Uncanny Experience 2025: Writer Benjamin Percy On Krakoa, Hellverine, And Making Wolverine Scary

Kicking off the second day of programming at the third annual Uncanny Experience convention, Benjamin Percy held court in the packed student lecture hall for a morning panel in which he discussed the origins of his involvement with Krakoa, how writing comics is like playing an accordion, making Wolverine scary again in his audio drama, and more.

If you’ve never heard Percy in an interview or on a panel before, the first thing to know is that he sounds exactly like you’d expect the writer of Wolverine would sound. Percy’s first work with the character was in the Wolverine: The Long Night audio drama (later adapted into a comic miniseries of the same name), in which Wolverine was voiced by Richard Armitage; and after the panel, I joked to Chad Anderson of the Graymalkin Lane podcast that they could have just had Percy voice the character.

Percy mentioned that Wolverine has always been his favorite character, and one of his goals with the audio drama was to make Wolverine a scary character again. Having little experience writing for audio, he listened to fictional and true crime podcasts to figure out how to fill in the sensory gaps of audio — in which details taken for granted in other mediums, like setting, action and time, are difficult to express without clunky exposition — and decided to use the interrogative approach he deployed there. While he has plenty of comic book work on his slate, Percy said he enjoys the audio drama medium, and has two new ones coming out in 2026; both have yet to be announced and he’s bound by an NDA, but he did let slip that one involved a “giant monster,” prompting the crowd to speculate that it involves Godzilla.

Percy said he loves all monsters — the use of vampires in his Wolverine run came entirely from him (as opposed to Marvel asking him to use vampires). He views vampires and Wolverine as kindred spirits: both are eternal, but where one helps the vulnerable, one feeds on/is powered by them.

Talking about the origins of his involvement with the launch of Krakoa, Percy said he was approached by writer/Krakoan architect Jonathan Hickman to join the X-Men writers room. Hickman wanted every book in the initial launch to be different — a kissing book, a fantasy book, a black-ops book — and he wanted Percy to handle the black-ops because he was, “delightfully evil.”

Percy was given the “bible” that outlined the general arc of Hickman’s planned narrative and attended the first summit of the future Krakoa writers room, in which the various creators passed around 3×5 notecards with character names written on them as they each built up the cast of their books. He added that the parallels between the launch of Krakoa and real world “stand up” movements at the time was entirely intentional.

Percy said he wanted Jean Grey in the book because he needed someone who could say, “this is wrong,” while he chose Sage because she seemed like the perfect character to be the “person in the chair.” Beast’s arc, getting appointed the head of Krakoan intelligence and slipping further and further into super-villainy, was planned from the beginning. Percy viewed him as a Henry Kissinger-like figure for Krakoa, and someone whose embrace of utilitarianism — the most good for the most mutants — would carry him down a dark path; that said, the Beast Wonder Man/Beast team-up (in X-Force #49) was always in his mind as a capstone to that arc.

Artist Joshua Cassara, a self-taught artist working as a bartender at the time, was brought on by Percy because they shared similar tastes and experiences. It was Cassara, the former bartender, who came up with the idea of the Green Lagoon, the watering hole/party spot on the island. After reading the series bible Cassara asked, “where’s the bar?” and set about coming up with a drink list for the Green Lagoon. Percy also said the villainous Russian nesting dolls which attacked the island were a Cassara creation.

Speaking to ends of his Krakoa books, both X-Force and Wolverine, Percy said he never knew exactly how long he had to tell his story, but he knew had a fair amount of runway to do so whenever the end came. This prompted him to compare writing comics to playing an accordion: sometimes you need to stretch out a story to fill space, sometimes you need to squeeze a story down into a small number of issues than you expected. But he always knew that “Sabretooth War” would be the end of his Wolverine run, and intentionally saved the hero’s biggest villain for last. He and co-writer Victor LaVelle worked via a shared Google doc, and traded off responsibility for each issue.

Taking questions from the audience, Percy said that he initially did Hellverine because he thought the basic premise — a Ghost Rider Wolverine — it should have happened already. He continued to work with the character out of a desire to take Daken out of Wolverine’s shadow, but has been blown away by the popularity and continued success of the character.

When asked what creator he’d loved to work with, he admitted he constantly bugs Ryan Stegman to work with him on something, but joked that “Conductor of X” Tom Brevoort would be made if he heard that.

Concluding the panel, he was asked which character he’s always wanted to write the most, and said that’s he’s wanted to write Punisher a long time — something he’ll finally get to do starting with September’s The Punisher #1. He finished by saying his Punisher run will be “ultra violent” and “off-leash.”