This post is brought to you by Strange Adventures by G. W. Thomas. This companion collection to Strange Detectives, offers tales of the Old West where the undead wait for Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope to arrive. Also included are tales of ape creatures in the Alps, and the modern Athenodorian, Sandochis, a woman of the Shuswap people of British Columbia. These strange detectives are also good with a gun or a spell as they face off against the darkness.
Looking over comic titles from the early 1970s, Marvel had one of its periodic Horror explosions. The date 1971 is key here. That year the Comics Code Authority or CCA loosened its rules around supernatural creatures. Since 1954, the Code had ruled that “vampires, ghouls and werewolves” were out along with violence and drugs. The changes allowed that Horror monsters were allowed “… when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world”.
This opened the door to some new comic premises, though Marvel really didn’t re-invent much, with Warren Publications publishing Horror black & white comics outside the Code since the early 1960s. In a hurry, Marvel gave us such famous color comics as Werewolf By Night, Ghost Rider, Man-Thing, Tomb of Dracula, The Monster of Frankenstein, Morbius the Living Vampire, Brother Voodoo and Son of Satan. There were anthology comics as well with Supernatural Thrillers, Tower of Darkness, Chamber of Chills, Fear, etc.
In black & white we got Dracula Lives!, Vampire Tales, Tomb of Dracula, Tales of the Zombie, Masters of Terror, Monsters Unleashed and Haunt of Horrors, all in the Creepy and Eerie mold. Warren certainly felt the competition but it was rival Skywald that was decimated and ultimately destroyed by the move. After 1975 and Skywald’s surrender, Marvel dropped the Horror titles to focus on Savage Sword of Conan, The Rampaging Hulk and The Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu, along with more SF titles like Planet of the Apes, Doc Savage and The Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. The second half of the decade belonged to Star Wars and space.
Let’s remember that 1971 wasn’t the first time Marvel had taken a Gothic turn. In 1963, Steve Ditko created Doctor Strange, a sorcerer who fought strange monsters from other dimensions and space. Occult detective characters with the title of “Doctor” go back to the 1930s. Ditko and Marvel avoided the Code by making the nature of the stories super-science rather than Horror. Strange belongs to an earlier Golden Age tradition that gave us Doctor Fate, the Spectre and Terence Thirteen. In 1971, Doctor Strange no longer had to feel alone.
What all these comics share is a Gothic touch. We call them Horror comics but the term is usually incorrect unless the tale is in anthology comic. Let’s take Werewolf By Night for example. The main character, Jack Russell, is a werewolf. That sounds supernatural and should be Horror. But then you look at what happens in a typical issue: Jack encounters someone strange with a terrible agenda, who wants to use him for their purposes. He turns into the werewolf and fights them (or their biggest henchman) and escapes to wander into the next encounter. This is not really a Horror tale. This is a comic book tale. But it is a comic book tale told with plenty of Gothic touches. For example, the bad guy probably loves in a castle, has people enslaved in a dungeon, and their big, bad henchie is weird and monstrous. The werewolf element is simply to give the hero some super-hero abilities. (All drawn in a creepy style by Mike Ploog or Tom Sutton looking like Berni Wrightson.)
The Gothic includes a whole array of visual elements, including creepy castles or forests, caves, underground tunnels, thunder storms, Victorian settings with horse-drawn carriages and old-fashioned clothes, ghostly encounters that prove to be human enough in the finale. There is more of The Mysteries of Udolpho here than The Werewolf of Paris. Much of this, whether in Warren’s Creepy, DC’s The Phantom Stranger or Marvel’s Werewolf By Night, has been taken from the Universal films of the 1930s. Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy offer their visual feel, especially when rendered in black & white. The writers and artists of the 1970s comic industry grew up on Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. It’s all about the look or the feel.
The storytelling elements of these comics is not really Horror. Let’s take Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, for instance. That Gothic novel has for its crux the act of hubris by Victor Frankenstein to create the monster, and the terrible consequences that follow. The comic books (I include all adaptations of that novel) include this at the beginning, but quickly move on to the monster finding it hard to survive in the world. Like Jack Russell, Frankenstein’s Adam goes from encounter to encounter, fighting other monsters. Once again, the super-hero tale is key. You can imagine writers like Roy Thomas or Gary Friedrich in story meetings beginning with: “So who will Frankie encounter this time?” To be fair, these are comic books and the big fight is an essential part of their structure.
How important were the Gothic elements? The Hulk began as a Frankenstein-type guy with grey skin but got greener and bulgier as time went by. In his case, the Gothic was sloughed off quickly. But in another case, The Monster of Frankenstein was a good selling comic but the writing team decided to freeze the monster and bring him to modern times in Issue #12. The comic was doomed from that point on. Why? I think because this modernization stripped most of the Gothic from the comic. Val Mayerik, who did a great job after the amazing Mike Ploog and John Buscema (and Frankie’s fight with Dracula), had a nice Gothic touch but modern cityscapes don’t. In Issue #17, the monster fights a tin robot. As much as I appreciate the Frankenstein influence on tin robot history, the idea is closer to SF and less Gothic.
And Marvel being Marvel, it all becomes super-heroes beating on super-villains by 1975. Some titles like Tomb of Dracula, Ghost Rider and Man-Thing will go on into the post-Star Wars 1980s but largely as part of super-hero histories. Companies like Warren will disappear, leaving only Savage Sword of Conan as the last man standing in the black & white comic magazine game. Slick color magazines like Heavy Metal are changing the landscape, but that’s a different post.
Conclusion
This brief four year period from 1971 to 1975 is a Gothic comics bubble that burst like all bubbles. For a short time, comic readers got to dwell in dark, shadowy spaces filled with crumbling castles and thunderstorm clouds as strange figures fought beneath. Like the early 1970s in general, this was a time when Horror was king. In the movies we had The Exorcist, on TV Kolchak The Night Stalker and a host of other Dan Curtis Gothica like Dark Shadows. In the paperback racks, there were tons of Gothic romance paperbacks for women readers with covers showing a woman fleeing a creepy castle. Marvel tried a Gothic Romance fiction title Gothic Tales of Love but this died quickly. Seems kissy-kissy doesn’t sell like monster punch fights.
Mythos Horror at RAGE m a c h i n e
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