Warning: The following contains spoilers for Werewolf By Night #1 by Taboo & B. Earl, Scot Eaton, Scott Hanna, and Miroslav Mrva, on sale now.
Werewolf By Night #1 brings back a familiar Marvel monster who seems to have his head more grounded this time around. While the lastest incarnation of the fan-favorite character, a Native American teenager named Jake, is a very different kind of werewolf, the heart of the howling character remains the same.
In the new Werewolf By Night series, the titular character is 17-year old Jake, a Native-American who realized he has the ability to change into a werewolf when he was 13. Jake doesn't need a full moon to turn. "It happens more emotionally," Jake says. "Angry, hungry, sad. Whatever." Molly, Jake's friend, helps him control his transformations by soothing the beast with music that transforms him back into human form.
While the end results are similar, Jake's form of lycanism is markedly different from Marvel's more famous Werewolf by Night, Jack Russell.Due to the loosening up of the Comics Code Authority's rules in 1971, publishers were allowed to publish code-approved comic books about werewolves for the first time in decades. Werewolf By Night debuted in 1972 in Marvel Spotlight #2-4, by Roy Thomas, Jean Thomas, Gerry Conway, and Mike Ploog, and was a test run for the character.
Its debut proved to be so popular that it got its own title. Russell was cursed with lycanthropy after one of his ancestors was bitten by a werewolf in 1795. The curse lay mainly dormant until it was activated in the 1950s after the great-great-grandson of the original werewolf read a passage out of the ancient text, Darkhold, which contained the secret origin of lycanthropy.
Jack wasn't afflicted by the curse until he turned 18 years old. He was a slave to the full moon and turned whenever the moon appeared, but for the first two years, he would lock himself up in a room to prevent himself from getting out. On the occasions when he escaped his self-imposed lock-ups, he never took a human life. Eventually, Jack gained the ability to change shape voluntarily (not just when the moon was full) and the ability to retain his human intellect while in werewolf form, and he even became an occasional crime-fighter.
And now, Jake is getting ready to dabble in some crime-fighting, too. Jake works as a janitor at a local secretive laboratory and discovers there are some shady things going on when he was tasked with cleaning a top-secret lab. His heightened werewolf sense picked up on clues that are undetectable by the average human. When Molly tells him that there has been a string of disappearances in the area, he and Molly decide to investigate. Molly has always wanted Jake to use his abilities for good, but Jake has been more reluctant. Jake drops a few hints that his father was also a werewolf but wasn't a particularly nice guy.
The first issue ends with Jake discovering a van full of some of the missing locals as well as three creatures, one of whom looks like a werewolf with enhanced, cybernetic limbs. Jake's journey is just beginning and it looks as though he is going to have to learn quickly what it takes to be a hero.