There’s a scene in the sixth episode of Marvel and Stitcher’s radio drama podcast Wolverine: The Long Night where
special agent Tad Marshall is interviewing a boy whose home was
attacked by… something. The agent is searching for Logan, aka the mutant
hero Wolverine, who the agent thinks might be behind the attack. But
the boy swears it wasn’t a man; it was a beast — and a huge one at that.
This is the first time Marshall believes Logan might not be the cause
of all the murders in the town of Burns, Alaska, though he’s still not
wholly convinced.
Meanwhile, the audience isn’t sure what to believe. This
account notwithstanding, the evidence points uncomfortably to Logan. But
he’s the good guy, right? And the special agents must be the bad guys
because they’re hunting him. Except… what if it’s the other way around?
This purposeful ambiguity is the slow, unraveling mystery at the core of Wolverine: The Long Night,
a story nearly two years in the making, and it might change the
landscape of scripted radio dramas in the endless expanse of podcasts.
In April 2017, Marvel’s New Media division asked comics
writer Benjamin Percy to pitch an idea for a new scripted podcast series
with Stitcher. He was given only two vague guidelines: the podcast had
to feature Wolverine, and it had to be an investigative show in the mold
of Serial or S-Town. Marvel was probably expecting a
one or two-page summary. They got something much, much longer. “It had
character bios, themes, my take on Wolverine’s history in comics and
film, influences I would bring to the podcast, along with detailed
breakdowns of every episode,” Percy says. “I put an exhaustive amount of
work into it because I wanted to make it impossible for them to say
no.”
“At the end of that pitch was an asterisk with a note that basically said, ‘Give this to me, or else,’” he says.
As
it turns out, the not-so-veiled (and not-so-serious) threat wasn’t
necessary. Percy’s pitch was exactly what Marvel was looking for, and
his 30-page bible became the foundation for the first season of Marvel
and Stitcher’s Wolverine: The Long Night, which concluded its 10-episode run in early May.
“The audio medium is one that, for years, Marvel was
intrigued by,” says Dan Fink, executive director of development for
Marvel New Media and The Long Night’s producer. “It intrigued
me to know how a Marvel superhero story would work in this medium. We
weren’t looking to reinvent the wheel, we wanted to do what worked.”
What worked, according to Fink, were investigative shows like Serial or S-Town,
where there was a narrator or investigator to guide listeners through
the experience. This is why Wolverine isn’t necessarily the show’s lead
character, even though his name is in the title. Listeners instead spend
the most time with special agents Sally Pierce and Tad Marshall as they
search for Logan in the remote town of Burns, Alaska, uncovering the
town’s darkest secrets along the way.
“As a team, we reference Jaws a lot,” Fink says.
“In the movie, you don’t see him all that much, but everyone’s talking
about the shark. There’s all this fear and mystery. Your imagination
starts playing games. After Jaws, everyone was scared to go in
the water, because you couldn’t see the shark. And so by creating this
elusiveness [about] who Wolverine truly is as a comic book character, we
were like, ‘Let’s bring this back, and slowly have him come back out of
his shell.’ That’s what season 1 is about. It’s Wolverine coming to
terms with who he is, and accepting the mistakes he’s made.”
Scripted podcasts are common today, but The Long Night
is the first time a company like Marvel has centered a narrative
podcast on a major flagship character. Fink says Marvel searched all
over for writers for The Long Night, both within Marvel’s
creative and editorial departments and outside. In a bout of
serendipity, Percy’s agent had an office next to Stitcher’s, and when he
caught word of the project, he threw his client’s hat in the ring.
Though Percy, at that point, had only worked with DC Comics, writing
titles like Detective Comics, Green Arrow, and Teen Titans, Marvel was familiar with his work.
As Marvel was recruiting Percy to write their first narrative podcast, they were also recruiting Brendan Baker, producer of Love + Radio,
to direct it. While he didn’t write an exhaustive 30-page pitch script
like Percy, he did submit a treatment discussing elements he wanted to
experiment with in audio fiction, such as telling a story in two
different timelines and working with unreliable narrators.
Both of these elements are crucial to the storytelling in
the series. Nearly every episode features a flashback of some sort,
whether prompted by a witness testimony or a conversation in a bar.
Those testimonies aren’t always truthful, and neither are the special
agents.
Baker refers to sound design as “designing an audience’s
attention.” He and fellow director Chloe Prasinos were able to do that
by using an ambisonic microphone, which records in a sphere, meaning it
captures sounds above, below, and behind the mic. It also allows users
to isolate different voices and change their positions in the mix, so
listeners can hear things above or below them.
“One of the challenges of fictional podcasting or radio
plays is trying to create an immersive experience for the listener,”
Baker says. “In television, things are always mixed so the voices are in
the center, and the side speakers are used for music or sound effects.
But we knew in this case, most people would be listening through
headphones, so we tried to create an audio environment that would be
tailored to that listening experience.”
“Let’s
say someone was telling a story about what happened to them in the
woods earlier,” Percy says. “We could make the chuffing of the winds or
the crackling of dried twigs beneath their feet, and sleet that might be
pattering in their coat, and slip that into the conversation, and make
the listener feel like they were there.”
The ambisonic mic necessitated a different method of
recording the show. Instead of the standard “one-person, one-mic” studio
approach that the actors recorded simultaneously, in the same room. The
approach allowed for more interaction between actors, more like staging
a play than recording an audiobook.
The final element was finding the perfect Wolverine. The
criteria for an audio Wolverine is different than for an on-screen
character: the actor didn’t need Hugh Jackman’s corded muscles or the
ability to pull off the character’s signature hairstyle and sideburns.
They needed gravel in their voice and the ability to intone rage, grief,
and feral intelligence. Enter Richard Armitage, the actor who played
dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit adaptations.
Armitage was deeply involved and invested in the
character, whom he saw as an addict, someone who couldn’t get away from
getting involved and taking action in any given conflict. Percy says
Armitage sent him dissertation-length emails concerning Logan, citing
works like William Blake’s “Nebuchadnezzar” in his attempt to get to
Wolverine’s “beastly heart.”
Armitage’s version of Wolverine is more brooding and
haunted than Hugh Jackman’s take from the films, or any of the
character’s previous cartoon portrayals. (His voice in the role sounds
like a hungover George Clooney / Doug Ross, circa season 3 of ER.)
Armitage’s first extensive scene as Logan comes in the second episode,
not in a cinema-friendly gory fight sequence, but in a morose recitation
of a letter he wrote to an old lover, Maureen:
I came back home and found you asleep. It was hot, remember? You weren’t wearing anything but underwear, and lying on top of the sheets. God… do you know what my mind did? I saw every organ, every vertebrae, every nerve, every artery, every bone, every way to hurt you. That’s how I look at everyone, you know.
It’s a grim thought, but in this monologue, in a matter of seconds, The Long Night gets at the core of Logan better than some multiyear comic runs ever did.
Inevitably, Wolverine comes to the foreground of the series, especially in the last three episodes. (Even the shark in Jaws
didn’t stay offscreen for the whole film.) Yet when Wolverine takes
center stage and the podcast becomes a bit more action-oriented, it
still never loses its initial premise and style. It features more
punches and explosions than Serial, but even in those moments, the series never approaches the kitsch of the old Superman and The Shadow radio plays. It always feels like the same procedural.
Marvel is keeping its cards close to the vest regarding
what’s next for Wolverine’s podcast adventures, but Fink, Baker, and
Percy each repeatedly referred to The Long Night as season 1 of the series, and Long Night’s final
episode has a clear lead-in to a second season. Marvel is playing it
even closer about plans for a Marvel Podcast Universe, but Percy let
something interesting slip to Mashable’s Laura Prudom:
“We have a fun opportunity here, and that’s to create our
own continuity. A continuity that will grow more and more expansive as
the Marvel Podcast Universe expands,” Percy teases. “There are glimmers
that people will recognize, references to Weapon X and wartime Logan,
Japan and past relationships that he’s had. But he himself is not able
to really work through his moth-eaten memory until the conclusion of
this first season.”
And while Marvel is keeping quiet about the possibility
of an MPU, it’s easy to read between the lines on Percy’s quote, the
positive reception to The Long Night, and the fact that fans want more Marvel content than ever. Like 2008’s Iron Man, The Long Night
was an experiment in finding an audience and setting the stage for a
larger, more cohesive story. From a storytelling standpoint at the very
least, it succeeded.
Whatever Marvel decides to do next, it’s clear it’s found
a formula for success in audio storytelling, one that’s easily
replicable and adjustable across their many properties. It’s fun to
imagine Peter Parker running an investigative podcast “produced” by The Daily Bugle.
Or a show where Bruce Banner, separated from the Hulk somehow, goes
looking for his greener half. Or a high school drama set in the Jean
Grey School for Higher Learning, or a world-touring espionage thriller
starring the Black Widow. The only limit is Marvel’s imagination.
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