Creator Dez Skinn spoke on the creation of the character stating, "Chicago has gangsters of every hue and I felt wouldn't it be great to relive the pulps of the American 1930s where you had The Spider, The Shadow, characters who, in a pre-comics world, would beat the crap out of the bad guys, so at the end of the 1970s brought back the pre-comics era of the early 1930s with a character called Night Raven, he had a brand on his hand, and he would brand people on the forehead if they were bad guys...then he would leave them a little note...that would say "WHERE BROODING DARKNESS SPREADS ITS EVIL WINGS THE NIGHT RAVEN STINGS !

", because I thought that sounded a bit classical, its stolen from Milton from L'Allegro, but it doesn't matter and it sounds good...but what was interesting the artist I chose to draw Night Raven, a guy called David Lloyd, came up with this really good sort of classical shaped chest emblem, because after all comics characters have to have chest emblems and it was a symbolic looking raven which was basically a V-shape in a circle"[1] David Llyod publicly discussed the look of the character stating "It was not specifically meant to evoke the raven but to be generally bird-like and scary-looking to those who should be scared by it.

"[2] Created by editors Dez Skinn and Richard Burton, the early Night Raven stories were written by Steve Parkhouse, with art by David Lloyd.

Night Raven was one of the few original characters created for Marvel UK in the 1980s, and quickly became a fan favorite, with his appearance in Hulk Weekly #2 being voted "Favourite Single Story" in the British section of the 1980 Eagle Awards.

The plot device of having him appear to be immortal and indestructible but in constant pain and gradually losing his sanity as a result, due to the schemes of his equally immortal arch-foe, the Oriental female crime lord Yi Yang, caused his time setting to be gradually moved from the 1930s up to contemporary times.