In 2005, Keith Giffen had a stroke of genius. He took the name “Howling Commandos” — usually attributed to the elite fighting force that accompanies Nick Fury during World War II in the comics, though it’s Captain America they follow in the MCU — and focused on the “Howling” part of the name. And so the short-lived series “Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos” was born with a special-ops team made up of both old and new Marvel characters like the Living Mummy, Frankenstein, and Warwolf. That’s right: instead of using the perfect opportunity to reintroduce Werewolf by Night, Giffen created an entirely new wolf guy.
It would take until 2015 for the comics to make this right by bring Russell into a similar team, first in the 2015 “Secret Wars” tie-in miniseries “Mrs. Deadpool and the Howling Commandos,” and later that year with “Howling Commandos of SHIELD.”
But the animated world stepped up and corrected the problem first. In 2013, toward the end of Season 2 of the Disney XD animated series “Ultimate Spider-Man,” Werewolf by Night appears in “Blade and The Howling Commandos,” joined by the Living Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Man-Thing. Together they help Spider-Man retrieve a mystical ankh from Dracula.