Ultimate Wolverine’s Trailer Turns the New Weapon Loose

The relaunched Ultimate Marvel line has been progressing through the year with just four titles: Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Black Panther, Ultimates, and Ultimate X-Men. Next year, a new comic is being added to the lineup with Ultimate Wolverine, which puts the most A-list X-Man in a familiar, but different context.

Written by Chris Condon and drawn by Alessandro Cappuccio, the book finds Wolverine forced into assassin work for Maker’s Council members Magik, Colossus, and Omega Red. As the trailer shows, this Wolverine’s still got the claws and exoskeleton, and they’re as deadly as other versions of the character, complete with an urge to rebel from their masters. But the biggest change may concern who they are: not only do they also go by “the Winter Soldier,” their identity is currently unknown. It could be Logan, it could be Bucky, or who knows; other Ultimate comics have given established identities to different, sometimes new characters, like Hawkeye being the wholly new Charli Ramsey.

According to Condon, this book “pushes the ideas that we all have about Wolverine to their limits – which is everything that an ‘ultimate’ Wolverine should be.” Whoever’s under that mask, we’ll see them get hit from all sides during their exploits: not only do they have to tangle with their handlers, they also look to be crossing violent paths with some familiar X-faces. Beyond Nightcrawler and Mystique, it’s unknown who else is showing up in this book, mainly because this universe’s mutants are much more scattered—Storm’s over in Black Panther, while other major mutants are have new Ultimate equivalents or just haven’t appeared yet. Go ahead and speculate away.

Ultimate Wolverine begins on January 15, but the character will first appear in December 11’s Ultimate Universe: One Year In one-shot.

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