Will You Offer Your Throat to the Wolf?

Last time, I was writing about Marvel Comics and its monster heroes. The Thing and the Hulk are direct descendants of Goom, Taboo ( my first!) and, of course, Groot. Alien invaders who ran amok in Strange Tales and Journey Into Mystery, inspired by their B-movie brethren- like Them! and The Blob.
But Spider-Man himself is a teenage version of the horrible Fly: a scientific experiment, involving a tiny creature, tragically alters the life of a schoolboy and his family. So, when the popularity of Universal movie-inspired comics from the House of Ideas soared in the early Seventies, Spider-Man's more traditionally horrific villains received regular series. 

The first of these was not the cyborg Dr. Octopus, nor the saurian Lizard, but Morbius, the Living Vampire. The first blood-drinker to bedevil Spidey was another victim of Mad Science, not of Hammer's cult of the Undead. I imagine the daytime soap notoriety of Barnabas Collins, Byronic blood-sucking star of Dark Shadows, might have been a (clotting) factor.

Morbius had his own series in Adventures into Fear and was halfway through that run when he was a guest-star in Giant-Size Super-Heroes 1, dated June 1974. GSS was actually, numbering aside, the second issue of Giant Size-Super Stars. While this had been a May '74 comic on a par with the traditional annual or special, Marvel did intend to respond to DC's 100 page Super-Spectaculars. Back Issue 86 (Feb 2016) posits 100 page "extravaganzas" including Conan, the Avengers and a Spidey team-up title.
But no 60 cent- 100 pagers materialised. Giant-Sized Superheroes 1-and-only was a 35 cent comic but it did feature a team-up: Morbius and the Man-Wolf. Marvel's own version of Universal's monster mash-ups like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man?



This summer special was written by Man-Wolf's originator, Gerry Conway and Gil Kane, whose control over anatomy and composition portrays the two ( or is it three?) monsters in a way that streamlines their weirdness and makes them balletic and horrific.

In "Man-Wolf at Midnight", we learn that Morbius (after 3 previous clashes with Spidey , 7 episodes in Vampire Tales and 7 in Fear)  has retrieved the moon-rock from the East River. 
Like Dracula manipulating Renfield, or Igor and the Frankenstein Monster, Morbius is using the rock to influence the lupine change in John Jameson. It no longer needs physical proximity. Their rather one-sided alliance is a ploy to suborn a haematologist, Dr. Ward, to cure Morbius. The plan backfires when irreplaceable equipment is destroyed in the climactic clash between Living Vampire and Wall-Crawler ( although that turns out to be an incorrect assumption by Morbius).

Once, Spidey has dealt with the distraction of Man-Wolf,  Jameson Jr. returns to JJJ, who is protecting his secret condition, Strangely but conveniently, fiancee Kristine Wells seems to have complete amnesia about John Jameson's injury and transformation.

The pairing of the "Demon Duo" returns John Jameson to the status quo of the previous autumn; it also sets him up in his own series, in the pages of Creatures on the Loose, the following month,
CotL was the reincarnation of Tower of Shadows, the first of Marvel's late 60s attempts to ape the success of Joe Orlando's "weird mystery" comics at DC.


Just as tv's Dark Shadows had surfed a wave of pop culture interest in the supernatural, magic, witchcraft and paganism, thanks to the burgeoning Counterculture, so DC had been in touch with it, too.
House of Mystery, House of Shadows and the Witching Hour were anthologies of spook-stories, not unlike the Amicus portmanteau movies of Horror Double Bill notoriety.
Smilin' Stan launched his own answer to the Orlando stable with Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness. Despite gorgeous work by Marvel giants like Steranko, Adams, Buscema and Heck, Tower faltered after 9 issues and became Creatures on the Loose, while Chamber - after 8 issues-became Monsters on the Prowl.

Both titles reprinted Sixties monster stories ( like Grogg, Oog and Spragg) and a smattering of sword-and-sorcery or sword-and-planet fantasy. I first met Howard's King Kull in Monsters/Prowl. Creatures starred John Carter of Mars analogue Gullivar Jones, then Lin Carter's Thongor of Lemuria. I read paperbacks featuring Thongor and Carter's Barsoom voraciously as a teenager and the b/w version of the CotL features were reprinted a bit earlier in our UK Marvel weeklies.

By the summer of 1974, however, the swashbucklers had failed to find as faithful an audience as Conan, their progenitor. They just weren't as well-written or drawn, IMO, especially once both series had been established, with revolving creative teams and despite Steranko covers.

So, would a sci-fi werewolf in space thrive where the swordsmen floundered? Check out my next post.

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