Legions Of Monsters

Apparently, the late great Neal Adams hated the image above. This painting featuring Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and the Manphibian was the cover for Legion of Monsters #1, a last gasp attempt by Mighty Marvel to mine the black and white magazine horror market. Adams says the perspective doesn't make sense, but despite his expert reservations I love it. Not only does it have the typical power of an Adams image but it's brimming with atmosphere. It is emblematic of that time in the early 70's when comics had slipped off some of the restrictions of the Comics Code (though that code never held sway over magazines) and let loose with a cavalcade of creatures to chill the comic reading soul. I want to take a gambol through some of those mighty monsters with special attention to vampires. 

The centerpiece of my reading this month is the Tomb of Dracula series which has been reprinted a few times over the decades. I'm using the four Essential volumes which gather both the color comic as well as the Drac features from sundry black and white mags. There is no doubt that Dracula is "Lord of the Vampires" at Marvel. 

First up will be a look at the unfinished Bronze Age adaptation of the original Bram Stoker novel Dracula by Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano. They were only to get about half the novel done back in the 70's but a few decades later they were at long last able to wrap up this intense look at the peculiar story that launched a thousand bats. 

One of Dracula's most implacable foes is Blade the Vampire Slayer. Blade has gone on to have a pretty successful film career with Wesley Snipes in the role, but before that he was fighting bloodsuckers in Vampire Tales and elsewhere. He's certainly worth a glimpse. 

It's almost impossible to deal with Dracula without giving a shoutout to that other vintage classic monster, the one assembled by the notorious Doctor Frankenstein. Frankenstein's Monster had a hectic and rather bizarre career in the 70's and I want to give a looksee as well. 

Deathlok is often categorized as a science fiction superhero series, but I think reading it with an eye towards horror will be instructive. Like the original Frankenstein, a novel which is considered by many the genesis of science fiction, Deathlok is a rather rugged modern reinvention of returning the dead to a form of life. 

Dracula wasn't Marvel's first vampire. That dishonor goes to Morbius, a science-based bloodsucker first forged in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man. He went on to have his own series in Adventures in Fear, in fact like Dracula he was active in both the color comics as well as the black and white in the pages of Vampire Tales and elsewhere. They made a movie about Morbius recently and that too will get some attention. 

Morbius had a furry companion, the bizarre Man-Wolf. The son of Spidey nemesis J. Jonah Jameson, the Man-Wolf too debuted in ASM and wen to have a most unpredictable career in the pages of Creatures on the Loose. A young George Perez cut his teeth on this title. 

Another hirsute hero from Marvel in the 70's The Beast. Hank McCoy late of the then defunct X-Men gets a job as a scientist and goes all Dr. Jekyll on himself causing his mutation to sprout a robust pelt of gray fur (later they changed it to blue/black). This is another of Marvel's series from Amazing Adventures that seemed to straddle the superhero and horror genres. 

Another was Tigra which had the delectable Greer Nelson who had a small superhero career as The Cat get caught up in the intrigues of a cat-worshipping cult and before you know it, she's furry and ferocious. She's gone on to be a very recognizable part of Marvel's universe. And that brings up another gorgeous but very scary dame. 

Vampirella was the absolute queen of 70's horror comics. She was the creation of Forry Ackerman and Tom Sutton as a marginally comedic hostess like Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie, but before long Archie Goodwin and Sutton and later definitive artist Jose Gonzalez made her into a ravishing vamp in all sense of that word. Along with Dracula, Vampi will be showing up on the weekends as I work through some of her early misadventures from Warren Magazines. 

The 70's produced some intriguing fictional works or adaptations of same. My absolute favorite is The Kolchak Papers which spawned The Night Stalker movies and series. There's a debate that an earlier novel Progeny of the Adder was a big influence on the Kolchak material. I've at long last gotten a copy of Progeny of the Adder and I will render my opinion. I am Legend has been adapted to the big screen many times (once in the 70's) but none are better than the original 50's novel. There's a comic book adaptation too and that will get a glance. And finally, I will finally climb the mighty Stephen King vampire epic from 1975 titled Salem's Lot. I've made earlier attempts to read this novel, the only King novel I've much interest in and now I will make that trip for certain. 

If there's room, I'd like to fit in some witchery as well. First with Archie's resident witch the fetching Sabrina, a character who has had a number of versions over the many decades since her creation. Some of those quite scary. 

And finally, in the "Showcase Corner" I'm taking on The Witching Hour, one of DC's early 70's horror anthologies. This one features some delicious art by Alex Toth who designed the trio of witches - Mildred, Modred and the curvaceous Cynthia. Classic stuff with an offbeat sexy twist. 

That's a lot to do and maybe I'll not make it, but I sure want to give a go. We're Counting Down to Halloween here at the Dojo and I'm eager to see how it all turns out. 

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We Spoke Out - Experiment In Fear!

Eerie  was James Warren's second magazine dedicated to horror in the classic EC vein and in its ninth issue there's a story titled "Experiment in Fear!". This is a tale written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Gene Colan which takes place in a concentration camp. The experiments in question here are actually mild compared to some of the dastardly and grotesque "experiments" conducted by the Nazis on those they considered less than human.

We have a Nazi doctor here who wants to prove Aryan superiority by proving that the emotion of fear itself is a trait limited to the lesser varieties of peoples of the Earth, those selected by the Nazis for extermination in their death camps. It's an elaborate laboratory arrangement to induce fear, so much fear that the subject or better said, the victim always dies. When the tables are turned on the Doctor himself of course, we learn what we always knew, that fear is common to all men and women and rising above it is realizing that, as a wise man once said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo. 

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Monster Mash - 1957-1972!

Let me state for the record that I am not a "Monster Kid", that generation of youngsters (almost all boys it seems) who were just the right age (ten or eleven or thereabouts) to suck in the delectable badness of monsters when the craze broke in 1957. I was too busy being born that year to concern myself with such things as Frankenstein and Dracula and other beasties of the night. But when I did finally sprout up in the middle 60's there was still enough of of the old monster glamour to attract my attention and then in the early 70's there was final burst of monstery awfulness to glom onto before it sputtered out for a time. Mark Voger in his Twomorrows tome Monster Mash-The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972 touches on many if not most of the aspects of society which were touched or transformed or even given birth by the shocking interest in monsters. 

Like so many things in our culture the sudden and abiding interest in ghouls and goblins was television's fault. It began with "Shock!", a package of fifty-two horror and mystery films from Hollywood's golden era making its way to the small screen. These tepid films, mild by almost any era's standard, were still seen as just possibly too much for the tender psyches of America's youth and to avoid widespread condemnation but yet still reap some profits the folks who put this together didn't offer it to national TV but rather to regional stations in syndication. Those individual stations hired ghost hosts of sundry kind and put the shows on at the least objectionable hours they could find in the television landscape. Still the youth found these movies and gobbled them up with glee. Suddenly Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman and the Mummy among many others were shambling around in America's living rooms and it was good...for business. 

The cavalcade of monster items was...well monstrous in size. There were masks, board games, card games, comic books, television shows, toys, candies, cards, paperbacks, and even specialty magazines dedicated utterly to the fad. First and foremost among these magazines was Famous Monsters of Filmland from Warren Publications. In fact Famous Monsters of Filmland is the outcropping on which Jim Warren built his little black and white empire that eventually gave us Uncle Creepy, Cousin Eerie, and most importantly Vampirella. Forry Ackerman was Jim Warren's partner of sorts in the venture and in fact it was the "Ackermonster's" vast collection of horror, sci-fi and fantasy movies which was the essence of the magazine. The "Monster Kids" had a leader and in the letters pages of FM, a place where they could congregate and compare notes. Other mags like Castle of Frankenstein and Monster World are given some space as well. 

One of the amazing things about Famous Monsters though was that as influential as the articles and stills might have been, the Captain Company might have been even more so to the collective memories of the "Monster Kids". Captain Company was the mail-order side of the Warren operation and showcased many monster and fantasy products that kids might order and certainly would want to order. Like the wishbook from Sears every Christmas season, this was a poor kid's window into what was possible. 

I wanted so many things from the Captain  Company but perhaps nothing so much as the life-size posters of Frankenstein by Jack Davis. There's one for Vampirella too by Sanjulian but who'd dare bring that into a home overseen by a God-fearing Mamma! Not me. 

A lot of space is spent discussing and showcasing the wonderful Aurora model kids which allowed "Monster Kids" to actually collect and build their own versions of these awesome monsters. 

That extended to such strange quasi-monster things such as Rat Fink created by car designer and artist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. Rat Fink's imitators are given some space as well. Goofy and gruesome about covers it. 

Marvel monster comics get a few pages with my personal favorite Atlas-era monster "Fin Fang Foom" getting a page all to his titanic self. But aside from the monsters there's no coverage of Marvel's other supernatural and monster endeavors nor is there any talk of DC's revival of mystery and ghost tales at their shop. Perhaps this has to do with the somewhat arbitrary cut-off point of 1972 but still there was much done by the "Big Two" before then. 

Getting a lot of love though and properly so are the Warren magazines which followed on after the success of Famous Monsters. Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella all get some discussion and some tasty artwork from Jack Davis and other talents of the time. 

A great many pages are devoted to the TV monsters such as The Munsters and The Addams Family. Voger suggests the appearance of these two shows almost simultaneously on home screens marks the apogee of the monster craze in America and it's hard to dispute this point, though monster stuff stayed around for a long time in some form or other. The John Astin interview was a highlight and there's much more on the actors in both series. 

And clearly the author was a monster fan of Dark Shadows, the ABC television soap opera which weirdly normalized the vampire and made it suitable faire for the living rooms of America. The succees of Barnabas Collins and other stars of the show are discussed at length and several interviews or portions of same are highlighted. Voger and his late wife have talked to a lot of folks over the years and that material bears fruit in this tasty tome. 

Jonathan Frid's vampiric mug is a great way to wrap up this month-long Halloween celebration. Mark Voger has fashioned a fun look at the monster craze, a fad that lingers still in the general background of modern American society. While monsters have become less faddish, they have become oddly normalized in a way that 1960's America would've found stunning. Voger's fannish book does a decent if incomplete job of showing how that happened. 

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Sanjulian's Demon Queen!

She's one of those ladies you cannot forget. Manuel Sanjulian's "Demon Queen" from the cover Eerie magazine is at once an attractive and repulsive figure -- the kind of monster who kills.

Here is what I believe to be the pencil version of Sanjulian's memorable masterpiece.

But it might well be connected to this recreation done by Sanjulain.

The original lured the public once again as both the front and back covers of Warren's Ring of the Warlords, published to piggyback the notoriety of Ralph Bashki's version of The Lord of the Rings. 

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Favorite Heroes Countdown #17 - The Spirit!

It took me quite a few years to grok the greatness of The Spirit, the magnificent comic noir hero created by the late great Will Eisner. Eisner's work on The Spirit was mostly unavailable when I first dawdled into the comics world, save for the Undergrounds, a few Harvey comics, and a single story in the pages of The Great Comic Book Heroes, a story which left me somewhat cold.

Later when I was able to see prime Eisner artwork in the pages of the Warren's reprint magazine, I fell head-over-heels in love with the character and the world in which he operated. It was simply fascinating evocative, rich with characters, and truly at times funny.

I followed The Spirit around to Kitchen Sink and have put together a pretty complete collection of those comics over the decades. When DC started their archives volumes I was just not able to participate and regret it mightily. I'd love to have all twenty-six tomes in my library, handy to read and savor. And I still might try to get them -- the Spirit is worth the effort.

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Of Man-Bulls And Minotaurs!

The above scene, from Eerie #10 presents a very angry image of one of my favorite mythological beasts -- the Minotaur. The little blurb says it all, youngsters trapped in a dangerous confusing environment with a overwhelmingly deadly menace hunting them down. It's only just about every horror-slasher flick of the last many decades. It's a formula filled with fright and the Minotaur is the original implacable menace.

We get the classic Minotaur on this cover from issue seven of Charlton's Hercules series.

Jack Kirby cobbled together this energetic image with Cap's Kooky Quartet filling in for the youth of Athens for the cover of The Avengers #17.

Some years later Iron Man battled a new Minotaur, as seen on this cover for Iron Man #24 by the late great Marie Severin.

Marvel eventually created a new version of the Minotaur with their "Man-Bull" who ended up becoming one of a small army of powerful but small-minded minions over the years. In this cover debut on Daredevil #79 we see him taking on DD as dramatically rendered by Sal Buscema.

The Man-Bull returns for his revenge in Daredevil #95 and #96 when he uses the formula that made him a monster to create many more in the streets of San Francisco.

He pops over to battle The Cat and team up with Melter and Whiplash to take on Iron Man before setting his sights on DD again.

First he battles him in Daredevil #129.

And finally in Daredevil #133. After this encounter the Man-Bull is seen little more for many years, but his brutish potent presence remains in the memory.

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