Earth-47301) in this issue — the culmination of a plot thread in which an aged Logan had been ritually visiting and dismembering Creed annually rather than killing him outright.
• The issue's central conflict is Wolverine versus Nikolai Rasputin, the son of Colossus (Piotr Rasputin), who wields his father's organic-steel mutation and his Aunt Illyana's Soulsword, using the latter to drag the fight into Limbo.
• Logan's closing gambit — secretly sabotaging Forge's power-neutralizer so Nikolai believes he has killed a depowered Wolverine — allows Nikolai a false sense of closure while Logan chooses to remain in Limbo and seize its throne.
• The series was conceived as an out-of-main-continuity alternate-universe story set on Earth-47301, and was reprinted in a pencil-art-only black-and-white format (Wolverine: Revenge – Red Band Raw: Black & White Edition #1–5), on sale from July 2025, showcasing Capullo's uncolored original pages.
• Variant covers for this issue include a 1:100 Greg Capullo virgin variant and a 1:25 Mike McKone homage variant, plus retailer exclusives by Tyler Kirkham through Unknown Comics/Comic Traders.

Cast · 6 characters

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