Spoilers for Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth by Frank Tieri, Guillermo Sanna, Angel Unzueta, and Gerardo Sandoval below
Marvel Comics has just revealed the secret history of one of their oldest supernatural antiheroes, Werewolf By Night. The character was created back in 1953, but the formation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 led to the character being essentially dropped. The early CCA refused to allow publishers to explore the supernatural, and those rules were only relaxed in 1971. As a result, Marvel returned to the concept of Werewolf By Night, integrating Jack Russell - a man cursed with lycanthropy - into their superhero universe.
The Russell family line has long been cursed with lycanthropy, with unconfirmed accounts of werewolves running back centuries. The earliest known of these was Grigori Russoff, who fought Count Dracula in 1795. But it had previously been believed the werewolf gene went dormant until the 1930s, when one of Jack Russell's closer ancestors came across the Darkhold, an ancient book of forbidden magic that triggered the curse.
Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth #1 reveals that isn't the case, and there were in fact other werewolves in the Russell line. The book features a number of journal entries from Jonas Ravencroft, founder of the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane, which is most famous for imprisoning the psychopath Carnage. Notes from 1909 reveal that one of his doctors was Claudia Russell - and the issue reveals she was also a werewolf. It seems Claudia had been transforming under every full moon, and - unable to control her animal instincts - had been hunting and killing in New York City. She unwittingly drew the attention of a mutant named Logan, who perhaps wondered if the killer was somebody like himself.
Although Claudia's boss Jonas Ravencroft appears to have been a good man, he had gathered a group of scientists whose ethics were pretty dubious. One of her colleagues was a man named Nathaniel Essex, destined to become the X-Men villain Mr. Sinister, and he was conducting secret experiments on supernatural beings in a sub-basement of the Ravencroft Institute. Claudia decided enough was enough and attempted to free Logan; although she was successful, it cost Claudia her freedom, because she was captured by Essex and his ally, Victor Creed, aka Sabretooth.
So the ends the story of Claudia Russell. And yet, this is particularly fascinating because it completely rewrites the history of Werewolf By Night. It suggests that active werewolves have been found in the Russell line for centuries and that Jack is just the latest of them. What's more, the timing is interesting, because there have been rumors that Werewolf By Night will be joining the MCU soon, appearing in the Moon Knight series on Disney+. We'll see if Werewolf by Night's history being retconned plays a factor in the character's future in the MCU.
Ruins of Ravencroft: Sabretooth #1 is on sale now in comic book stores.
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