I first read these stories in the b/w Star Wars Weekly that my brother got, 40 years ago this month. I was nearly finished S5 at Hamilton Grammar School but I was getting Dr. Who Weekly and the relaunched Spider-Man and Hulk weekly too.
Coincidentally, I just bought the True Believers reprint of She-Hulk 1 this week. Although it's a pedestrian story, in the vein of the Hulk tv series, I like seeing the Stan Lee/John Buscema combo. From issue 2 onwards, the scripter was Dave Kraft (aka DAK) and its his Man-Wolf stories I'll look at today.
I first noticed Kraft's Kredit on the Defenders, which was one of a group of titles that Gerry Conway left after his brief editorship at Marvel ended in 1976.
At the same time, the 24-year-old "motorcycle maniac and lover of loud rock music" became editor of FOOM Magazine, from issue 15 up to its demise in 1979. References to Blue Oyster Cult and Rush entered my 13-14 year old consciousness, just as my music teacher played our class "Temples of Syrinx".
A former rock journalist - and in the 80s, founder of Comics Interview-Dave the Dude teamed up with another new face in the House of Ideas, George "Pacesetter" Perez ( an artist whose intricate and detailed pencils I knew from early 1976 issues of Fantastic Four and the Inhumans) on Man-Wolf in issue 33 of Creatures in the Loose. For the next five issues, the new creative team would bring a very 70s flavour of the counterculture and sci-fi to this series.
33: Kraven hunts M-W in the vein of The Most Dangerous Game. This is the template for most Kraven stories- from his first clash with Spider-Man and Daredevil, Tigra, the Beast and most recently with Captain America in 2017.
Kristine gets her memory back; I don't see what was gained by her having lost it. Simon Stroud saves JJJ and Kristine from Kraven. DAK makes a reference to The Furry Freak Brothers, which used to be on the racks in the Glasgow Virgin Megastore, in the very early 80s.
34. Evading arrest by Stroud, M-W finds himself in Georgia. It's an interesting change from Marvel's usual locales- NYC, LA and occasionally, San Francisco.
Jameson befriends a hippie couple who drive a "magic bus" and borrowing their motorbike, encounters some Southern in-hospitality, Easy Rider style. There are script references to Goldfinger and Deliverance, too as hippie Joel is tragically murdered by saboteurs who man an underground complex. Perez's art has improved dramatically in one issue.
35 opens with a werewolf on a motorcycle! 1975-76 is really the peak of Marvel's Headshop Kozmic and Man-Wolf feels like a bombastic younger brother to the psychedelic Warlock, Dr. Strange and Celestial Madonna sagas of Starlin and Englehart. DAK's stories are less cerebral and outre than Gerber's Defenders or Man-Thing and more "in-universe", so to speak. This is most clear when an armoured attacker abducts M-W on a sky-sled to deliver him to the Hate-Monger.
This fascist super-villain is a medieval mash-up of Spanish Inquisitor and Klansman, created by Kirby and Lee and revealed in his first, apparently- fatal appearance to be Hitler.
SHIELD suddenly mount a raid on the underground complex and M-W lands the Hate-Monger's escape vehicle as John Jameson, AWOL astronaut.
The storytelling is somewhat unclear as to whether the armoured assailant is the Hate-Monger but he is killed on re-entry, anyway, in an echo of Icarus.
In 36, Jameson accepts a mission to pilot a craft to a stricken space wheel in return for the dismissal of a court martial. On board the station, the transformed M-W encounters three space brigands: the barbarian Gorjoon, the wizard Lambert and the heroic Garth.
They're like a Dungeons and Dragons crew, about four years early, sword and sorcery characters in a sci-fi setting, drawn from scenes in 2001. I felt very conscious of the hand of a film fan in this phase of the series.
Meanwhile, in the last two issues, we've met the saturnine Harrisyn Turk, Kristine's substitute art tutor. He wears love beads and -eh-pauses in a sinister way, before using his magic belt buckle to subdue Kristine and declaring himself God. Komix!
Perez's art now already resembles the kind of work he'd produce at
DC in 1980
.
Issue 37 is the final Creatures/Loose. Turk tells JJJ he knows something about Kristine's disappearance, hinting he was involved with Kraven and Stroud intervenes. It feels like DAK is winging it here, as Englehart was wont to do.
The station crew nullify the gravity on the wheel and imprison M-W. The space brigands liberate him because he's linked to their "godstone" and make a break for the moon, with Jameson piloting. But of course, he begins to transform again. On the wheel, the crew examine an x-ray showing the "weirdstone"/godstone" has extruded a root system throughout Jameson's body. It's grisly and it predates the body horror of Alien.
Creatures might have ended there but it's not the end of the saga. Next time, we'll look at how pulp nostalgia and Universal horror blended with 70s cultural influences like Ziggy Stardust and Jesus Christ Superstar.
Take care and stay aware.
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