Marvel Comics had a podcast hit with a Wolverine story set in Alaska.

The scripted podcast was adapted into a five-part comic book written by Benjamin Percy with art by Marcio Takara. The comic was collected in a trade paperback edition. 

A ship’s crew and two women have been savagely killed in a small, outback Alaskan town. The bodies all have claw marks. 

The townfolk believe a maddened grizzly bear is to blame. 

Two investigating agents seem to think it’s someone else. Especially, with every indication that Logan, a.k.a. the steel-clawed X-Men member known as Wolverine, appears to have taken up residence in the town.

Perhaps, neither group is right.

“The Long Night” is written as a first-class mystery. The title character dominates this story, but unlike many Wolverine stories, it is not told from his perspective. 

There’s no first-person narrative from Logan. There’s no Wolverine saying the famed line: “I’m the best there is at what I do.” 

Readers do not follow Wolverine from scene to scene as he pieces the mystery together. Instead, readers see Wolverine through other people’s eyes as they recount incidents involving him. The readers get to piece the story together. Is Wolverine the person committing the killings? Perhaps. 

“The Long Night” is a tremendously satisfying Wolverine yarn, told in a different way than so many other stories. 

He’s still Wolverine but the storytelling makes this overused Marvel character something new – a splendid feat on its own.