By Doug Moench, Don Perlin, Virgilio Redondo, Yong Montaño, Gil Kane, Vince Colletta, Sal Trapani, & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-5550-2 (HB) 978-1-3025-2941-3 (Digital edition)
This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.
As Marvel slowly grew to a position of market dominance in 1970, in the wake of losing their two most innovative and inspirational creators – Steve Ditko & Jack Kirby – they did so less by experimentation and more by expanding proven concepts and properties.
The only real exception to this was a mass release of horror titles rapidly devised in response to an industry-wide down-turn in superhero sales. The move was handily expedited by a rapid revision in the wordings of the increasingly ineffectual Comics Code Authority rules.
Almost overnight nasty monsters (plus narcotics and bent coppers – but that’s another story) again became acceptable fare on four-colour pages. Whilst a parade of 1950s pre-code reprints made sound business sense (so they repackaged a bunch of those too) the creative aspect of the contemporary fascination in supernatural themes was catered to by adapting popular cultural icons before risking whole new concepts on an untested public.
As always, the watch-word was fashion: what was hitting big outside comics was to be incorporated into the mix as soon as possible…
When proto-monster Morbius, the Living Vampire debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #101 (cover-dated October 1971) and the sky failed to fall in, Marvel moved ahead with a line of scary stars – beginning with a werewolf and traditional vampire – before chancing something new via a haunted biker who could tap into both Easy Rider’s freewheeling motorcycling chic and the supernatural zeitgeist. With its title cribbed from a classic short thriller from a pre-Code horror anthology (Marvel Tales #116, July 1953), Werewolf By Night debuted in Marvel Spotlight #2. It had been preceded by western-era masked avenger Red Wolf in #1, and followed by the afore-hinted Ghost Rider, but this hairy hero was destined to stick around for a while.
This third chillingly crackers compendium compiles more moody misadventures of a good-hearted young West Coast lycanthrope who briefly shone as an unlikely star for the entire length of a trading trend, as confirmed here by the reprinted full-colour contents of Werewolf By Night volume 1 #22-30 and Giant-Size Werewolf #2-5, collectively spanning October 1974 to July 1975.
Jack Russell is a teenager with a rare but very disturbing condition. On her deathbed, his mother revealed unsuspected Transylvanian origins to her beloved boy: relating a family curse which would turn him into a raging beast on every night with a full moon as soon as he reached his 18th birthday.
And so it began…
After many months of misunderstanding as Jack tried to cope alone with his periodic wild side, Jack’s stepfather Philip Russell reluctantly expanded the backstory, revealing how the Russoff line was cursed by the taint of Lycanthropy: every child doomed to become a wolf-thing under the full-moon from the moment they reached adulthood. Moreover, the feral blight would do the same to his little sister Lissa when she reached her own majority…
As Jack tried and repeatedly failed to balance a normal life with his monthly cycle of uncontrollable ferocity, he met eventual mentor and confidante Buck Cowan, an aging Hollywood writer who became Jack’s best friend and only confidante after the pair began to jointly investigate the wolfboy’s past. Their incessant search for a cure was made more urgent by little Lissa’s ever-encroaching birthday.
In the course of their researches they crossed swords with many monsters – human and otherwise – including off-the-rails cop Lou Hackett, who had been going increasingly crazy in his off-the-books investigation/hunt for a werewolf nobody believed in. A major if faceless foe was exposed in The Committee – a cabal of capitalists seeking to corner the monster market to boost sales who wanted to own the werewolf because he could scare the public, allowing them to create a panic-crazed sales boom – and even vampire lord Dracula.
However the biggest boost to Jack & Buck’s quest (other than Jack’s mutant girlfriend Topaz who could psionically calm the beast!) was learning from fellow lycanthrope Raymond Coker that there was a cure for their condition; sadly it was for a werewolf to kill another werewolf…
With the stage set for some truly outrageous yarn-spinning and Moench at the helm – and almost exclusively pencilled for rest of the run by the criminally underrated Don Perlin – the moonlight comics mysteries resume with the Vince Colletta inked Giant-Size Werewolf #2 as ‘The Frankenstein Monster Meets Werewolf By Night’. Roaming the streets of New York in ‘Prisoners of Flesh!’, the recently resurrected massive but mute monster hops a westbound freight train after overhearing a mystic named Danton Vayla can transplant souls into new bodies…
He arrives in Los Angeles just as Jack Russell discovers Lissa has been abducted by Vayla’s Satanist cult The Brotherhood of Baal who want ‘To Host the Beast’ before cataclysmically clashing with the monster who has only to let the diabolists sacrifice the werewolf and Lissa to gain his heart’s desire. Tragically the innately noble artificial man has far more empathy and compassion than the cultists and prefers his own sorry existence to benefiting from ‘The Flesh of Satan’s Hate!’
Werewolf By Night #22 (Moench, Perlin & Colletta) introduces crazed murder-maniac Atlas, who stalks and slays many of Buck’s movie friends. Moreover, when Russell’s periodically prowling Passenger encounters the ‘Face of the Fiend!’, Atlas beats the beast unconscious. In the morning light, bleary Jack is subsequently arrested for the latest murder…
LA detective Lieutenant Vic Northrup was a friend of deceased former foe Hackett and knows Russell is hiding something, but eventually releases the kid for lack of evidence. Picking Jack up from the station, Buck then reveals he has gleaned the inside story of Atlas and his own personal involvement in the story… just in time to become the next target…
Fortuitously, the werewolf is on hand when Atlas attacks again and the battle explodes into LA’s streets where disbelieving cops have to admit that ‘The Murderer is a Maniac!’
WBN #24 sees Buck introduces Jack to fringe scientist Winston Redditch who claims to have chemically isolated the constituents of the human psyche and thus might be able to suppress Jack’s regular bestial outbursts. Sadly, the benevolent boffin accidentally ingests the serum himself and unleashes ‘The Dark Side of Evil!’ The remorseless sadistic thug he becomes calls himself DePrayve and fights the werewolf to a standstill, giving Northrup opportunity to capture the hirsute “urban legend” which has stalked the city and drove Hackett crazy…
From #25 the art took a quantum leap in quality as Perlin – already co-plotting the stories – began inking his own pencils. When the beast busts out of custody ‘An Eclipse of Evil’ sees Redditch turning his warped attention to the lycanthrope as a potential guinea pig for further experimentation, only for both the feral fury and dastardly DePrayve to be targeted by a deranged vigilante and self-declared “protector of purity” (for which read woman abductor) calling himself The Hangman. The horrific three-way clash results in ‘A Crusade of Murder’, with Redditch hospitalised, the vicious vigilante in custody and battered, bloody-yet-unbowed Jack still free and still cursed…
Eschewing chronological order for the sake of unbroken continuity-clarity, January 1975’s Giant-Size Werewolf By Night #3 pops up here to reveal a ‘Castle Curse!’(Moench Perlin and inked by Sal Trapani) wherein Jack returns to Transylvania after receiving a monster-infested vision of former love interest Topaz in ‘Spawned in Dream… Slain in Nightmare!’ Jack drags Buck and Lissa ‘Home to Slay!’ in the Balkans, finding the old family estate under siege by pitchfork-wielding villagers who have all their worst fears confirmed when he goes hairy and gets hungry, before finally tracking down Topaz in the care – and custody – of a gypsy matriarch with an arcane agenda of her own.
The blood-crazed old witch has a tragic connection to the Russoff line and is exploiting Topaz’s recently-faded but now restored powers to enact a grisly ‘Vengeance in Death!’ upon the villagers by raising an army of zombies. The chain of events she set in motion can only end in slaughter…
Werewolf By Night #27 (March 1975) began a chilling and fantastic extended eldritch epic with the introduction of ‘The Amazing Doctor Glitternight’. Back in the USA, Jack’s feral alter ego runs loose on the isolated Californian coast and is drawn to a cave where a bizarre wizard makes monsters from what appears to be fragments of Topaz’s soul. The eerie mage is actually hunting for Topaz’s dead stepfather Taboo and will not be swayed or gainsaid, even after Jack’s uncontrollable were-beast eviscerates the weird stranger’s monstrous “masterpiece”…
The wizard intensifies his campaign in ‘The Darkness from Glitternight’, heaping horrors upon Jack and friends before capturing Lissa on her birthday and using dark magic to turn her from “simple, ordinary” werewolf into ‘A Sister of Hell’. The spectral re-emergence of Taboo proves a turning point as wolf battles demon-beast and everybody grapples with Glitternight before a ‘Red Slash Across Midnight’ seemingly results in a cure for one of the tortured Russell clan…
Slightly askance of publishing schedules but placed here for sensible reading continuity, April 1975’s Giant-Size Werewolf By Night #4 offers a long-delayed and much-anticipated clash with living vampire Morbius: beginning with ‘A Meeting of Blood’ (Moench & Virgil Redondo) with the former biologist and longsuffering haemovore tracking his old girlfriend Martine and discovering a possible cure for his own exsanguinary condition. Unfortunately, the chase also brings him into savage and inconclusive combat with a certain hairy hellion and the potential solution is forever lost…
Also included in that double-sized issue is Moench & Yong Montaño’s ‘When the Moon Dripped Blood!’, wherein Jack and Buck stumble across a group of rustic loons all-too-successfully summoning a ghastly elder god. Although great at consuming and converting human offerings and acolytes, the appalling atrocity is apparently no match for a ravening ball of furious fangs and claws…
This dose of shaggy suspense concludes with Giant-Size Werewolf #5 (cover-dated July) which shifted the cast into full-on dark fantasy mode. Scripted by Moench and illustrated by Montaño, ‘Prologue: I Werewolf’ recaps Jack’s peculiar problems before ‘The Plunder of Paingloss’ discloses how the leaders of dimensional realm Biphasia – permanently polarised between night and day – instigate a ‘Bad Deal with the Devil’s Disciple’ on Earth when demonist Joaquin Zairre kidnaps the werewolf…
With the beast dispatched though a ‘Doorway of the Dark Waters’, Jack is soon a pawn in a sorcerous war where ‘Fragile Magic’ on the world of light and darkness allows him and his allies to raid the ‘The Ark of Onom-Kra’ and expose a secret tyrant in ‘Silver Rain, Sardanus and Shadow’…
To Be Continued…
Kicking off the rather meagre bonus section and complementing the cover gallery by Gil Kane, Dan Adkins, John Romita Sr. is a selection of original art by Ron Wilson, Frank Giacoia, Perlin and Kane, topped off by an Introduction by Ralph Macchio first seen in 2018’s Werewolf By Night: The Complete Collection volume 2.
This moody masterpiece of macabre menace and aggressive animal action covers some of the most under-appreciated mindbendingly magical moments in Marvel history; tense, suspenseful and solidly compelling. If you feel the urge to indulge in a mixed bag of clawed killers, beastly bloodsuckers and moody young muses this is a far more entertaining mix than many modern movies, books or miscellaneous matter…
© 2024 MARVEL.
Today Marvel writer/editors Terry Kavanagh and Craig Anderson were born but we don’t when! Far more traditional and open, UK humourist/ cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather (Old Bill) arrived with all his papers sorted on this date in 1887, followed in 1909 by uniquely iconic creator Basil Wolverton (Spacehawk, Powerhouse Pepper, Mad Magazine, Plop!, The Bible). In 1916 comic book artist Mort Leav (The Heap) joined us, followed by Atlas artist/strip star Tony DiPreta (Joe Palooka, Rex Morgan M.D.) in 1921 and Silver Age artistic co-founder Murphy Anderson (Buck Rogers, Captain Comet, Atomic Knights, Hawkman, Flash, Adam Strange, The Spectre, Superman, Jonny Quest) in 1926.
Today in 1977 the 652nd and final issue of UK weekly Sparky was published.