As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

HELLVERINE vol 2 #1
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso

This ongoing series follows the miniseries of the same name from earlier this year, which brought Akihiro back as a Ghost Rider mash-up. This, by the way, is the problem with Marvel’s current convention of distinguishing between volumes by the year in which the first issue came out: there are two Hellverine (2024) #1s.

Fun fact! If you try to search for this issue on Amazon, it thinks it’s a typo and gives you results for Wolverine instead.

Although it’s coming from the X-office, this series seems to be basically Ghost Rider, so I probably won’t continue doing annotations for it, but hey, it’s the first issue. Chances are I’ll be dropping some other lower-tier books in the new year – otherwise we’re going to have weeks coming up with seven books requiring annotations and that’s just not realistic.

AKIHIRO.

I didn’t cover the Hellverine mini, so here’s how we got to this point. In Wolverine vol 7 #41 (the opening chapter of “Sabretooth War”), Sabretooth killed Akihiro and tore his body apart. In the Hellverine miniseries, his body was reassembled and reanimated by the demon Bagra-ghul; the demon then had him doing Ghost Rider type things while wearing a Wolverine costume. Bagra-ghul was the same demon who had briefly possessed the real Wolverine during the crossover Ghost Rider / Wolverine: Weapons of Vengeance.

Once restarted, Daken’s body eventually healed to the point where his mind was restored. The Hellverine miniseries involved Project Hellfire, a scheme by a demonically corrupted Pentagon general to bring soldiers back from the dead as hellfire-powered cyborgs; Akihiro left those soldiers in charge of Project Hellfire and apparently just wandered off on his own. (I read Hellverine #4 at the time as suggesting that he was going to stick with them, but on re-reading, that doesn’t seem to be the idea.)

As this series begins, Akihiro has basically inherited the wandering biker status quo that Johnny Blaze had in Percy’s Ghost Rider run. He experiences the demon day-to-day more as a mental health problem than as a voice in his head. He’s gone back to wearing the Fang costume that he had in the tail end of the Krakoan era. Basically he wanders around, encounters bad people and mangles them. In Weapons of Vengeance, Bagra-ghul’s schtick involved arranging body parts into grotesque artistic monuments, so he’s basically doing the same thing here.

GUEST STAR.

Akihiro is understandably unsure whether he ought to exist in this form and seeks advice from Dr Strange. We’re after Blood Hunt, so Strange is no longer the Sorcerer Supreme and no longer has some of his usual trappings (which he surrendered to Dr Doom).

VILLAINS

Well, there are assorted passing villains for Akihiro to mangle, but they speak for themselves.

Bagra-ghul is more of a background presence than a character as such. In the Hellverine mini, Akihiro and Wolverine both assumed that merging with Akihiro had led to it channelling its violent urges against more deserving targets, but Dr Strange declares that it is in fact still a servant of Mephisto. The suggestion seems to be that Bagra-ghul is creating his body-part totems as some way of powering up Mephisto, and that he’s targetting evil victims simply because they make for better fuel.

MISCELLANEOUS

There are a number of flashbacks here, all of them recapping material for new readers.

• Page 6 panels 1-3. Romulus kills Akihiro’s mother Itsu while she’s pregnant. This is a scene first shown in flashback in Wolverine: Origins #5. It’s not spelled out here, but Romulus takes the child with him and gives him to his adoptive parents.
• Page 6 panels 4-6. Other children torment Akihiro and name him Daken. I think this specific scene with the pond is original, but the basic thrust comes from Wolverine: Origins #26.
• Page 7 panels 1-3. Akihiro kills his adoptive mother and her child, and embraces the name Daken. Again, this is from his origin flashback in Origins #26 (as is Akihiro “kill[ing] one of my tormentors”, which is mentioned but not shown). The original scene includes his adoptive father committing suicide. Akihiro is slightly exaggerating when he says that his adoptive mother “despised me”; what she says in the original story is more along the lines that she doesn’t love him, and that she finds him disturbing.
• Page 7 panels 4-6. Wolverine kills Daken. This is Uncanny X-Force #34.
• Page 11. This side of the double page spread is recapping the Weapons of Vengeance crossover.
• Page 12. And this is the Hellverine miniseries.