Wolverine: Revenge - Red Band #3

History

The Wolverine: Revenge miniseries was announced in May 2024 as a five-issue prestige limited series timed to Wolverine's 50th anniversary—the character having debuted in Incredible Hulk #180 (1974) by Len Wein and Herb Trimpe. Writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Greg Capullo worked in the classic Marvel plot style, with Capullo breakingdown pages first and Hickman crafting much of the final dialogue after seeing the art, a collaborative method Capullo described in a Marvel.com interview. Capullo's involvement carried particular weight because Wolverine: Revenge marked his first Marvel interior artwork in decades—he had returned to Marvel in 2023 primarily for cover work after a career-defining run on DC's Batman with Scott Snyder, and before that a long tenure at Image on Spawn, with his earlier Marvel work including X-Force in the early 1990s. The Red Band edition of each issue was polybagged and contained exclusive additional pages not present in the standard edition, physically distributed only through comic shops and not made available digitally, with editor Mark Basso overseeing both editions.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published October 30, 2024 (in-shop date), with an FOC date of September 23, 2024; the Red Band edition carries a December 2024 cover date.
• Written by Jonathan Hickman; pencils and cover by Greg Capullo; inks by Tim Townsend; colors by FCO Plascencia; letters by VC's Cory Petit; edited by Mark Basso.
• The Red Band edition is polybagged and contains exclusive additional pages beyond those in the standard Wolverine: Revenge #3, which it reprints as its primary story.
• Set on the alternate-continuity world Earth-47301, in a post-apocalyptic timeline where a dying Magneto released a global EMP, plunging civilization into darkness and killing roughly 100 million people.
• Omega Red (Arkady Rossovich), Deadpool (Wade Wilson), and Colossus (Piotr Rasputin) all die in this issue—Omega Red killed in hand-to-hand combat at a failing Russian power plant, Deadpool pushed into a nuclear reactor by Wolverine, and Colossus killed by adamantium claws driven through his metallic skull.
• Colossus serves as a villain in this continuity, having sided with Mastermind's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants—a grouping that also includes Sabretooth, Omega Red, and Deadpool—making this one of the character's most radical villain portrayals in any Marvel continuity.
• The miniseries as a whole was part of Marvel's broader Red Band publishing initiative launched in 2024, which also spawned Punisher: Red Band and Blade: Red Band, all polybagged with explicit-content ratings.
• A Wolverine: Revenge – Red Band Raw: Black & White Edition reprinting Capullo's original uncolored pencils for all five issues was subsequently announced, with issue #3 of that series solicited for July 2025, reflecting the creative team's desire to showcase Capullo's linework in its raw form.

Cast · 5 characters

Full credits

Variants (2)