VALERIA PATĈEK
Real Name: Valeria Patĉek
Identity/Class: Human (late 18th century)
Occupation: Unrevealed
Group Membership: None
Affiliations: None
Enemies: Grigori, Baron Russoff (in his werewolf form)
Known Relatives: None
Aliases: None
Base of Operations: Transylvania (then part of the Kingdom of Hungary);
previously lived somewhere else
First Appearance: Werewolf by Night I#18 (June, 1974)
Powers/Abilities: Valeria Patĉek is not known to have had any abilities that were not possessed by any normal young woman who was probably in her late teens or early twenties.
Height: 5' (guess - consistent with historical data)
Weight: Unrevealed
Eye color: Grey or pale blue
Hair color: Reddish-brown (auburn?)
History:
(Werewolf by Night I#18 (fb) - BTS) <1770s> - Valeria Patĉek was born somewhere outside
of the land known as Transylvania.
(Werewolf by Night I#18 (fb) - BTS) <1795 A.D.> - Valeria Patĉek had recently moved to Transylvania and she found it to be frightening.
(Werewolf by Night I#18 (fb) - BTS) - For some reason, even though it was a night of the full moon and a werewolf was apparently known to be in the area, Valeria Patĉek decided to go somewhere by walking through a Transylvanian forest.
(Werewolf by Night I#18 (fb)) - Early in the morning, before the sun had arisen, Valeria
was nervously walking through a Transylvanian forest when a werewolf suddenly leaped out at her from behind
a large rock with a loud growl. Valeria reacted immediately, throwing her arms up in front of her face and
screaming, "AAAIIEEEEE!!!"
Unfortunately for her, these actions did nothing to prevent the werewolf
from quickly killing her.
(Conjecture: Given the lack of blood or any visible wounds, the werewolf may have killed Valeria by strangling her.)
(Werewolf by Night I#18 (fb)) - Before the werewolf could do anything with (or to) Valeria's body, he noticed a mob of torch-bearing armed humans approaching them through the forest. Realizing that they were hunting him and would be able to kill him because they were many while he was only one, the werewolf let go of Valeria's body, allowing it to fall to the ground, and fled, leaving the corpse behind.
The werewolf eventually hid himself beneath a large fallen tree trunk. The mob of villagers followed the werewolf's tracks until they ended. As they stood there in the dawn's early light, one of them mentioned that, with the arising of the sun, the werewolf must have been human again. Another villager then stated that, by God's grace, they would find the fiend some other night--and destroy him!
From his nearby hiding place, the werewolf heard those words even as the sun's rays changed him back into a man, Baron Russoff, who quickly made his way back to the safety of his (also nearby) castle.
(Conjecture) - After their hunt for the werewolf ended with the dawn, the villagers presumably recovered Valeria Patĉek's body and brought it to the local church to be buried in the local graveyard.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS/Werewolf by Night I#18 (fb) - BTS) - Baron Russoff would later write something about what he remembered of that night in his diary.
(Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe I#12: Werewolf entry/Marvel Zombies: The Book of Angels, Demons & Various Monstrosities#1: Werewolves profile) - Grigori, Baron Russoff was eventually slain by local villagers, presumably while he was prowling the countryside in his werewolf form during a night when the moon was full. However, no details about exactly how or when he was killed have ever been revealed.
Comments: Created by Mike Friedrich, Don Perlin and Mike Royer.
This character only appeared in seven panels on the first two pages of Werewolf by Night I#18. Given how clearly it shows her imminent demise, I would have liked to include the image to the right as part of the sequence showing the werewolf's attack on her, with one image to either side, bracketing the description of the attack between them. Or maybe I could have used this image as the main image and shifted the image of the actual attack into the History section. Unfortunately, while this image is the only unobstructed full body shot of the living Valeria Patĉek, it's a distant view that is lacking in detail, and the attack image serves the profile much better as the main image since it shows the defining event of her life: her death at the hands of a werewolf. However, since the image of her walking to her doom under a full moon is quite nice, I decided to include it here in the Comments section.
Jack Russell's narration in Werewolf by Night I#18 implies that he learned about the 1795 murder of Valeria Patĉek by reading his ancestor's "torment-filled diary" in Werewolf by Night I#15. However, Valeria wasn't shown or mentioned in that issue, so it's unclear exactly what that Baron Russoff wrote about her. The only thing that we know for sure were written down were the words he spoke to a rabbit just after he had changed back into his human form on the morning after he had killed Valeria, apparently just for the thrill of making a kill.
For some reason, I was sure that I remembered that Valeria was 22 years old when she was killed. I was so sure of that fact that I had actually included the date "1772 or 1773 A.D." as part of the paragraph about her not having been born in Transylvania. However, upon trying to confirm that date by reviewing the first two pages of Werewolf by Night I#18, I was surprised and very puzzled to find that those pages contained absolutely no mention of Valeria's age. So where did that certainty come from? It's like a very minor example of the Mandela effect. Weird.
Anyway, given that there aren't any references to her age in her brief appearance, I've decided to presume that the 22 year figure, wherever it originated, is roughly accurate, so I've listed her as being born in the 1770s. This would mean that she was murdered by the werewolf when she was somewhere between 16 and 25 years old.
Also, who was that fictional 22-year-old female character that somehow became conflated in my mind with Valeria Patĉek?
Although Valeria Patĉek is the only person that the Grigori Russoff werewolf has ever been shown killing, there has never been any indication as to whether or not she was the only person he murdered before he was slain by local villagers. So, while it's possible that Valeria was his first victim and maybe the only person he ever killed, it's at least as likely that she wasn't his only victim or even his first kill. More information if needed about Grigori Russoff's life as a werewolf.
Given the fact that there was a group of armed villagers in the forest hunting a werewolf, it seems likely that everyone who lived in that area knew that there was a good chance (if not a certainty) that a werewolf would be on the prowl during the nights when the moon was full. So, with that in mind, what on earth was Valeria Patĉek thinking when she decided to do something as INSANELY RISKY as walking through the forest on one of those nights? I mean, she probably would have been safer if she had stayed at home and played Russian roulette. The story might have read better if it had included some reason why Valeria was out in the woods that night. Maybe she, as unlikely as it seems, somehow just hadn't been warned that there was a werewolf on the loose? Or maybe she was aware of the danger but had some really strong reason for taking the risk? Like, maybe a close relative was very ill and urgently needed Valeria to deliver the medicine that could save their life? Either change would made her seem (maybe) less responsible for her own death. I realize that this makes it sound like I'm blaming the (fictional) victim for her (fictional) death, something that would be completely wrong for a human-on-human attack in the real world, but this situation is more akin to someone being dared to jump into the lion enclosure at a zoo, doing it and then being mauled to death by a lion. Sure, the lion may have killed the person, but the human also bears some responsibility because they knowingly did something that was inherently (and stupidly) dangerous.
I had thought of speculating that maybe Valeria was in the pre-dawn forest because she was returning from visiting her grandmother when the werewolf attacked her but, sadly, she was wearing a blue cape (instead of a red one with an attached hood) so the joke would have fallen flat.
Speaking of what Valeria was wearing when she was killed, in the main image it can be seen that her dress includes bands of fabric that encircle her upper arms just below her shoulders, but another image shows that the shoulders themselves were bare. I believe this means that the dress had "attached sleeves" instead of just sleeves, or maybe they're called "cold shoulder sleeves." Anyway, this aspect of her dress reminds me of the dresses that barmaids in medieval taverns are often portrayed as wearing in works of fiction in which the term "saucy wenches" might be used to describe them. It makes me wonder if this is a style of dress that, in the real world, a typical (non-noble) woman living in Transylvania in the late 1700s might have worn.
Having heard the saying that "Man is the only animal who kills for fun," I was going suggest that the fact that the werewolf had killed Valeria simply for the thrill of that murder meant that it was his inner human who was truly more to blame than his werewolf self. However, after doing some internet research, I discovered that that saying wasn't actually true and that animals that thrill kill are fairly common. Animals that kill for no reason are usually (but not always) mammals, and scientists call that behavior "surplus killing." Given that wolves are listed among the species that sometimes (rarely) go on killing sprees, I guess it's not just the "were" (an archaic term meaning adult male human) parts of the werewolves that makes them monsters after all. Or maybe this Baron Russoff was unusually susceptible to being manipulated by Vârcolac, the mightiest of the demonic Wolf Men created by Chthon.
On page 3 of Werewolf by Night I#18, the Omniscient Narrative describes Baron Russoff as "a man who reviles himself almost as much as his tormentors do!" In that sentence, the tormentors were the villagers who were hunting the werewolf. I found that statement to be odd because a tormentor is defined as "a person who inflicts severe mental or physical suffering on someone" and is generally used to describe a malevolent person (like an abusive spouse or a stalker) who is harming someone who doesn't deserve it. However, in this case the person who was being tormented was a beast who murdered an innocent human being just for the thrill of making the kill. For that reason, I have a hard time regarding the villagers who were hunting him as being "tormentors."
Profile by Donald Campbell.
CLARIFICATIONS:
Valeria Patĉek has no known connections to:
images: (without ads)
Werewolf by Night I#18, page 1, panel 4 (main image)
page 1, panel 2 (head shot)
page 2, panel 1 (body in the werewolf's grasp)
page 2, panel 3 (corpse abandoned in the forest)
page 1, panel 3 (walking in the forest under a full moon)
Appearances:
Werewolf By Night I#18 (June, 1974) - Mike Friedrich (writer), Don Perlin (artist), Mike Royer (inks),
Roy Thomas (editor)
First Posted: 10/31/2024
Last updated: 10/31/2024
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
Non-Marvel Copyright info
All other characters mentioned or pictured are ™ and © 1941-2099 Marvel Characters, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. If you like this stuff, you should check out the real thing!
Please visit The
Marvel Official Site at: http://www.marvel.com
Special Thanks to http://www.g-mart.com/ for hosting the Appendix, Master List, etc.!