Werewolf By Night: Blood Hunt #1 - Marvel Comics

WEREWOLF BY NIGHT: BLOOD HUNT No. 1, September 2024

Apparently spinning out of “the bloodiest event in Marvel history” Jason Loo’s narrative for Issue One of “Werewolf By Night: Blood Hunt” would certainly seem to live up to its publisher’s promise of providing the audience with an incarnation of the titular character “unlike any you have seen or known before!” But whilst a ferociously fanged shapeshifter is arguably always going to play an anti-heroic role in any comic book storyline, it’s debatably difficult to rally together any support whatsoever for a fiend who ends up quite literally eating his old school friends along with the vampire police officers he was trying to protect them from.

Furthermore, the entire premise of this publication’s plot, apart from allowing the Eisner Award-winner to “flex a dark, macabre writing muscle than my usual fare”, appears to be bemusingly based upon a group of feckless teenagers somehow summoning the demonically damned soul of Uncle Duke Jensen using a load of mumbo jumbo, a chalk circle and a coin. Just how the adolescent sorcerer Sam is able to achieve any of this wizardry is frustratingly never explained, with the Canadian author actually implying that the ‘kids’ were simply trying to hold a séance as opposed to rousing a full-blown, death-dealing devil.

Lastly, for those bibliophiles who are well-versed in the “Blood Hunt” crossover event, this twenty-five page periodical’s passage of time appears to veer badly off-track just as soon as Jake Gomez enters the Wild Dino Adventure Park whilst the sun is still setting – presumably therefore occurring before the Dark Dimension’s Darkforce blankets the planet in eternal night and allows the undead to rise from their crypts. The entire unholy ritual then only seems to take a matter of minutes to succeed in resurrecting Jensen. Yet it’s clear from the dialogue of the blood-drinking patrolmen who are drawn to Uncle Duke’s subsequent murder spree inside a now flaming fun factory, that they have been feasting upon the living for some considerable time (perhaps even days)..?

Quite possibly this “teen-horror” grindhouse’s greatest asset therefore lies in the layouts of Adam Gorham, who does a proficient job pencilling all the gratuitous, bodily mutilation which occurs within this comic. Indeed, whether it be the new Werewolf By Night waking up to find himself cuddling a severed leg, or Trevor’s ghostly relative incinerating a hapless stooge, it’s crystal clear from the artwork just why Loo would state beforehand that “you’ll need permission from your parent/guardian” to read this book.

The regular cover art to "WEREWOLF BY NIGHT: BLOOD HUNT" #1 by Davide Paratore