What is a Hulkverine?

Every week we use the powers of Marvel Unlimited to celebrate a major character's first appearance in the hallowed halls of the House of Ideas.

If you asked most people, we bet they'd say that mixing Hulk and Wolverine DNA could only lead to disaster, but not Weapon X! The organization dedicated to making dangerous people even more deadly didn't shy away from doing exactly that in the "Weapons of Mutant Destruction" crossover between TOTALLY AWESOME HULK and WEAPON X last year which lead to the WEAPON H title and the current HULKVERINES! three-issue limited series by Greg Pak and Ario Anindito that debuted this week!

However, if you missed those titles, you might be wondering about this big gray behemoth and where he came from. That's where we come in!

As we mentioned, the character debuted between TOTALLY AWESOME HULK #19-22, WEAPON X #4-6 plus WEAPONS OF MUTANT DESTRUCTION: ALPHA #1.

The WEAPON X series kicked off because the title organization tried killing Sabretooth, Domino, and Old Man Logan with highly advanced adamantium cyborgs imbued with the gifts of Lady Deathstrike, Warpath, and Old Man Logan and Sabretooth themselves. A couple of those same robots even attacked Amadeus Cho's Hulk in outer space! He fended them off, but a separate drone managed to escape with a sample of his gamma-powered blood. As Logan, Dom and 'Tooth investigated the downed cyborg, Cho came along with his ship, leading to a team-up.

Meanwhile, the Reverend Stryker-led Weapon X combined Hulk and Wolverine DNA with human subjects to create a super soldier designed to kill mutants. Headed up by Dr. Alba, the project failed repeatedly, but she felt good about subjects H-Beta and H-Alpha. When Cho and his mutant pals attacked the secret lab in Serenity Hills, Texas, Ryker ordered Alba to let them out early.

Beta, whose mind had been all but erased, finished first, but couldn't hold his own against Hulk, Warpath, and Domino. That gave Alpha enough time to finish up. He retained more of his mind, went after the biggest threat and used his own adamantium claws to decapitate Beta.

The creature–who combined the Hulk's size and strength with Wolverine's healing factor and adamantium claws–considered taking on the Weapon X forces, but instead jumped away, only wanting to be left alone. Barely remembering his old life, Weapon H wandered the country, facing off against Weapon X forces as well as the mutants he attempted to help him in WEAPON X #7-11.

Along the way, readers learned who this guy was before he'd been altered. The man known as Crayton Cortez had been a soldier, but carried on as a soldier of fortune working for a firm called Eaglestar. When they were ordered to kill the people of a village to make way for a Roxxon pipeline, he flipped out and killed his fellow mercenaries. To punish him, Eaglestar's higher-ups subdued him and sold him off to Dr. Alba as a way to get a return on their investment in him.

Upon meeting with Alba, she took control of Clay and used him kill Stryker, though he turned out to be one of the adamantium cyborgs as well. Still, Cortez fought against her orders to kill innocents long enough for Domino, X-23, Old Man Logan, Warpath, and Sabretooth managed to break that connection. Weapon H thought about using the Weapon X computers to find out the names of his wife and kids, but instead destroyed the servers.

Since then, he's starred in his own series, WEAPON H, where he took a page from Hulk's book and tried to be left alone. That didn't work out so well as he eventually reunited with his wife around the same time that Roxxon's Darrio Agger used him to invade Weirdworld.

Now, Clay's got a new adventure on his clawed hands as he finally meets up with the original Hulk and Wolverine in HULKVERINES!, which kicked off this week!

Read these titles and more on Marvel Unlimited! Then visit your local comic shop to read HULKVERINES #1 today!