When two comic book legends like Jonathan Hickman and Greg Capullo team up, expectations skyrocket. Wolverine: Revenge does its best to meet that moment with a blood-soaked grin in the tight confines of a five-issue run.
Hickman, known for many important revolutions in comics, including reinventing the X-Men line and crafting some of the most unique new worlds in East of West and The Manhattan Projects, is pared down here to a shorter-than-usual run with well-established characters that this team wasn’t looking to reinvent. Instead, he’s here to show readers just how violent and entertaining Marvel comics can still be in the right hands. And Capullo, the iconic artist behind Spawn and Batman, is here in full form, with all the grit and glamour readers have come to expect for his art.
These two legends bring very different energies to the page, but together they create something feral, fast, and surprisingly fun. This isn’t Hickman doing his usual big-brain, slow-burn epic. This is Hickman unchained, scripting a lean, mean Wolverine tale while Capullo absolutely lets it rip. It’s a creative pairing that feels overdue and it is (literally) as explosive as you’d hope.
Marvel
The first issue does a lot of work setting up the mini-timeline this story takes place in. Despite feeling a little rushed, Hickman does a stellar job of distilling what could be three issues of plot in a main-line Wolverine comic into a single issue. By the end, Wolverine is prepped, pissed, and on his way down the blood-soaked path the title promises. This first issue alone captures the running theme that nothing in this book is “new”: the characters and their motivations, locations, organizations, and even some plot beats are dredged up from Wolverine’s long comic history. Impatient readers might put the book down at this point, assuming (mostly correctly) that the rest of the book will be an action comic covered in blood. But by the end of the run—which reads best as a collected trade devoured in a single sitting—the book’s core concepts snap into place.
After the last light of a dying world goes out, Wolverine is captured, gutted, and stuffed with a bomb by a rouges gallery full of his oldest enemies (and even one of his occasional friends). We are flashed through another list of classic Marvel characters: Nick Fury, Dani Moonstar, Cap and Bucky, and ultimately Forge, who Wolverine tries to rope into his quest for revenge. Like we’ve seen from Forge before, he reluctantly accedes, and helps to lay another stone on this twisted path. The voicing of each character is both recognizably Hickman and true to their roots, with many moments between blood spatters carrying the quiet intensity of a stage play. It makes the violence hit harder, as the creative team volleys between extremes with precision.
The two verbal showdowns that Logan has with Sabretooth rehash a lot of the personal and philosophical issues they’ve been going over for ages. This doesn’t mean they aren’t fun to read; in fact, seeing Hickman’s spin on some of Wolverine’s oldest tropes is half the fun. Wolverine is usually gruff and straight to the point; here, readers get a more mature, layered version of the character who still knows how to cut through a monologue with his claws.
If you’re expecting “standard Hickman” – dense world-building, cryptic charts, long-game teases – you won’t find it here. Instead, you get the rare pleasure of seeing two top-tier creators having fun. The synergy is pure, the art is magnificent, and the script leaps off the page, even if the book’s smaller scope limits its emotional reach. Put plainly: if almost any other writer-artist team had tackled this concept, it wouldn’t be half as compelling.
Marvel
Capullo’s art gives the book an immediately timeless feel. He seamlessly blends classic paneling with jagged splash moments, and pairs gritty violence with occasional serenity. There’s a quiet horror in the way Deadpool melts atop a failing reactor, but a stark calm to Wolverine’s snowy showdown with Colossus. That range of tone is rare in modern superhero comics, but Capullo makes it look effortless.
The big picture doesn’t really appear until the last couple of issues of this book, where the entire concept of revenge as a lifelong philosophy is called into question. After Wolverine completes his own revenge arc about halfway through the story, we jump forward in time to show the lasting effects that his trail of violence has had on the next generation. Some survivors (including a new Captain America and Bucky duo) live in the blood-bought safety Wolverine and Forge have carved out, while others are scarred by the deaths that occurred earlier at the business end of Logan’s claws. A new generation of enemies has risen to challenge Logan’s will, painting his anger with futility.
It becomes clear here that this book isn’t actually about Wolverine’s revenge, but about the way that revenge itself has become the second-billed character (that colon in the title makes all the difference). Revenge becomes a character in its own right: born, fulfilled, extinguished, and reborn. While this theme doesn’t radiate fully back to the earliest issues, the payoff sticks. It’s a smart, surprisingly reflective ending for a book that opens with a bomb in Wolverine’s chest.
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