Most days, up here in the far north-east, I felt like I'd barely seen daylight. At home, I regularly dipped into Scarred For Life, one of my Xmas presents from a colleague and, as I said to my manager, essentially the inside of my head compiled into a book.
SFL is a compendium of all the excessive pop culture ephemera from what comics fans refer to as the "Bronze Age". Not only tv series like Sapphire and Steel and Dr.Who but public information films and even board games like the baffling Escape From Colditz, which I attempted to play for the first time with colleagues this time last year.
Obviously the horror and supernatural boom of the Seventies scarred me for life too. One of my other Xmas presents (to myself) was the compilation of the Roy Thomas/Dick Giordano adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
It's increasingly rare for me to read the "glorious trash" of Bronze Age Marvel for the first time now. Very little remains except for the genres of war, romance and Westerns, which I think really faltered and fell in the Bronze Age and some horror. This material was originally printed, in part, in the 1973-75 b/w Dracula Lives magazine. I've never actually read the epistolary novel but this story is very similar to Big Finish's compelling audio version.
Dracula Lives was cancelled before Thomas and the late Giordano could complete the adaptation so, despite a couple of abortive attempts to do so, there's an almost thirty-year hiatus between the publishing of the concluding chapters from 2004 and 2005.
I could clearly see a difference between the modern chapters and the Seventies originals. I think it's the inks but I'm not certain. The latter chapters seem less experimental and it all looks a bit stiffer, the figures more "plastic"- I'm reminded of the pencils of Mike Grell, more of whom in a future post this month. The plot feels very slow and repetitive. The book itself is printed at somewhere between digest size and tpb-size, like the Vampire Tales reprints. I also didn't realise that this reprint was in colour; I would've liked to see the art in the original black-and-white. Some fonts are nigh-impossible to read against block colour captions. Most frustratingly, the binding was very poor and the pages of my copy are separating and coming away from the cover . Poor show.
I never got the UK Dracula Lives weekly; despite the Horror Double Bills of summer Saturday nights, I think my mum would've have balked at it for its content. Also, in those post-Three-Day-Week times, I was already getting four British Marvel weeklies ( although Planet of the Apes weekly was supposed to be for my brother). I didn't follow the reprinted exploits of the Count in Tomb of Dracula therefore until his weekly was amalgamated with POTA and then MWOM.
I was somehow vaguely aware that The Night-Staker aka Paul Butterworth from ToD 43 was a parody of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Marv Wolfman might have said so in FOOM. In the 70s, I hadn't seen the 1972 tv movie that inspired the series ( but I might have subsequently; I'm really not sure).
In October last year, however, I bought the dvd box set online and I just finished the last episode last night.
Kolchak is played by Darren McGavin; a Chicago reporter, erudite, acerbic and middle-aged Carl is saggy, rumpled and eccentric, with his ever-present signature straw hat jammed on his head. The series is a proto-X Files as Carl investigates paranormal murders in the Windy City with a gleeful recklessness and a mordantly cynical wit.
The verbose and clownish Kolchak works for a sensationalist tabloid. His co-workers include a dyspeptic boss, an dithery elderly lady novelist and an elitist and effete competitor. In every episode, his chutzpah and daring are undercut with bumbling ( IMO, Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor is a blend of Buster Keaton and Kolchak!) and his photographic evidence of the Monster of the Week is seized by the authorities.
A teen runaway and college dropout, McGavin, like many actors, expressed his dissatisfaction with increasing camp humour in the series, which was, after all, a spin-off from one of the highest-rated tv movies of the day. Certainly, the stories feel repetitive, in part due to the format of blackly comic voiceovers ( Carl's portable tape recorder reportage) as Chicagoans fall victim to succubi, androids, haunted knightly armour, Victorian rippers and Aztec priests. However, I particularly enjoyed the brown Seventies drabness: the same sleazy qualities that you get in Kojak before Kevin Dobson's hair miraculously grew back. I think my favourite episode might be The Werewolf when the eponymous lycanthrope is stalking a Love Boat-style cruise and Carl shares a cabin with a couple of Swingers.
Another attraction is the guest stars, like the sublime Phil Silvers in an episode about Hindu demons, swastikas and sun-symbols. The theme music for Kolchak moves from his jaunty whistle to an ominous and dramatic theme. It ends with the kind of light jazz "sting" that reminds me of the worldly, world-weary tv shows of my childhood, like the Odd Couple, MASH and Rhoda. Suicide is painless, ba-ba-de-dum-tish.
In the next couple of posts, I'll look at more boxsets I've enjoyed this winter- Luke Cage from Netflix and the bleak, malign audio Master of Callous from Big Finish .
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