(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 014, 1940)

We open on our poor Werewolf as he approaches the great occultist (but apparent werewolf-skeptic) Dr Martin Keller in search of a potential cure for his affliction. This is the werewolf-as-victim, as someone just as much at the mercy of his bestial alter ego as those he kills. Should I even place him in the category of super-villain?

The answer, I think, is yes, if only because anyone so careless as to come into someone else’s home while under a time-based murder-curse without having a really close handle on what the actual hour is is so blissfully unconcerned with the safety of others as to be guilty of willful manslaughter at the very least. Even the intervention of the Vision is not enough to save Dr Keller, and the Werewolf scampers off into the night

We finally learn who the Werewolf is the next morning: Gordon Sanders, Wall Street Executive and definitely a man who could have afforded to take half a day off to meet Dr Keller in daylight rather than during the Wolfing Hours.

Sanders gets mad at his wife and delivers a truly astonishing amount of exposition that boils down to the facts that some time ago a) he and a friend named Medwick traveled to Tibet* in search of a place called the City of the Howling Demons, b) while there, Medwick was killed and Sanders gravely injured by some sort of wolf creature and c) the next day Sanders found a woman injured in the same way the beast had been in the wolf attack and despite the clear signs that she and the beast were one and the same (including the fact that her name was Llhupa) he brought her home and married her.

Llhupa doesn’t do much to defend herself, and at this point in the story one might reasonably assume that whole connection between her and the beast is all in Sanders’ mind.

* both this and the origin of the last Werewolf we covered here appear to be references to the 1935 movie The Werewolf of London, which is the only real touchstone I can find for the idea that Tibet is where you go to get bitten by a wolfman.

You would however be wrong in your assumption, as the Vision discovers when he makes his way inside. Indeed, Llhupa is not only a werewolf, but a wolfier kind of werewolf who has already murdered her husband (her reason for doing so is unstated but presumably has to do with his reluctance to be a full-fledged creature of the night). Even this new super-wolf (dubbed the She-Wolf for the few panels in which she appears) is no match for the Vision’s mystic might, however, and she soon joins her spouse in wolf heaven.