Image: Marvel

You can’t swing a severed arm laced with adamantium these days without hitting someone who has a new podcast. Everyone’s gotten into the game these days and Marvel’s Wolverine is no exception. Beginning next year, Marvel will launch The Long Night, its first scripted podcast styled after WBEZ’s Serial. And it’ll star The Hobbit’s Richard Armitage.


Today, Marvel announced they’re partnering with Stitcher Audio to produce the scripted podcast writer Ben Percy described as a blend of programs like Serial, S-Town, True Detective, and Unforgiven. He said the show is meant specifically to pull audiences in as the characters slowly begin to piece together the elements of a larger mystery. Said Percy :

“If you look at the success of Serial and S-Town, it has everything to do I think with their investigative formats, the way the listeners become complicit in the narrative. They’re co-authors, they’re literary detectives, because they’re piecing together the clues alongside the reporters, and I wanted to take a similar approach to that.”


So what’s the actual story about? The Long Night will find two special agents investigating a series of gruesome murders taking place in Burns, a fictional Alaskan town. An amnesiac Wolverine (Armitage) is the agents’ top suspect for the killings, but as they begin to dig into the town’s mysteries, they soon learn that all isn’t necessarily as it seems. According to Percy, The Long Night will borrow some narrative elements from popular murder mystery podcasts, but the story will also incorporate a number of themes more common to comic books to set itself apart. There will be murder, there will be cults, and there will be claws. Said Percy :

“I’m also drawing from the Native legends in the area and from cultish mythology. There is a compound set up outside of the town of Burns, Alaska, where the Aurora cult is located. And it’s unclear at first whether they are implicated in the murders that are occurring here and whether they might have powers, as they purport to — a connection to and a control over the fabric of light that plays over the winter skies.”

As it turns out, Armitage was in the studio working on this new project just a few days ago.


[Mashable]