Back Issue #95

MOENCH & SIENKIEWICZ Moon Knight Pro2Pro Interview!

April 2

017

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CREATURES OF THE NIGHT! Ghost Rider • Night Nurse Eclipso in the Bronze Age • I…Vampire Mike W. Barr Batman Interview • featuring Budiansky, DeMatteis, Pasko, Ploog, Sutton, Thomas & Marvel’s Nightcat, Jacqueline Tavarez

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Volume 1, Number 95 April 2017 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTISTS Bill Sienkiewicz and Klaus Janson (Originally the splash page to Moon Knight #6, Apr. 1981. Original art scan courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions.)

COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Mike W. Barr Don Kessler Andrew Bennett Paul Kupperberg Jerry Boyd Christopher Michael Browning Larochelle Bob Budiansky Marvel Comics Dewey Cassell Dan Mishkin Gary Cohn Doug Moench Gerry Conway Luigi Novi Denys Cowan Adam Palance Paris Cullins Maritn Pasko J. M. DeMatteis Shannon E. Riley Barry Dutter Bill Sienkiewicz Fayetteville Anthony Snyder Comic-Con Jacqueline Tavarez Linda Fite Jean Thomas Peter B. Gillis Roy Thomas Grand Comics Steven Thompson Database David Torsiello Steven Grant Don Vaughan Nikki Gregoroff Len Wein Larry Hama Steven Wilber Karl Heitmueller, Jr. Marv Wolfman Heritage Comics Michael Zeno Auctions Tony Isabella

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PRO2PRO: Moon Knight: The Doug Moench/Bill Sienkiewicz Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 An intimate dialogue with the superstar creative team that put Marvel’s midnight man on the map FLASHBACK: The Ghost Rider’s First Ride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 A super-charged history of Johnny Blaze’s Bronze Age adventures BEYOND CAPES: Enter the World of Danger, Drama, and Death… Night Nurse!. . . . . 31 Oh, nurse! This obscure 1970s book helped populate Marvel’s current cinematic universe BRING ON THE BAD GUYS: Devil Inside: Eclipso. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 The Bronze Age battles between Bruce Gordon and his sinister alter ego BEYOND CAPES: A Different Kind of Bat Man: I… Vampire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 This bloodsucking protagonist took a bite out of 1980s’ issues of House of Mystery INTERVIEW: The Mike W. Barr/Batman Interview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 One of our favorite writers chats about the controversial birth of Damian Wayne, Batman: Year Two, Jim Aparo, and other topics PRINCE STREET NEWS: “Of Cape and Cowl”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Karl Heitmueller, Jr.’s latest toon takes on Batman’s wardrobe ROUGH STUFF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 A pencil-art showcase starring THE creature of the night, Batman ONE-HIT WONDERS: Nightcat: She Sings, She Fights, She’s Dynamite!. . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Nightcat herself, Jacqueline Tavarez, and a star-studded lineup of creative folk relive the tale of Marvel’s musical crimefighter BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Reader reactions

BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Eight-issue subscriptions: $73 Economy US, $88 Expedited US, $116 International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Bill Sienkiewicz and Klaus Janson. Moon Knight TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2017 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing except Prince Street News, © 2017 Karl Heitmueller, Jr. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

In 1975, a mysterious new character started to find his way into the pages of several Marvel Comics titles. Moon Knight was a villain, then a hero, and often a character who was never expected to be seen again… but eventually a steady home in the back pages of the Hulk black-andwhite magazine brought together two creators who had a lengthy run that remains the definitive take on the character, writer Doug Moench and artist Bill Sienkiewicz.

– Christopher Larochelle CHRISTOPHER LAROCHELLE: While the intention here is to discuss Moon Knight by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz, I want to ask you, Doug, to explain a little bit about your work on the character before Bill came on board. How did Moon Knight get started as a character at Marvel Comics?

DOUG MOENCH: Well, I had needed to do the next plot for Werewolf by Night, and I decided to create a new villain. But when the protagonist is a werewolf, the character fighting the werewolf is kind of a hero, so I decided that he would be some kind of anti-hero. This character became a mercenary, and an organization called the Committee had hired him to go after the Werewolf.

I came up with a character whose every design and gimmick was related to the Werewolf. The first thing that I thought of was the Moon, because after all, the Moon triggers the transformation into a werewolf. So this new character would be themed around the Moon. That made me think of the black-and-white costume… when it’s a crescent moon, most of it is black but part of it is white, and so on. I thought that would be cool, and it was the first time that I had ever heard of in which there would be a costume with no color on it… and man, that was a hard time, getting colorists to not put color on that! He also had a glove with silver spikes, called a cestus, which is something that gladiators had in Ancient Rome. And silver hurts werewolves, right? So this character had crescentshaped darts, and the darts were made out of silver. Everything about him was designed to go up against the Werewolf.

LAROCHELLE: Makes sense.

MOENCH: I came up with a list of something like 15 different names, and Moon Knight was just one of them. Len Wein, who was the editor at the time, called me and asked what I had coming up in Werewolf by Night. I told him that I was creating this new villain who was also a hero, and I had a bunch of possible names. “Read them to me!” Len said.

So I read him all the names and I think that Moon Knight was maybe the fourth name, and he stopped me. He said, “Oh, I really like Moon Knight!

Moon Knight… that’s a good one.”

2 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

TM

by C h r i s t o p h e r

Larochelle

conducted July 2016

© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons.

I had a couple of other names that I still liked, but I thought, “All right, Moon Knight… we’ll go with that.”

It seemed like kind of an odd name, but I also liked the sound of it. And that’s how the character was created.

And later, after the story in Werewolf by Night, Marv Wolfman said, “I really like that Moon Knight character.

How about you do a two-part story in Marvel Spotlight?”

I agreed, and said that while Moon Knight would still be a little bit of an anti-hero, that I wanted to push the hero part of his character. He’d still be a mercenary, and not a totally good guy, but maybe he was trying to atone for his mercenary past, trying to put that behind him.

LAROCHELLE: All of this was with Don Perlin as the artist. Let me ask, was Don solely responsible for the initial look of Moon Knight?

MOENCH: Don used to call me every time he got a plot from me. He asked me about this character, and I had written him a whole description of the costume, the whole thing with the cape attached to his wrists so that it could be like a paraglider. I had the whole thing worked out. Don did a great job following the description that I gave him.

LAROCHELLE: The Marvel Spotlight issues led up to a Moon Knight backup feature in the Hulk black-and white-magazine. What was it like to finally get a “home” for Moon Knight after years of sporadic storytelling opportunities?

MOENCH: You know, it was odd. I probably underrated the character more than anyone. I didn’t really think beyond that first appearance, and it was other people who kept asking and pushing for him. I was already assigned to the main feature for the Hulk magazine, and Ralph Macchio, who was the editor, asked if I could do the backup, too. He suggested giving the space to Moon Knight, and I thought it was a good idea.

LAROCHELLE: So Moon Knight grew from a character with a few appearances here and there to a character with a running backup feature in the Hulk magazine, and from there to a title character in an ongoing series.

How did this growth happen?

MOENCH: I never pushed for anything with Moon Knight… everything came about from people liking the character.

LAROCHELLE: You mean, fans writing in and saying that they liked what was going on?

MOENCH: I mean, editors at Marvel, like Marv Wolfman and others. They just always wanted to see what other Moon Knight stories there were, and I was happy to tell them.

LAROCHELLE: Doug, in the time shortly before you started working on Moon Knight with Bill, what was going on in your career?

MOENCH: Oh, I was writing everything under the sun.

Master of Kung Fu, Planet of the Apes, Doc Savage, I was still on Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, Godzilla… I can’t even remember all of the stuff I was working on at that time! Just about all of it for Marvel.

LAROCHELLE: Bill, in your case, was Moon Knight literally your debut in comics?

BILL SIENKIEWICZ: The only thing that I had published up to that point, if you even want to call it “published,” was sort of a fanzine called Watch Out. We put it out as students of the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. We brought it to a convention in New York City and dropped off copies with lots of different people. There was definitely a Neal Adams flavor to my piece. That was really it. I never submitted a letter or anything, and went up to Marvel. They basically gave me a career when they asked me about Moon Knight, and I had never heard of the character.

LAROCHELLE: So, Bill, before you got started with this nice, long run of comics, did you know Doug?

SIENKIEWICZ: I knew who he was, having read his stories for years, but as far as Moon Knight stories are concerned, no. When I went to Marvel and they offered me Moon Knight, it was this duality… my response was that I was really excited because I was getting work, but at the same time I was wondering why I was getting a character that I didn’t know. Why wasn’t I doing the Hulk or something?

It was this mix of being grateful and being a snot.

LAROCHELLE: I could see that. People saying, “Hey, Bill, so you’re working for Marvel? What is it… Spider-Man? X-Men? Wait… who is Moon Knight?”

SIENKIEWICZ: Right. It was actually Al Milgrom who said to me that I should think of it like this: “Since DC can’t do Batman right, at least Marvel can.” And I took that as a license to go for it. So in a way, the more that I talked about it with the editors of the Hulk magazine, like Ralph Macchio, I thought we could do things kind of like Batman. Let’s start using the crescent shape, and having the cape assume the shape of the waning moon. It allowed us to do callbacks to what worked with Batman.

MOENCH: I always object when people say that Moon Knight is Marvel’s “clone of Batman.” Nothing could be further from the truth… he started out as a villain in Werewolf by Night, for Pete’s sake! He had nothing to do with Batman. I think that the major reason that people

Crimefighting Toys Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), original Bill Sienkiewicz/Joe Rubinstein art from the Moon Knight backup in the Marvel magazine, The Hulk! #13 (Feb. 1979). (opposite page) Detail from Bill S’s cover to Moon Knight #25 (Nov. 1982).

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3

Burying the Hatchet Early Moench/ Sienkiewicz Moon Knight pages from The Hulk!, with Bill inked by two modern masters. (left) Bob McLeod inks, from issue #14; courtesy of Heritage. (right) Klaus Janson inks, from issue #18; courtesy of Michael Zeno.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

say that is because he is a nighttime character. Well, yeah, because the Werewolf is a nighttime character!

And another thing was that when Bill came on, Bill was very much in the school of Neal Adams, and Neal Adams had done Batman, so it kind of came across as, “Wow, that really looks like the Batman style.” I guess another thing is that neither Batman nor Moon Knight have superpowers. Okay, but the character was not Batman. He was a totally different character. Batman does not have three secret identities [like Moon Knight does].

So that’s always bugged me, but it will never shake loose. I admit that when I left Marvel and went to DC, they asked what I wanted to write and I said that Batman was always my favorite. So I wrote Batman, and maybe that’s another thing that people look at… that I wrote both characters. I don’t know.

SIENKIEWICZ: I totally agree with that—he’s a different character. In terms of the flavor and the attitude of the character, being dark in a lot of ways, maybe that was a comparison that could be made. I wish we could have done more about the psychology of multiple personalities, which I probably would have been ready for around the time that we did the story “Hit It” in issue #26 of the ongoing series. By that time I was really looking at Moon Knight differently, and at first I was looking at it as a chance to do a lot of those things that I might have done if I was working on Batman. The way Moon Knight was written, he certainly was not Batman. I think that when Al Milgrom said that to me, that Batman comment, that was his way of speaking carefully so that the “new guy” would understand it. Maybe I don’t necessarily think of

4 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

the Batman connection as a bad thing, because I certainly did my part in keeping that theory alive over the years.

I don’t think I did you any favors, Doug.

When I was growing up, Neal Adams was my biggest influence. When I started going to art school, I started learning about so many other things in art, too. Since I had gotten into the industry based on my style being somewhat (or a lot) like Neal’s, there’s just no way that I would have gotten hired if I came in with the kind of style that I got into later on. I freely admit that I came in sort of like a Trojan Horse. I knew that the likelihood of me getting work was pretty good if I did this traditional style. And there were plenty of other guys like Mike Grell who were “doing Neal,” so I was hedging my bets.

Later on with Moon Knight, I started pushing against some of the restrictions and boundaries and barriers to storytelling.

LAROCHELLE: It’s good that we’ve gotten to address that here.

MOENCH: When Bill came on, he wanted to change the cape so it wasn’t attached to the ankles and wrists, and that made it look a little more like the Neal Adams Batman. I resisted that, and thought that it was unique that he had a cape like the one that Don Perlin drew.

I finally gave in, as long as Moon Knight could still grab the corners of the cape to glide into places.

LAROCHELLE: And what came out of this new cape design was the really powerful image of that crescentshaped cape pouring out behind Moon Knight.

MOENCH: Oh, yeah, that was great! Bill did a fabulous job. After I saw it, I was thrilled.

LAROCHELLE: When I look back at the credits, I see that there were a few different artists involved with the Moon Knight stories, but as of that third installment of the Moon Knight backup in the Hulk magazine, Bill, you were there, and you were there to stay. Doug, what did you think when you first saw things coming in from Bill?

MOENCH: Well, the one word answer is that it was “fabulous”! It wasn’t a surprise, because Ralph Macchio had called me up and said he was really excited about this new artist. And sure enough, when the pages started to come in, it really lived up to the hype. And the art just kept on getting better from that… better and better, in fact, the more that he got away from the Neal Adams school and became more and more of himself.

SIENKIEWICZ: I was so green when I started work on Moon Knight, I think someone must have told you to make your stories idiot-proof, and I’m sure I still managed to cause some headaches! It took us a little while to get in sync, but I think that we really hit our stride around Moon Knight #20, and things really came together. When I started on Moon Knight, I was just thrown into the thick of it and hadn’t really had the chance to look at what had come before. I was happy to just dive in and do my own take on it, and almost start over from scratch. I felt like I was being paid to learn. That Hulk magazine issue #13 was not only the first issue for myself but also for Steve Oliff, the colorist.

We started on the exact same job. That was his first job coloring for Marvel.

LAROCHELLE: It’s nice that from that point forward there was stability with the creative team for Moon Knight.

SIENKIEWICZ: That’s what they wanted. For most of the other guys who worked on Moon Knight up until that point, it was “just” doing a backup feature.

For me, I was treating it like it was the front of the magazine, in terms of what I was putting into it.

MOENCH: Bill was there almost until the end of my time with Moon Knight. The last few issues were done by Kevin Nowlan. Bill wanted to do a big style change, and didn’t think that it was appropriate for Moon Knight. I kind of wish that we had done at least one issue with that different style, just to see how it would have gone. I saw the writing on the wall with Bill, and I was having these big arguments with [Marvel editor-in-chief] Jim Shooter.

I really didn’t see myself staying on Moon Knight much longer either.

So I didn’t really fight over it when it was time for you to move on, Bill.

It was more of an “I understand and I wish you luck” kind of moment.

And then Kevin Nowlan came on, and that stuff was gorgeous. So when it really was time for me to go, I was sorry to leave Moon Knight behind.

SIENKIEWICZ: I really learned a lot working on Moon Knight and then Fantastic Four at the same time, especially on layouts and not being fussy. Very quickly, I got better. I felt like I was channeling Alex Toth, in terms of how I was blocking out shapes and positions and became much more conscious of storytelling and panel design than how I was, for instance, rendering a muscle. It really was a wakeup call. All in all, it was great.

LAROCHELLE: Bill, I assume that you stayed with Doug and Moon Knight for such a long time because you were enjoying it.

SIENKIEWICZ: Oh, yeah. I had wanted to work in comics since I was a kid and I here I was doing that!

Moon Knight helped me out with the learning process, and the “getting to know you” between Doug and myself. He was such a pro, and had been doing it forever, and I’m sure that he had to babysit for a while.

And after a while, I felt that I could take off the training wheels, so to speak. And that’s when I really started to contribute my own take on things. It would have been interesting to see where we would have gone if we had stayed on for longer, and it’s almost a shame that we didn’t hit our peak earlier.

If it had come maybe ten issues earlier, who knows… but after three years and 30 issues of a single book, I felt like it was a pretty substantial chunk.

LAROCHELLE: Like we’ve touched upon already, one thing that makes Moon Knight stand out is that he has three identities when he isn’t in costume. Each of these identities serves a distinct purpose.

MOENCH: Right. The “real guy” is Marc Spector, the mercenary. But he’s the guy that he ultimately doesn’t like. He doesn’t like how he went out and fought and killed for money. He decided that he should atone for that. That psychological crisis sort of split him up a little, but he also decided that these other identities could help him as a hero.

The Man with Three Secret IDs Doug and Bill’s first issue (Nov. 1980) of the Moon Knight ongoing series, depicting our hero’s trio of alter egos (foreground, left to right): cabbie Jake Lockley, merc Marc Spector, and socialite Steven Grant, with girlfriend Marlene Alraune.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 5

He made all this money as a mercenary, so he used that money to create Steven Grant, the rich guy who invested that money and made even more money and provided a base of operations and supplied all of the stuff that Moon Knight would use, such as the Moon Copter. Then he needed a guy close to the ground who could keep an eye on crime. And I wondered why nobody had ever thought about a cab driver—he goes all over the city, hears everything, and can mingle with people in a diner—so Jake Lockley was specifically created for that purpose.

But he was still Marc Spector.

SIENKIEWICZ: It was a single character’s name on the title of the book, but it was really a group book.

LAROCHELLE: Still talking specifically about characters, let’s hear about Frenchie.

MOENCH: Well, every character needs a sidekick, and from the beginning with Moon Knight we needed someone who could pilot the Moon Copter. Frenchie was also a connection to Marc Spector’s past, from before he was even Moon Knight.

LAROCHELLE: What about Marlene?

MOENCH: Marlene was with Steven Grant. Frenchie was with Marc Spector, and Gena and Crawley were with Jake Lockley. Because of the different identities, there wound up being different characters to go along with each. Now, this doesn’t mean that Marlene didn’t know about the other personas, just that she was in love with Steven Grant.

LAROCHELLE: And Marlene is right in the thick of things during so many adventures…

MOENCH: Oh, yeah.

LAROCHELLE: She’s not a damsel in distress, even though she does find her way into a lot of trouble.

MOENCH: I deliberately did not want a Lois Lane who needed to be rescued all the time. Marlene did need to be rescued from time to time, but I wanted her to be strong, someone who could fight and not have to wear a costume.

She was just strong as a regular character.

SIENKIEWICZ: I liked Marlene, even though I think I had her crying in every issue. I guess being involved with a guy who has multiple personalities wouldn’t be easy. I’m glad that she wasn’t like Jack Bauer’s daughter in 24, that she was the problem that needed to be solved in every story. I think that the characters in Moon Knight really needed each other.

LAROCHELLE: Any other characters you want to mention?

MOENCH: There was a guy who comes to the diner and has his ear to the ground… his name was Crawley. The cast just grew and grew and grew, and it seemed organic to me, at least.

SIENKIEWICZ: I had a lot of fun with Crawley. He was a great mix of a character. And I got the chance to play with a lot of “real” characters in the supporting cast.

LAROCHELLE: That’s true… for the most part, Moon Knight is the only person in a costume. Often the villains seem to come from more of a horror tradition than being spandex-clad supervillains.

SIENKIEWICZ: We were really finding our way with things with so much in Moon Knight. There was really no history with the character besides a few things that Don Perlin had drawn, and [Moon Knight] was a villain at first. He didn’t have his “Dr. Doom,” or his whole rogues’ gallery. Bushman, the villain from Moon Knight #1, was fun to work with, but when you are thinking of a list of Marvel’s top villains, he won’t really be mentioned.

LAROCHELLE: When Bushman comes back in later issues, you get the sense that he’s supposed to be building up to be a recurring nemesis, but there’s just never really enough of him to accomplish that.

SIENKIEWICZ: Right. We didn’t have the benefit of decades’ worth of cultural history like you’d have with a Batman villain at that point. We were creating that stuff from whole cloth, which was a lot of fun, but as a first gig, it was kind of disorienting. Here I am, working for Marvel, and not really playing with any of Marvel’s toys as I knew them. And I think that’s what happened when we were doing Fantastic Four together, too, we were kind of placeholders until John Byrne could come in. We couldn’t really use any of the characters that we wanted to. So, yeah, early in my career, I was doing Moon Knight and Fantastic Four at the same time.

Sequential Sienkiewicz Back-to-back pages from Moon Knight #1 depicting a climactic exchange between the nightmaster and his sharp-toothed enemy Bushman. Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

6 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

LAROCHELLE: Near the end of the time that you spent with Moon Knight in the Hulk magazine, some layers of the character’s history finally get peeled back. I’m talking specifically about a story in which Marc Spector’s brother Randall appears.

MOENCH: Yeah. I thought those were pretty good.

I liked those.

LAROCHELLE: Did you know that Marc had a brother for a while?

MOENCH: Oh, no. I never knew it until I came up with that story. It suddenly hit me… wow, this whole thing with a serial killer, it would be even better with a brother!

LAROCHELLE: When the time came for Moon Knight to get promoted to being an ongoing solo series, was it something of a happy surprise for you guys or was it something that you almost expected, given the response that you were getting?

MOENCH: No, I didn’t expect it at all. Every time they asked me to do more of Moon Knight it was a surprise.

SIENKIEWICZ: I don’t think we really expected it, but it was certainly nice when they mentioned it. It was a little bit of “be careful what you wish for,” because again, I never expected to be working for Marvel and working on this character for so long.

LAROCHELLE: One change that took place in the handoff from the Hulk magazine to the ongoing series was that Ralph Macchio stepped out as editor and Dennis O’Neil came in. Any comparison between the two editors?

MOENCH: They were both totally hands-off, and I loved that. They both said similar things, that they just had to sit back and we made them look good!

That was a nice compliment, but even more important was the freedom. I just hate having someone looking over my shoulder.

SIENKIEWICZ: Yeah, they were both hands-off. I had so much respect for Denny, and Ralph and I became very good friends. Denny was doing so many other things and had so many calls on his attention, so maybe that was

part of the reason why he was so hands-off. I would sometimes do some things just to see if I could get a response of some kind from Denny. I came to realize that with him, a non-response was probably the best thing.

Because when there was a problem, Denny certainly let me know it. He did tell me, “You know, Bill, don’t have Moon Knight being beaten up on every cover. Have him win some. It has to look like it’s a fair fight.” I always had Moon Knight on the losing side of the fight in the covers, and I really think that it works because then somebody looking at the book at the store just has to wonder about how he’s going to make it out of the situation. I think that Denny wanted Moon Knight to be a little more formidable on the covers. So I had Moon Knight going crazy on the covers, or ripping up the costume.

But there is one cover, for issue #19, that I have to really go on the record for. It’s a cover with Moon Knight holding his shoulder and there is this big poster behind him. I vehemently say that I had nothing to do with that poster that is drawn in the background.

Instead of asking me, Denny had someone else, I don’t

Killer Covers While Doug’s dramas kept MK’s readers turning pages, Bill’s skills evolved to his ascendency as one of comics’ master cover (and interior) illustrators. Covers to issues #2, 5 (background), and 7.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 7

Moon Knight in Graphite (top) Infusion of Egyptian mythology including the statue of Khonshu never slowed down the pace of Moon Knight’s exciting stories.

Cover to issue #10 (Aug. 1981). (bottom) An undated Moon Knight pencil illo by Bill Sienkiewicz, from the Heritage archives.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

even know who, redo my version of it. Denny felt that having a fully rendered Moon Knight and a fully rendered villain in the poster would be confusing. So somebody in the Bullpen just went over the original art and made this absolute mess of it. When people look at that and see that horrible image, and they think that I did it… I just remember that when I saw it, when it came out, I was so, so upset. I just wish that Denny hadn’t done that without asking me.

LAROCHELLE: I wanted to ask about the creative process that you two utilized to make the Moon Knight comics. Was the Marvel Method something that you used, or were full scripts more your style, Doug?

MOENCH: I had my own version of the Marvel Method, which was actually pretty different from the Marvel Method. In fact, my version of it is probably longer than a lot of people’s full scripts. It still gives the artists a certain amount of freedom.

I would do things in a freeform kind of way in paragraphs, and if the artist wanted to, each paragraph could be one panel, just like a full script. But if he wanted to take a paragraph and split it into two panels, he could. Or if he wanted to combine two paragraphs into one panel, he could do that, too. As long as the storytelling worked, I was happy. Some dialogue was there, but it wasn’t always polished. I didn’t want it to be totally polished, because sometimes the art would surprise me, and I wanted to take advantage of that. So, yeah, Moon Knight was done in my version of Marvel Method, which is definitely very different from Stan Lee’s.

SIENKIEWICZ: I didn’t have anything to compare Doug’s style to and just assumed that what Doug gave me is what every writer gave to every artist. I felt like the plots were very in-depth. It was all there in what he gave me. It eventually turned out to be more information than I needed. I came to find out that I like to solve some problems on my own and feel like I am contributing a little more. Doug’s stuff was so well thought out that I felt like there was little more I could bring. Choreographing the fight scenes was about the extent of what I did.

MOENCH: But there were requests for certain things. Like when you wanted pages with four panels each because you wanted to try something out. I think I granted every request, but the requests weren’t about plots, they were about the mechanics or the design or the storytelling style.

LAROCHELLE: So it wasn’t like when Chris Claremont or John Byrne were working so well together on X-Men and as time went on, John started driving the plots of the stories themselves.

MOENCH: I’ve never had that with any artist. I feel like as the writer, I should be writing it. If not, what am I doing?

I’d be stealing, and not doing my job.

LAROCHELLE: What kind of communication was there between you two as you were working on the series?

MOENCH: We were on the phone a lot, maybe not as much as I was with some other artists, but things were working out well… piece of cake, really!

SIENKIEWICZ: We did speak pretty often and I visited him in Pennsylvania, so yeah, we were always able to be in touch about things.

LAROCHELLE: When Moon Knight #1 came out, it was really important because it allowed you to finally tell the story of how a guy like Marc Spector became Moon Knight. The space that wasn’t there as a backup feature was now available for you to flesh out the character some more.

MOENCH: Yeah, it tells the whole story: How he was in Egypt and found the statue of Khonshu, the moon god, and decided to turn himself into a Knight of the Moon.

8 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

SIENKIEWICZ: I actually had to draw that story twice because my first version wasn’t really up to Jim Shooter’s standards for a first issue. I think he felt that a lot of my choices were too clever or artsy, and he wanted more in the way of establishing shots. He had a certain set of rules, and I listened to what he had to say. I think that Jim took an interest and that meant that he was going to shepherd it. It certainly made me step up my game and stop being precious about things. It made me want to hit it out of the park from the first go-around.

LAROCHELLE: Were the Egyptian ideas always a part of the character in your mind, Doug?

MOENCH: You know, that I couldn’t really tell you.

I’ve always been extremely interested in Ancient Egyptian mythology. I remember going to a museum in Chicago as a kid, seeing mummies in their caskets and little statues of the gods, and it really fascinated me.

It may have been there from the beginning, but I don’t remember. He was always a mercenary, and at that time, being a mercenary would definitely mean seeing action in Northern Africa, so it made sense that he would wind up in Egypt somehow.

SIENKIEWICZ: So much of it was learning on the fly.

I was interested in Egyptian mythology, and I think that in some of the later issues we dealt more with it.

Again, I think that if we stayed on Moon Knight longer, we would have delved even more into that part of the character and his background.

LAROCHELLE: Bill, how did you feel about different people inking your work over the course of your time spent on Moon Knight?

SIENKIEWICZ: I always felt like I was very fortunate to have all of the inkers I had on the book. Joe Rubenstein made it his mission to make the art as good as can be, since we both kind of came from the Neal Adams school.

He was the first inker I met and he really wanted to work on it.

He fought for it. And Bob McLeod, and Steve Mitchell, Tom Palmer, Klaus Janson… a lot of guys who inked my stuff, what they really wound up showing me was the failings of my pencils. More learning opportunities. I felt bad about what I sent to them sometimes.

When I started inking my own stuff, I realized that though I might not be the most technically proficient in terms of finish, I at least knew what I wanted. And when I inked myself, I gave myself very little in terms of pencils. So much of what I do comes in the inking stage.

Doing it really tight in pencils and then doing it really tight in inks is doing it twice, you know? I wanted the spontaneity and freshness. In pencils, I would try to indicate what I wanted in inks, and I had to realize that the inkers were going to bring their own takes to it.

Now, as someone who has done finishes on so many different artists’ pencils, I try to be very sensitive to what the artist wants to have coming through.

LAROCHELLE: Since there were so many inkers involved, would you say that the editors were just trying to find a good match for your art?

SIENKIEWICZ: Yeah, we all wanted to make the right team. And I think that when I started to do my own finishes, I was moving away from the Neal Adams thing.

Joe Rubenstein might have reinforced that Neal influence early on. The place where I felt that I could really do my thing was on the covers or the advertisements for the

book. There was a cover for issue #5 with a shotguncarrying skeleton. I must have started it a dozen times, and just felt that it was too messy each time. Finally, I wound up going back to the first layout because that was where all of the energy was.

LAROCHELLE: So for the covers, you were always a one-man show?

SIENKIEWICZ: Yeah, and I wanted them to be that way.

I wanted to see how I could grab people’s attention with those, which led to the black-and-white covers. I was thinking that it would stand out on the shelves among all of the competing colors on display at the comic stores and newsstands.

LAROCHELLE: In issue #15 there is a back-matter essay called “Shades of Moon Knight” by you, Doug.

It’s a nice piece that gives the story of Moon Knight’s publication history up until that point, and at the end it is mentioned that another landmark has hit. As of #15, Moon Knight was being distributed exclusively through the direct market. What would you say is important to note about that?

An Unexpected Surprise The cover with the unexpected background art change to which Bill objected, Moon Knight #19.

In the original art (from Heritage), the paste-up alteration of the image of Arsenal is clearly visible.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 9

The Drenched Connection Moonie makes his move on this gripping splash to issue #18 (Sept. 1981).

Original art courtesy of Anthony Snyder (www.anthonyscomicbookart.com).

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

MOENCH: You see, before the comic shops, you’d get your comics at the newsstands and grocery stores. The publishers allowed returns on these books, and the saying was that you’d have to print ten copies just to sell three.

When the comic stores started up, the publishers didn’t allow returns. Comic shops wanted to have back issues to sell, and the publishers were happy because the profits were much, much higher. Marvel then wanted to experiment and to see if they could do some books exclusively through this new direct-sales model. The idea was that they would try to pick some titles that appealed to older readers. The first two Marvel titles that they chose was our book and Ka-Zar. Because they were direct-salesonly books, they didn’t have ads beyond house ads for other comics. There were no ads for Twinkies and that kind of stuff… they didn’t have to do that. The stories were longer, or at least there was more original material— and they could justify charging more for the content.

SIENKIEWICZ: I didn’t have a problem with the change.

That kind of a change would risk alienating some people, but I always thought that it would be the right kind of

10 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

people who would be alienated and the people who we really wanted on board would stay.

LAROCHELLE: I look at it as Marvel having a lot of confidence in what you guys were doing. Sure, the comic wouldn’t be on sale in as many places as Amazing Spider-Man, but it’s mentioned in the essay that Moon Knight #1 was a record setter for Marvel’s direct sales up until that point.

MOENCH: Well, more confidence in the fact that the older readers would find the book, but less confidence because the kids wouldn’t find it. They wound up being really happy with the experiment and the sales were good. And I was amazed that when I quit Marvel and started working on Batman for DC, that the sales for Batman were way less than the sales for Moon Knight, which was only sold in the comic shops! I couldn’t believe it, and I mean, more than a third higher, without newsstand sales. Eventually it did catch up, but I just thought it was nuts. Batman is such a great and iconic character, and I would have never guessed it.

SIENKIEWICZ: Moon Knight #1 certainly was a record setter. When they told me it was breaking all kinds of records I was glad, but again, I just didn’t have anything to compare it to at that point.

LAROCHELLE: Let’s talk about Moon Knight #26, “Hit It.” You guys were obviously really pushing forward and seeing what you could do with the book.

MOENCH: There’s a story behind that. Denny O’Neil called me and mentioned that Bill might not be able to make the next deadline, so he asked for a short, eightpage story so that Bill wouldn’t have to draw as much for an upcoming issue. So I decided to do this little experimental thing called “Hit It.” As it turned out, I think it was given to Bill by mistake, and he read it, and fell in love with it, and wanted to expand it. It was okay with me, but I wasn’t the editor! So Bill worked on it and I had to adjust the writing for it because the story had expanded so much. It really worked out… it gave both of us this unexpected freedom to just breathe and it turned into a really special thing, I thought.

SIENKIEWICZ: That’s when things really blew up for me. “Hit It” was a story that wasn’t about the “villain of the month.” It was much more of a story about humanity that just so happened to have Moon Knight in it. It was also the first story that I felt had the visuals that had a genuine emotional quality. Up until that point, I felt that I had only really been approaching that and never really grasping it. With the musical aspects, and the rhythm of the whole piece (no pun intended), I started getting phone calls from a lot of different industry professionals, and it made me feel like I might have stumbled onto something. It seemed to be a big deal to a lot of people.

LAROCHELLE: The back page of issue #30 was an announcement from Denny O’Neil that Kevin Nowlan was coming aboard the book while Bill was departing.

Denny wrote that Bill’s biggest problem was choosing among the offers that were being sent his way daily.

What were some of these, Bill? Where did you wind up going after Moon Knight?

SIENKIEWICZ: The biggest of the offers was X-Men, but I turned that down. I wasn’t really looking to jump to another series for a long time after three years on Moon Knight. I was doing a lot of covers and really did play checkers, trying a lot of different things. It wasn’t until Chris Claremont came to me with the idea for a three-issue story in New Mutants about the Demon Bear that I got locked in on something. And that wound up being so much fun that it turned into more than just three issues. That wound up keeping me busy for a couple of years.

LAROCHELLE: What were some highlights of the Moon Knight run that we haven’t talked about yet?

MOENCH: I thought that we did a really good job with the Morpheus stories. I really liked the way that the character looked, and the whole aspect of the dreams. And the issues when we had the Werewolf come over into Moon Knight, I thought that those came out really well, too.

SIENKIEWICZ: In the Morpheus issues, we got to play with the dream stuff and that got me to push things a little. I agree that that the Werewolf stories that we did were fun. And the all-black cover for #29, with the wolf’s face and the teeth, that was a cover that I held onto for a really long time. It was the last Moon Knight cover I sold. When I was talking to the person who bought it, I showed how if you hold it up to the light, you could see that I had actually drawn all of the details of the wolf’s face. I couldn’t make it look right and just kept adding shadows. Finally, I had made it look so terrible that I just covered everything with black except for the eyes and the teeth. If I had designed the cover that way from the beginning, I could have had it all done within an hour, but I spent a lot of time on that drawing!

LAROCHELLE: What does Moon Knight mean to you in terms of your career in comics?

MOENCH: It’s in the top five things that I’ve done, for sure. When I think about the best stuff, I think about Moon Knight, Master of Kung Fu, Aztec Ace, The Big Book of Conspiracies, and The Big Book of the Unexplained, and I really like some of the Batman stuff, like the vampire graphic novels, and a prestige series I did with Barry Kitson called Batman: The Book of the Dead.

With Moon Knight, it was kind of all unexpected. He was just supposed to be a villain, and it just kept growing and growing. By the time that Moon Knight had his own title, it made me think that this really was a major thing, if not quite for Marvel itself, for me personally.

SIENKIEWICZ: I feel that Moon Knight was all about learning on the go. I’m very proud of it. I don’t feel

particularly territorial about it either. With Elektra: Assassin, I’d say that I feel a little more territorial. [Editor’s note: See BI #90’s cover feature about the Frank Miller/ Bill Sienkiewicz Elektra: Assassin series.]

But with Moon Knight, there have been other iterations, and I’ve enjoyed some more than others, but I don’t feel like it’s “my” character. I’m very happy with what we did, and with it being a chunk of the Marvel history.

Getting a chance to work with Doug and so many inkers was great, and colorists, too! I mean, Christie Scheele, she was such a big part of it, a reason why it really hit. Her coloring was just spectacular, issue to issue.

Everyone who was involved with it was really invested in doing a really good monthly book.

LAROCHELLE: Since leaving Moon Knight, have either of you kept up with the character at all through the various miniseries and ongoing series that Marvel has put out?

MOENCH: No, I’ve never even read the stuff, because one of two things can happen: I can either get mad because it’s terrible, or get depressed because it’s really good! So I don’t even bother. I’ve had a lot of people

Red and Black (left) Moonie meets Stained Glass Scarlet in issue #24 (Oct. 1982). (right) Original art (courtesy of Heritage) for a house ad for #25’s Black Spectre story. (background) Cover to Moon Knight #28 (Feb. 1983).

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 11

Rematch

by Night (top) A lot of Sienk-ink went into Bill’s stark cover for Moon Knight #29 (Mar. 1983). (bottom) Issue #30’s cover depicts a hairy conflict between Marvel’s lycanthrope, Jack Russell, and our hero.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

come up to me and say that they really ruined Moon Knight after I left, but I don’t know if that’s the truth or not. I never read on, not if it’s something that I created or really identify with strongly.

If I’ve done a couple of Green Arrow stories, yeah, I might read some Green Arrow after that, but I’m not too invested in that. But if it’s something that I feel should be done a certain way, it’s hard.

There was a writer named Charlie Huston who got in touch with me about ten years ago. He said he was a big fan of Moon Knight and that he was going to be writing a new series for Marvel. He wanted to treat the series with all due respect and invited any input that I might have. I wished him luck but told him that I would never read it. We talked on the phone a couple of times and emailed back and forth, and he’s a really nice guy… but I have no idea what he ever did with Moon Knight.

SIENKIEWICZ: When Kevin Nowlan came on, I felt that I enjoyed what he was doing visually. Alex Maleev and Brian Bendis had a great take on it. Marvel seems to relaunch the character fairly often.

LAROCHELLE: The impression that I get is that Marvel doesn’t want the character to fall by the wayside, but the audience just doesn’t ever seem to get big enough. They have to keep trying to reinvigorate Moon Knight and catch people at the comic store with a new #1.

SIENKIEWICZ: I think it’s a little bit of a harder sell than most superheroes. Marvel could sell it as “the superhero with multiple personalities,” but that’s just not something that a lot of people will gravitate toward. It’s not as straightforward as, for instance, “blind superhero, Hell’s Kitchen.” Ultimately, Marvel is probably thinking of what they can do with the character outside of the comics, and you hear talk about how maybe Moon Knight could show up on TV or something like that. I think he’d be wonderful for it. The character is, to me, still a really interesting character.

I’m waiting for that iteration when Marlene becomes Moon Knight. Especially with the Egyptian stuff, the idea of a strong female. Plus, with the shroud that the character has around the face, there’s a chance to make that whole costume sexy.

LAROCHELLE: I’m glad that you’re saying that, because there seems to be a focus with Marvel lately, that they’re keeping the name of the hero but changing who is wearing the costume. For instance, Jane Foster becoming Thor, Falcon becoming Captain America, and so on. This seems like something Marvel really might be willing to try at this point in time.

SIENKIEWICZ: I had noticed that, but this is something that I thought of years and years ago. I almost feel like there is a little of a gimmick aspect to it, but I remember thinking that in regard to Moon Knight, it would actually work.

LAROCHELLE: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

MOENCH: Oh, yeah, I have something, and it is a weird one.

You know who else is a big Moon Knight fan? Patton Oswalt, the comedian. Somebody told me that he was on an episode of the show Parks and Recreation. In the episode (and in real life!) he’s a big nerd and he’s delivering this incredibly long-winded speech about the Marvel movies and how they really need to start bringing out some of the true “A-List” characters in the Marvel Universe, because, as he says, characters like Hawkeye and Black Widow just aren’t good enough. Anyway, he mentions Spider-Man, of course, but the second name that he says is Moon Knight! But wow, Moon Knight was on the “A-List?” Man, that’s the first time that I ever heard of that. I always thought that he was an oddball, off-to-the-side character. So that was some high praise for Moon Knight on television. People are thinking about Moon Knight, I guess.

At a young age CHRISTOPHER LAROCHELLE discovered superheroes on the small screen in cartoons like Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men. He got his first comics a short time after that and still adds to the collection today.

12 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

TM

by D a v i d

To r s i e l l o

In the early 1970s, the comic-book business had become a war between two of its biggest publishers—a war for rack space.

After Marvel Comics’ onerous distribution arrangement with Independent News (DC’s distributor) had expired in 1969, Marvel then made the jump to Curtis Circulation and for the first time since 1958, the company was free to publish as many titles as it pleased. In short order, Marvel put out a slew of new horror titles, sci-fi anthologies, and (of course) several reprint series. They were also swiping from pop culture as much as possible for fresh concepts.

New characters took inspiration from blaxploitation films (Luke Cage), the kung-fu craze (Shang-Chi, Iron Fist), and the Women’s Lib movement (the Cat, Shanna the She-Devil, Night Nurse).

But perhaps the strangest of these new characters was the Ghost Rider. Drawing from the horror genre, motorcycle clubs, and Evel Knievel (to go along with some standard superhero tropes), the concept was such a hodgepodge of disparate elements that it should have collapsed under the sheer weight of all its influences.

It ought to have been a creative mess and a commercial disaster— but it wasn’t. Instead, Ghost Rider wound up proving himself one of the most enduring original characters to come out of the Bronze Age. Why did the concept prove successful? There are a number of likely explanations, but to put it in the plainest terms: the image of a guy riding a motorcycle with a head that’s a flaming skull is totally badass. It stokes the imagination. It’s an image that pops off the comic page and most certainly pops off a comic cover.

Ghost Rider TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

ORIGINS

The original comic-book Ghost Rider did not ride a motorcycle, however, but a horse. He was a Western character created by Ray Krank and Dick Ayers for Magazine Enterprises in 1949. Taking inspiration from the Headless Horseman (of “Sleepy Hollow” fame), as well as the Vaughn Monroe song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” he was a cowboy vigilante that dressed in an all-white, full-body costume and rode a white horse. The character appeared regularly up until 1954.

More than a dozen years later, after the trademark lapsed, Marvel jumped on the character and began publishing a new series of his adventures in 1967. But this only lasted seven issues, followed by a very brief revival of the character for the anthology title Western Gunfighters in 1970.

Just a short time later, writer Gary Friedrich approached editor Roy Thomas with an idea for a motorcycle-riding villain called “Ghost Rider” that he wanted to use in the pages of Daredevil. Thomas liked the idea so much that he suggested launching the character in a series of his own.

When Mike Ploog drew the art assignment, he assumed they were taking another shot at the Western character.

“In my mind,” Ploog told BACK ISSUE in 2005, “the first image that came to me was the Frazetta Ghost Rider on Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 13

horseback.” (Frank Frazetta illustrated a couple of gorgeous covers for the original Magazine Enterprises series in the 1950s.) Though Ploog may have been disappointed to learn he was doing an all-new character with the same name, he clearly adjusted quickly.

Knowing Roy Thomas’ affection for the Golden Age, it would be reasonable to assume that the design of the modern Ghost Rider was inspired by ’40s superhero the Blazing Skull, but this was not the case. Depending upon whom you ask, either Friedrich came up with the fiery skull design or Ploog did. But regardless of its origins, all can agree that the design was an eye-catcher.

THE DEVIL INSIDE

The new Ghost Rider first appeared in Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug. 1972). Again, he jumped off the cover, surrounded by blurbs declaring, “The Most Supernatural Superhero of All!” and “A Legend Is Born!” A third blurb posed the ominous question, “Is He Alive—Or Dead?”

The character’s origin story is pretty straightforward. After being orphaned at a young age, Johnny Blaze is taken in by the owners of a traveling cycle show, the Simpson family: “Crash” Simpson, his wife, Mona, and their daughter, Roxanne. Several years down the road, when Crash is diagnosed with a fatal disease, Johnny makes a deal with the devil—literally Satan himself—to save Crash’s life. After Crash ends up dying in a show stunt, Satan comes to collect Johnny’s soul, correctly noting that Crash did not die of his disease, as per the letter of their bargain. He then informs Johnny that he will “walk the Earth” as his “emissary” at night, while spending his daylight hours trapped in “Hades.” But Roxanne returns just in time to interrupt this process, repeating the magical phrases necessary to drive the devil away and, seemingly, save Johnny. Alone together and safe, Rocky reveals that she had been reading Johnny’s books on Satan in secret, which is how she knew the way to save him.

But the next night, Johnny Blaze finds himself transformed into the Ghost Rider for the first time.

The transformations continue every evening at sundown thereafter, with a transformation back to human form with each dawn.

HERO OR HORROR?

Ghost Rider Unplooged Artist Mike Ploog burned rubber as Ghost Rider’s original artist. (right) GR’s debut, in Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug. 1972). (above) An undated Ploog preliminary sketch of our hot-headed hellion, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

Ghost Rider TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Like his Spotlight predecessor, Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider had an unusual narrative style (unusual for a comic book, that is), as it was narrated in second person.

(Werewolf was done in first person.) Also like Werewolf, this premiere story begins in medias res, as we start with Johnny Blaze already the Ghost Rider, with his origins then revealed to us via flashback afterward. And finally, the two features also shared the same artist kicking off their strip: Mike Ploog (who would also have long stints on Frankenstein and Man-Thing). Taking all this in, the strip felt very much of a piece with the other new horror titles Marvel was beginning to publish.

Many specifics of the character were only vaguely defined at this point. Although Johnny could not control his transformations (they occurred at sundown whether he willed it or not), he was still fully conscious and in control as the Ghost Rider, even though he would often speak as if he were an infernal creature—threatening “mortals” with his power as a “servant of Satan.” (Johnny, as well as some of his later confidants and allies, would come to refer to this as his “spook routine.”)

The finer aspects of his powers were also unclear. He speaks of commanding “hell-fire,” for example, but his flame does not appear to have any properties that would distinguish it from conventional fire. It would be quite some time before the Ghost Rider’s powers, or even his demonic nature, would be properly detailed.

EARLY ADVENTURES

In his second appearance, in Spotlight #6 (Oct. 1972), Ghost Rider runs afoul of “Satan’s Servants” (a Hell’s Angels-style motorcycle gang) in Greenwich Village. After a display of his powers, GR is invited by the group’s leader, Curly, to join. Curly then betrays GR, revealing

14 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

himself as not only a pawn of Satan, but in fact the resurrected Crash Simpson! This kicked off a storyline that would run across the next three issues whereby Crash would get a second chance at life if he could successfully deliver Johnny’s soul to Satan. Standing in the way was Roxanne, whose purity and love for Johnny kept him out of the devil’s reach.

Modern readers may be surprised by the appearance of Satan in these stories. Amazingly enough, this prompted nary a word of protest at the time, though it did garner some response from wannabe Satanists and witches. After seeing some of their letters, Ploog confessed: “I’ll tell you, I slept with the lights on after that.” As for illustrating the character, he recalled, “I tried like hell never to show the devil’s face, and I don’t think I ever did. It was always this huge guy with glowing eyes in the shadows.”

Spotlight #6 is also notable for Ghost Rider appearing in public with the cycle show for the first time. Although this happened because Johnny had to save Rocky from the Servants biker gang, they later played it off as part of the act. It’s a device that would be reused often in the coming years.

The first half of Spotlight #8 wraps up the Crash Simpson plot, with Crash being spared the tortures of Hell by a mysterious hooded figure called the Messenger. The second half of the story moves the cycle show to Arizona, where Johnny plans to jump “Copperhead Canyon” (clearly inspired by Evel Knievel’s long-planned jump over Snake River Canyon in Idaho, which finally took place more than a year later in 1974). Ploog’s run as penciler would also end here, as Tom Sutton took the penciling reins for a four-issue stint beginning with Spotlight #9 (Apr. 1973) and ending with Ghost Rider #1 (Aug. 1973).

GR would close out his Spotlight run and begin his own title battling Native-American villains Snake Dance and his daughter, Witch-Woman. These stories would also introduce the Son of Satan, Daimon Hellstrom, to the Marvel Universe. The Son of Satan would then take over as the lead feature of Spotlight after GR graduated to his own title. (In fact, the original plan for Spotlight post-Ghost Rider was for a feature titled “The Mark of Satan,” which would have had Satan himself as its protagonist. This was being promoted as late as Ghost Rider’s last issue of Spotlight, #11, Aug. 1973, where it was mentioned near the end of the lettercol.)

After the Son of Satan crossover that took place over the first two issues of his new title series, Ghost Rider #3 (Dec. 1973) sees GR learning how to create his flame cycle for the first time. Then, after a one-panel cameo in Avengers #118 (Dec. 1973), GR #4 (Feb. 1974) brings GR and Rocky to Nevada, where they become involved with a shady stock-car promoter named Dude Jensen. This would be Gary Friedrich’s last issue as writer.

At some point between Arizona and Nevada, the cycle show had a detour back to New York City, where Ghost Rider met Spider-Man in the pages of Marvel Team-Up #15 (Nov. 1973). In this tale (written by Len Wein with art by Ross Andru and Don Perlin), GR had his first encounter with the villain who would prove his most persistent foe: the Orb. Years earlier, Drake Shannon (the Orb) had once been a partner of Crash Simpson’s in the cycle show. The two men tried to settle their business differences with a cycle race, winner take all. Shannon/the Orb lost this race, taking an ugly spill in the process that left him monstrously disfigured and hellbent on revenge. He kidnaps Roxanne and tries to ransom her back for ownership of the show, but is thwarted by GR and Spider-Man. With a giant eyeball helmet covering his entire head, the Orb had a striking appearance, much as the Ghost Rider did. The helmet also gave him the ability to hypnotize people. In later appearances it would be modified to allow him additional powers.

THE ISABELLA “SUPERHERO” ERA

After a fill-in by Marv Wolfman and Doug Moench, Tony Isabella takes over as regular writer for an extended run that offers readers a different flavor of Ghost Rider. Isabella tells BACK ISSUE, “Before I started scripting the issue, I reread all of Gary’s work on the character.

I realized I couldn’t duplicate his wild mix of motorcycles and sorcery.

I didn’t have the affinity for that sort of story for an ongoing series.

So, with editor Roy Thomas’ okay, I added more superhero elements to the title.”

Issues #8–9 (Oct.–Dec. 1974) feature another extended battle with Satan, who is assisted by the demon “Inferno the Fear-Monger.”

At one point, Satan tricks Roxanne into renouncing her protection of the Ghost Rider and all seems lost until Johnny is saved by a mysterious “friend”—one that bears a strong resemblance to the traditional depictions of Jesus Christ. Rocky, guilt-ridden over allowing herself to be tricked, breaks off from Johnny at the end of the tale.

Originally, Isabella had written himself into a corner with this storyline, as he was not sure how he would get Johnny out of Satan’s clutches.

It was Steve Gerber who playfully suggested that God could save him, and Isabella decided to run with the idea.

Around this time, Ghost Rider had his first meeting with the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One #8 (Mar. 1975)—an odd Christmas story where the two unlikely partners battle the Miracle Man, written by the aforementioned Steve Gerber and illustrated by Sal Buscema. Then GR has a cameo appearance in a fantasy sequence in a Son of Satan story in Marvel Spotlight #22 (June 1975; again by Gerber and Buscema).

Returning to his proper title, GR battles the ghost of the Phantom Eagle in issue #12 (June 1975), and

Spirit of Vengeance The artistry of Mike Ploog. Page 12 of Ghost Rider’s third story, from Marvel Spotlight #7 (Dec. 1972). Script by Gary Friedrich, inks by Frank Chiaramonte. Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 15

Could It Be… Satan?

The Satanic Cyclist had a Devil of a time in (top left) Ghost Rider #2 (cover by Gil Kane and Joe Sinnott) and (top right) #9 (cover by Kane and Tom Palmer). (below) Detail from the Ghost Rider #6 cover.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

in the aftermath (at the beginning of the following issue), he realizes his powers have changed. Now he no longer changes at night, but whenever there’s imminent danger. Johnny rationalizes this development as some kind of divine reward for passing three tests of selflessness.

Johnny then departs for Los Angeles to take up the Stunt-Master on a job offer at a television studio. When he gets there, he meets actress Karen Page (formerly a major supporting player in Daredevil), who is summarily snatched up by the Trapster for the purpose of collecting a million-dollar bounty. After he’s defeated, the Trapster’s fate is revealed in the pages of Captain America #191 (Nov. 1975), where GR has yet another cameo in a flashback.

Ghost Rider #14 (Oct. 1975) brings the return of the Orb to go along with the introductions of Katy Millner (Karen’s stand-in and stunt double) and Richard and Wendy Pini. In real life, the Pinis were comic fans and future creators (most famously of the Elfquest series), but here their fictional counterparts work at the studio in special effects and costume design, respectively.

An errand Johnny agrees to run for Katy takes him to the campus of UCLA, where he meets up with his future super-teammates in the pages of Champions #1 (Oct. 1975).

Over the next few issues, there’s a lot of back and forth between the Champions and Ghost Rider titles. In his own book, GR defeats the Orb in issue #15 (Dec. 1975), with the “friend” resurfacing. In Champions #2–3 (Jan.–Feb. 1976), GR plays a key role by first figuring out how the team might reach Olympus, then again by opening Zeus’ eyes to Pluto’s treachery. The continuity is fairly seamless here, thanks to Isabella being the writer of both books.

16 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Ghost Rider pops up next in the pages of Marvel Premiere #28 (Feb. 1976) as a member of the one-shot group the Legion of Monsters, along with Man-Thing, Morbius, and the Werewolf by Night. GR proves the sole voice of reason when this motley crew confronts the tale’s misunderstood antagonist, Starseed.

A FRIENDLY CONTROVERSY

In GR #17 (Apr. 1976), Isabella resumes the regular plotline, which sees Daimon Hellstrom return to perform an exorcism on a possessed Katy Millner. This leads to a literal race for Johnny’s soul as the mysterious “Challenger” reveals himself to be the one behind Katy’s condition. This whole storyline would be resolved in controversial fashion in Ghost Rider #19 (Aug. 1976)—a tale that wound up being Isabella’s last issue.

In Isabella’s original script for GR #19, the “friend” would finally free Johnny from Satan’s power once and for all. “More than ever, there should be a place for people of faith in contemporary comic books,” Isabella says, looking back on the storyline 40 years later, “and I say that as a person whose sole religious affiliation at present is the First Church of Godzilla, a Facebook religious organization I launched. Contemporary comics must reflect our art form’s diverse readership and that readership includes people of faith.” He adds: “It was never my intention to turn Ghost Rider into a religious book. In a Marvel Universe replete with a variety of Satan-types, I felt it was only fair to give ‘the other side’ a place in the series.”

Jim Shooter, then an associate editor proofing the book, saw the “friend” as a clear portrayal of Christ and wound up radically altering Isabella’s script. In Shooter’s version, the Challenger reveals himself as another devilish servant of Satan, declaring

An Eye for Trouble Take a gander at the Orb, one of GR’s rogues. (left) From Marvel Team-Up #15 (Nov. 1973) and the Andru/Perlin team (page courtesy of Heritage), and (right) in the Isabellawritten Ghost Rider #14 (Oct. 1975).

Cover by Ron Wilson and Frank Giacoia.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

a powerful but fairly straightforward costumed crook. More worthy of note this issue is that Johnny initiates his transformation into the Ghost Rider by his own will for the first time.

For the record: Both Marv Wolfman and Gerry Conway were questioned for this article, but neither of them could recall anything of their work on Ghost Rider. Unfortunately, creators with deep bodies of work often can’t recall it all, particularly so when it’s this many years later. It’s also possible that neither writer felt any particular attachment to the Ghost Rider.

THE SHOOTER TENURE

the “friend” to be an “image” that was Satan’s “most delightful ploy!” Ghost Rider winds up defeating him through his own sheer will and determination.

Although it was more than a bit awkward and the explanation didn’t make much sense in the context of his previous appearances, this brought an end to the “friend” storyline and the character would not appear in the strip again.

A HERO IN FLUX

After defeating the Devil, Johnny returns to the hospital to discover that Katy Millner was actually Roxanne Simpson (disguised by deviltry, her true identity unknown even to herself), and the issue ends on a cliffhanger that sees Stunt-Master capture Karen Page on behalf of Death’s Head—a villain that was thought to have died years earlier in the pages of Daredevil.

This sets up a two-part crossover that begins in Daredevil #138 (Oct. 1976) and concludes in Ghost Rider #20 (Oct. 1976), with both segments written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by John Byrne. When Death’s Head is revealed to be Daredevil’s nemesis Death Stalker in disguise, GR pulls his weight in the fight by first resisting the Stalker’s death touch, then dispatching him with fire.

With the departure of Isabella from both Ghost Rider and Champions (and different writers now independently handling each assignment), the events in Champions begin to lag behind the Ghost Rider title and the stories no longer fit into GR continuity very neatly. After GR’s cameo appearance with his fellow Champions in Avengers #151 (Sept. 1976), Gerry Conway takes over as writer with Ghost Rider #21 (Dec. 1976). Like Isabella, Conway takes a very superhero-ish approach to the character, as GR takes on stock supervillains the Eel and the Gladiator. (Fun fact: this is also the first of a threeissue run of Jack Kirby covers—the King’s only brush with the Ghost Rider.)

After the Champions indulge in a playful snowball fight in the pages of Marvel Treasury Edition #13 (Nov. 1976), the GR solo action picks back up in Ghost Rider #22 (Feb. 1977), which introduces the Enforcer,

The following issue, Ghost Rider #23 (Apr. 1977), is significant for a couple of reasons. For starters, it features the first appearance of the Water Wizard, a villain that would return often in future issues and whose power over water made him a natural adversary for GR and his hellfire.

More importantly, this issue marks the debut of Jim Shooter as writer on the book. Shooter’s run here will be brief, but his creative choices will reverberate for years, all the way down to the strip’s conclusion.

The identity issues for Johnny Blaze begin to sharpen acutely from the tale’s very beginning. We open with GR parting company from his fellow Champions, many of whom express their unease with both his demonic appearance and the hellish origins of his powers. It also shows several innocent passersby in terror at the mere sight of him. As he steers down a dead-end alley, GR notes that the brick wall ahead of him would be “an impassable barrier—for a mortal!” After clearing said wall, he refers to himself—as both the Ghost Rider and Johnny Blaze— in the third person. One might assume he was putting on his “spook act”… except there was no one else around. This is our first glimpse of GR behaving as a different, separate personality from Johnny Blaze.

After some advancement of the Johnny/Rocky/Karen Page love triangle, the Water Wizard tries to take out Johnny to fulfill a contract for the Enforcer. GR later tracks him down and Water Wizard experiences effects from hellfire that we’ve never before seen—instead of being physically burned, the flames feel “cold... like my soul is on fire!”

The following issue brings the brief Enforcer saga to a close. After GR survives being driven off a cliff (!), he declares that the Enforcer “must feel the wrath… the vengeance of the Ghost Rider!” When he catches up to the villains, they are shocked and terrified by his appearance—not only is his fleshless skull ablaze (as always), but his jumpsuit is badly torn, revealing a bare skeleton beneath. “Fool, you might have killed the mortal, Blaze, when you had the chance,” he tells them, “but I am beyond your earthly power to destroy! I am a spirit born of Hell—! A vengeful spirit—” This is the first time GR invokes vengeance as his primary motive.

It is also clear to his enemies—from both his survival of the fall and his full skeletal appearance—that the Ghost Rider is no illusion of special effects (as had been offered up as an explanation for his powers in the past), but something real and dark and terrifying.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 17

Water Wizard, still severely shaken from his taste of hellfire the issue before, wants no part of him. The Enforcer tries to stand his ground, but his stuttering speech belies his terror as well. After seeing his boss display some backbone, Water Wizard tries to get back in the fight, but it ultimately makes little difference. GR dispatches both villains, but the scientist he saves in the process is no less terrified of him than the villains were. As the issue ends, GR unknowingly rides past Roxanne Simpson enjoying a romantic stroll on the beach with another man (Roger Cross, who works in the studio’s special-effects department), indicating that our hero may have lost more than he won in this issue.

The classic Marvel vibe to this story is no accident. Jim Shooter got his start as a young teen writing for DC, but his approach was to take the classic Stan Lee/Marvel style and apply it to the DC characters.

Basically, the idea is to take one-dimensional characters and make them twodimensional—give them problems; inject some shades of gray into their conflicts; make those conflicts more challenging, if not insurmountable… make your characters miserable, pretty much. This meant that Johnny Blaze was in for a whole lot of misfortune in his near future.

“I… know, my friend,” GR concedes as he rides off. “Farewell.”

The issue was penciled by Sal Buscema and written by Chris Claremont, whose work writing the X-Men title was then just beginning to gather a following. Front and center on the X-Men was Wolverine, a violent and edgy anti-hero. Meanwhile, the protagonist of Ghost Rider was getting even edgier and moving into even darker territory, though not nearly as many fans took notice at the time.

At this point, things slow down a tad in terms of character evolution, but get quite busy as far as comic appearances go. In addition to Champions and his own title, GR appears in Human Fly #2 (Oct. 1977; see background art), and with his fellow Champions in Super-Villain Team-Up #14 (Oct. 1977) and Iron Man Annual #4 (1977).

The dates don’t exactly line up, but if you want to read the stories in some semblance of creative order, all of the Champions continuity needs to be cleared out before Ghost Rider #26 (Oct. 1977), because this is the issue where Jim Shooter pretty much blows up the life of Johnny Blaze completely (and gloriously).

DOWN A DARK ROAD

The story begins with the Ghost Rider riding in a rage. One might assume he’s on the trail of some supervillain, but we quickly discover it is Roxanne Simpson he’s after. When he finds her, she’s in the arms of Roger Cross, which nearly causes him to snap. “I’ll sear his soul for this!” the Ghost Rider swears. “I’ll burn his home to ashes!”

Then the better nature of Johnny Blaze asserts itself. “No!” he thinks.

“Got to get out of here!” He rides off, recklessly, and crashes in a secluded, wooded area. There, he can finally give in to his anger, breaking stones with his fists and casting hellfire everywhere. “Why did I let her slip away from me?” he asks. “Why did I let him take her?

I wanted to kill him for it, back there!” Then, after calming down, he wonders, “How can the Ghost Rider exact vengeance… when it is Johnny Blaze who is truly to blame? I… Johnny Blaze!”

These romantic troubles feel very reminiscent of early Spider-Man, generally, while this tantrum, specifically, seems to evoke Amazing Spider-Man #38, wherein Spidey punches out a mannequin for the high crime of resembling Ned Leeds—Spidey’s rival for the affections of Betty Brant at that time.

But this is only the beginning of Johnny’s difficulties. Though GR doesn’t know it yet, Dr. Druid has just arrived in town, determined to end the threat of the hellspawn men call the Ghost Rider. Confronting him at the studio, Druid attacks Johnny and successfully goads him into transforming in front of everyone there. After witnessing it with their own eyes, no one present believes the Ghost Rider to be a special-effects trick any longer, effectively ending Johnny’s job at the studio. Upon realizing this, the Ghost Rider whips up his flame-cycle and rides off, ending up in an abandoned cemetery, where he throws another wild tantrum. When Druid catches up to him there, GR declares, “I hate you… I will kill you!”

After the battle devolves into fisticuffs, GR is on the verge of destroying Druid, ranting that he knows he is a demon, that he’s learned that “as I become this spectre, compassion drains out of me….

Sometimes I believe I am truly evil!” But as he is about to deliver the final blow, Johnny’s personality asserts itself once more. Taking advantage of this opening, Druid uses a magic amulet to force a transformation back into Blaze, whom Druid quickly knocks out. Only then does Druid realize his terrible, tragic error.

Exploring Blaze’s mind with his telepathic powers, Druid learns that though his “aura is tainted from the pit,” Blaze is in fact, “a good man… who strove against Satanic domination… and conquered the Dark Lord

Anyone who missed the developments in the pages of Ghost Rider proper was in for a quick education in Marvel Team-Up #58 (June 1977).

It’s a fairly fun team-up of Spidey and GR going up against the Trapster until we reach the end and the Trapster tastes hellfire. The effects, again, are shocking. As he picks up a seemingly comatose Trapster, Spider-Man declares, “If I live a thousand years, Blaze, I never want to hear a scream like that again!” When GR retorts, “I am what I am,” Spidey responds, “Then I hope you can live with yourself, pal, because what you are isn’t very nice.”

THE BLOW-UP

Ghost Rider Team-Ups Johnny Blaze’s flaming alter ego might not have been one of the easiest guys to get along with, but he sure didn’t keep a low profile in the Bronze Age. Among his appearances: (top) He was a member of the Champions and short-lived Legion of Monsters, and (bottom) shared a two-part adventure with Ol’ Hornhead.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

18 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Ghost Rider Merchandise (left) Courtesy of this article’s writer, back and front views of the 1975 Ghost Rider 7-11 Slurpee cup. (right) Fleetwood Toys’ Ghost Rider figure, MoC, and its interchangeable Johnny Blaze head, courtesy of Adam Palance of Popculturemania.

Ghost Rider TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

himself!” Shamed, Druid leaves Johnny behind, hoping that Blaze can somehow “gather up the pieces of his life.”

The final page shows Roxanne Simpson discovering that Johnny has emptied out his apartment and apparently left. The final panel of the page shows Johnny on his cycle, a tear in his eye, with a sign in the background declaring, “You Are Now Leaving the City of Los Angeles, City of the Angels.”

A STEADY HAND

In addition to this radical change of creative direction, Ghost Rider #26 also marks the beginning of a long residency by Don Perlin as penciler.

After many issues of short stints by Jim Mooney, Frank Robbins, George Tuska, and Don Heck, peppered with single-issue fill-ins by Bob Brown, Sal Buscema, John Byrne, and Gil Kane, Perlin would bring some much-needed artistic stability to the strip.

Perlin, however, didn’t exactly view it as a golden opportunity at first. “I was sitting there working on the fill-ins and I was wondering what kind of book Marvel will come up with [for me as a new regular assignment],” Perlin recalled in 2005 for BACK ISSUE #15. “I figured that I would like any book they had there, except one: Ghost Rider. I didn’t want to draw motorcycles. About 20 minutes into that thought, the phone rang. The call was from Shooter and he said, ‘Don, we have got a book for you. It’s Ghost Rider. I’m going to write it, and you’re going to draw it.’”

Shooter bought a model of a motorcycle for Perlin to use as reference; then got into cheerleader mode.

“I tried to psych Don up,” Shooter recalled on his blog, “convince him we could do something special with the character.”

It didn’t take long for Perlin to find enthusiasm for the strip. By his second issue, #27 (Dec. 1977), the story opens in the Mojave Desert in Arizona, where Johnny encounters a colorful cowboy-type calling himself Brahma Bill. Where did the idea for this guy come from?

“I’ve told this story before,” Shooter said on his blog, “but one night, very late, wee hours, Don called me, all excited, to say that he had an idea for a character that he wanted to insert into a story— Brahma Bill! Wha…? Brahma Bill? Whuhhh….? I said, sure, all right, whatever, and went back to sleep.

“That was Don,” Shooter went on to say. “Always enthusiastic, always trying to contribute, always creating. Brahma Bill turned out to be great fun to write. Don had a knack for creating characters, both headliners and interesting supporting cast.”

After Johnny indulges in a playful cycle race with Bill, some engine trouble leads him to the dude ranch where Hawkeye and the Two-Gun

Kid reside. While there, the trio go up against a rather interesting adversary named Manticore. (Interesting because we discover at the end of story that Manticore is a double-amputee with no legs. It could have been fascinating to delve further into the character’s background, but alas, this was his sole appearance during the Bronze Age.) Although Hawk and Two-Gun had met the Ghost Rider once before (in the pages of Champions), the two are quite unnerved by his demonic nature in this encounter. A cynic might chalk this up to poor editorial oversight, but it could also be interpreted as the two men noticing a radical change in the Ghost Rider since they last saw him.

HITTING THE HIGHWAY

With Ghost Rider #28 (Feb. 1978), Roger McKenzie takes over as writer. Early in the issue, we learn that Roxanne Simpson has taken to the road in search of Johnny. She runs into Bramha Bill, who (after a rebuffed come-on) tells her Johnny is headed east. Just as she catches sight of her lost love, she’s stopped by the Orb, who hypnotizes her into a state of amnesia. The Orb then uses a gang of hypnotized bikers to waylay Johnny. Luckily Bramha Bill comes to the rescue, giving Johnny a chance to transform.

After knocking the Orb off his cycle, the Ghost Rider warns, “surrender now before I lose all control!” The Orb battles back with laser beams emitted directly from his eyeball helmet—a new weapon in his arsenal.

After burying GR under some rubble, the Orb thinks he finally has his archfoe at his mercy, but winds up singed with his first taste of hellfire. The Orb still manages to escape, however, with the help of his hypnotized thralls.

In the end, Johnny rides off alone, unknowingly leaving an amnesiac Rocky behind. It’s the last readers will see of Roxanne Simpson (outside of flashbacks or magical trickery) for quite a while.

GR #29 (Apr. 1978) kicks off a three-parter guest starring Dr. Strange.

It begins rather formulaically, with Dormammu trying to trick GR into fighting his longtime nemesis, but gets interesting by the concluding chapter in GR #31 (Aug. 1978). In this issue, Johnny Blaze finds himself in the body of Dr. Strange, battling a Ghost Rider in complete control of his own physical form, unfettered by Johnny’s conscience. Planned or not, the conflict was a preview of how the strip would evolve in the coming years.

Halfway through the issue, after Dormammu’s plans are foiled, a new villain makes the scene: the Bounty Hunter. A shadowy figure dressed in black, riding a red-eyed, fire-snorting, black horse, he cuts quite a menacing figure. After chasing the Ghost Rider down an alley

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 19

and cutting him down with some hellfire of his own, he tells him, “It wuz either you or me—an’ ah’ll be hanged if’n ah die—again!”

If the hellfire wasn’t a big enough clue, the next issue makes the theme fairly clear: Bounty Hunter is Ghost Rider’s literary double. In addition to the hellfire, he bears the same burning-skull visage. The difference between them is that Bounty Hunter’s mortal life ended a century earlier, his soul long since damned. After the villain ends up reclaimed by his devilish masters and dragged back to Hell, Johnny (along with the rest of us) can’t help but wonder if he will ultimately suffer the same fate.

Ghost Rider #33–34 (Dec. 1978–Feb. 1979)—McKenzie’s final storyline—was an odd mash-up of The Omen and Close Encounters.

Getting past the sheer strangeness of the plot, however, the character development keeps coming on strong. Throwing another tantrum, GR laments being “cursed with the damnable mortal conscience of Johnny Blaze” before Johnny once again reasserts control. realizing that it’s getting “harder and harder” to control his demon self and “I’m beginning to like it… that way!” By the concluding chapter, Ghost Rider is absolutely consumed by bloodlust for his foe.

Also of note: the cover of issue #33 was drawn by Bob Budiansky, who would later serve as the book’s penciler in its peak, final years. “Ghost Rider #33, the first GR that I drew the cover for, featured an alien spaceship,” Budiansky recalls. “The editor did not think the way the spaceship was depicted in the story was up to modern standards; after the recent release of Star Wars, the editor felt that the spaceship in the GR story looked a bit dated. I was known, at least among a couple of people at the Marvel offices, for adding detail to backgrounds…. So I was primarily hired to draw my first GR cover to Star Wars-ize a spaceship. I believe the pencil artist of that issue, Don Perlin, was so impressed with the results of my cover that he took back the interior pages to accessorize the spaceship he had drawn so it looked more like mine.”

Budiansky’s cover was so well received, in fact, that he would be used as the primary cover artist for the rest of the book’s run. Roger Stern was editor of the book at the time, but as he remembers it: “I believe it was Jim Salicrup, my assistant editor, who decided to make Bob the Ghost Rider cover artist. When I was editor, I ceded a good bit of work on the covers to Jim. He was always better at them than I was.”

Stern’s run as editor ran from issue #32 (Oct. 1978) through #41 (Feb. 1980). Stern recalls that “for a book about a biker with a flaming skull for a head—a series that was such a weird hybrid of supernatural and superheroes—it sold surprisingly well. At least, it had during the period when I was editing it. ‘Hybrid’ characters in general often attract a smaller readership than you might expect, mainly the people who are fans of both genres. On a Venn diagram of fandom, they

Blaze is Saddled (with Problems) Writer Jim Shooter put the poor Johnny through the wringer in Ghost Rider #26 (Oct. 1977). Cover by George Pérez.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

would be the ones represented where circles of the different genres overlap—and that’s usually a small population. But for some reason, the Ghost Rider seemed to click for a goodly number of people.”

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

With the departure of McKenzie, Jim Starlin stepped in next for one very compelling issue that saw Ghost Rider race against Death itself.

Although the story was a flashback, set in earlier continuity and thus not featuring the more developed GR character, it still offered some novel insight. When Death introduces himself to GR, he declares, “I am the one you’ve long sought after and secretly longed for. I am the reason you ride that absurd motorcycle. I am why you risk those insane stunts you perform. I am Death!” This was a fresh and fascinating angle to take on the psyche of Johnny Blaze.

Though Jim Starlin’s involvement with the Dreadstar television project prohibited him from being interviewed for this article, it’s probably safe to assume that he had some fondness for the Ghost Rider character.

Starlin may have been the biggest artistic star at Marvel during this time, so he likely had the power to choose his assignments. It’s telling that he would pick Ghost Rider to be one of them. (Note that GR was also among the many characters that popped up for a cameo in Starlin’s Death of Captain Marvel graphic novel in 1982, even though he and the Captain had never actually met.)

On the business side of things, the issue’s lettercol noted that, “Ghost Rider has long been a book that, despite everything, has managed to capture and hold a very respectable readership. So much so, in fact, that there’s a chance it may go monthly!”

PICKING UP SPEED

The move to a monthly schedule was a clear sign the strip was picking up fans. One of those fans was Alan Vega of the electro-punk band Suicide. The group’s 1977, self-titled debut album even had a song titled “Ghost Rider.” With lyrics describing a “motorcycle hero” in a “blue jumpsuit,” there is no mistaking the reference. (Vega also claimed to have taken the very band name “Suicide” from a Ghost Rider story titled “Satan’s Suicide,” but even after exhaustive research, I could find no such story. In fact, I couldn’t find the phrase in any Ghost Rider story, anywhere.) The song was later covered by R.E.M. and Henry Rollins, and sampled by M.I.A. for her song “Born Free.”

Further evidence of Ghost Rider’s growing fanbase could also be found in the release of a rack-toy Ghost Rider figure by Fleetwood Toys. It was a small figure that featured interchangeable heads— one normal Johnny Blaze head and one blazing-skull Ghost Rider head.

The set also included a toy motorcycle for the figure to ride.

Back in the pages of the comic that inspired all this, Michael Fleisher began a long tenure as writer with Ghost Rider #36 (June 1979). In fact, Fleisher would wind up writing more issues of Ghost Rider than anyone else—31 issues total, all published consecutively over the course of nearly three years.

With a résumé that included a great run on the Spectre—comicdom’s original ghostly avenger, in the pages of editor Joe Orlando’s Adventure

20 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

A Long Time Ago… …artist Bob Budiansky’s Star Wars-esque cover for Ghost Rider #33 (Dec. 1978, inked by Bob Wiacek) opened doors for the artist.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Comics over at DC—Fleisher was a natural fit for Ghost Rider. He would bring the strip closer still to its horror roots with stories of mostly non-powered menaces, occasional supernatural foes, and the infrequent supervillain.

Oftentimes, rather than fighting an external antagonist, the villain of a given story would be the Ghost Rider himself. Most of these stories were one-offs, with a two-parter every now and then. This kept the continuity refreshingly simple and made the title more accessible to new readers.

THE FLEISHER ERA

Fleisher begins by giving us the darkest shade of Ghost Rider yet seen, opening with GR seemingly terrorizing a trucker for the sheer fun of it; then leading some Denver police on a merry chase simply because he can. The following issue, however, he warns an innocent young boy whose just lost his parents to avoid the mistakes of Johnny Blaze.

“Vengeance is not the rightful task of mortal men,” he tells the boy.

“It is the appointed task of… the Ghost Rider!”

So Fleisher’s Ghost Rider was capable of showing mercy to innocent life, even revering it at times. But he could also be boastful, petty, and hateful—in addition to being absolutely ruthless in the pursuit and punishment of evildoers.

As Roger Stern relates to BACK ISSUE, “When I was editing the book, Ghost Rider was selling pretty consistently in the mid-hundredthousands—every single issue. I mean, the sales on most titles fluctuated throughout the year: issues would sell better in the Summer than in Autumn, for instance. An introspective scene on the cover might not sell as well as an action scene. A fill-in story would sell differently than a story by the book’s regular creative team. But with Ghost Rider, it didn’t seem to matter what time of the year it was, what kind of scene was on the cover, or who was writing and drawing the book. Readers just seemed to like Ghost Rider, and were somehow tracking it down every 60 days. Wherever they were finding it, they were buying it—and in about the same numbers, While Johnny is competing against Fargo in the issue after issue. And since Michael and Don could contest, there’s a subplot involving a group of robbers easily handle the workload, the decision was made who keep eluding the Ghost Rider. In GR #46 (July 1980), to go monthly. Basically, we wanted to see if those there’s a point at which it appears Fargo is connected readers would buy the book every 30 days. And from © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. to the robbers somehow. Ghost Rider even confronts what I hear, they did… at least at first.”

Fargo about it—accusing him of cheating in the cycle contest in addition Ghost Rider would team with the Web-Head for the third time in to working with the crooks (as Fargo is well ahead on points in the Marvel Team-Up #91 (Mar. 1980), where the two battle the sinister contest at this stage). And in a more formulaic story, Fargo would have sorcerer Moondark. (In the wake of this story, Moondark would become indeed been revealed as a criminal and a cheat, lost the contest, and a semi-regular antagonist in the pages of Ghost Rider.) Immediately gone to jail… but this isn’t what happens. after, in GR #43–44 (Apr.–May 1980), an ancient wizard named Azaziah Even when he’s face-to-face with the Ghost Rider (and terrified), magically separates Johnny and the Ghost Rider into two independent Fargo still won’t confess to being a crook or a cheat—because he’s beings. This is not the first time the two have been split in some fashion neither. Later, Johnny Blaze begins to wonder if Fargo could really be or other, but in this instance GR is utterly evil, wreaking havoc and innocent, if he’s really being beaten fairly. He even begins to consider destruction wherever he goes, purely for its own sake. Note that Carmine using his Ghost Rider powers to ensure victory in the contest, but then Infantino handled the art chores on this storyline as (so I’m guessing) regains his composure. After losing everything else that ever mattered Perlin was given time to get ahead of schedule so he could handle the to him, his professional pride is all he has left. “By Heaven,” he declares, upcoming 50th issue, a 48-pager.

“I mean to win or lose like a champion!”

In the last leg of the contest, Johnny puts on a tremendous FLAGG FARGO performance, narrowing the score by more than 200 points, but it’s In Ghost Rider #45 (June 1980), we have what is one of Michael Fleisher’s not enough. Fargo wins, barely, by five points. Fargo could have gloated, but he surprises us—trying to push the trophy onto Johnny greatest additions to the strip: the character of Flagg Fargo.

After breaking some of Johnny Blaze’s records as a stunt cyclist, instead. Johnny refuses, but warns that if they compete again, “Maybe Flagg Fargo challenges Johnny to a cycle-riding and stunt contest. I’ll beat you.” Fargo then goes back to being a blowhard as the two Fargo is an unbearably obnoxious braggart, constantly taunting Johnny say their goodbyes. and generally behaving like an ass. Most readers were just dying to see Flagg Fargo would return several times, nearly always behaving him get punched in the face; it’s likely none of them could even imagine like a jerk, but every once in a while he’d give a glimpse of humanity that the character wouldn’t get some kind of comeuppance by the end. that kept him from becoming a completely one-dimensional character.

But Fleisher had a few tricks up his sleeve.

This dichotomy gave him layers; it made him complex and compelling.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 21

All-American Flagg Writer Michael Fleisher and artist Don Perlin introduced Flagg Fargo, Johnny Blaze’s blowhard of a stunt-racing rival, into the feature.

This page hails from Ghost Rider #46 (July 1980).

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

THE NIGHT RIDER

Remember in the early ’70s when Marvel was trying to push DC off the newsstands by publishing figurative mountains of product? Well after some of the early success of the new Ghost Rider, they dusted off those ’60s adventures of the cowboy Ghost Rider and reprinted them—only they changed his name to “Night Rider” in order to avoid any potential confusion. Six issues (most of them sporting striking new covers drawn by Gil Kane) were published across 1974 and 1975.

So to celebrate the 50th issue of Ghost Rider, it was decided Johnny Blaze would meet his comic-book forbearer, now called the Night Rider.

It began in issue #49 with the Ghost Rider flung back in time to the Old West. There, as the story continues in Ghost Rider #50 (Nov. 1980), he meets the Night Rider and aids him against his enemy, the Tarantula. Reader reaction to this team-up was overwhelmingly positive, ensuring a re-teaming at some point in the future.

When this finally happened in issue #56 (May 1981), Night Rider wasn’t quite the same character as before.

With the tale set entirely in the present, this Night Rider is a

descendant of the original who finds himself magically possessed by the spirit of his ancestor. Together with the Ghost Rider, the two foil the plans of a returning Moondark.

PIT STOPS

Ghost Rider makes a special guest appearance in Defenders #96 (June 1981) to help the group against a demonpossessed rock star in the midst of the title’s “SixFingered Hand” storyline. This is J. M. DeMatteis’s first brush with the character he will end up writing in the strip’s peak era.

Ghost Rider #58 (July 1981) then brings readers the long-awaited rematch with Flagg Fargo. Early on in the story, the Enforcer shows up for the first time in 34 issues, appearing to be mixed up with Fargo somehow. This makes Johnny suspicious that Fargo might be involved in something underhanded, but after building a nearinsurmountable lead against Fargo in the contest, Johnny sees his braggadocios rival shot while attempting a jump. After pulling him from the flaming wreck, Johnny sets out after the Enforcer.

The contest is called off, of course, depriving Johnny of a chance to reclaim his championship. Later on in the hospital, after giving Johnny his usual hard time, Flagg does extend his hand and thanks him “for haulin’ my butt out of that fire.”

The issue marked the end of Perlin’s run as regular penciler, though he would return to ink the next two issues, along with the occasional fill-in assignment here and there.

Ghost Rider’s next appearance is in Marvel Two-in-One #80 (Oct. 1981), where the Thing shows up in the wake of one of GR’s wild sprees to help him out because “us monsters have to stick together!” Later, the two “monsters” clash, as the demon runs amok yet again. By the end of the issue, in a rare occurrence, the Thing actually winds up feeling more sorry for Johnny Blaze than he does himself.

ONE-SHOT SHOOTER

Ghost Rider would then make another guest appearance, this time in the pages of Avengers #214 (Dec. 1981), written by the man who first put him on his dark road, Jim Shooter. The issue opens in the middle of the much larger story of Yellowjacket/Hank Pym’s fall from grace, which casts a pall over everything, from the very beginning of the story to its end. The presence of the Ghost Rider in the midst of all this offers another strong example of literary doubling—because just as Hank Pym is battling his inner demons, we have Johnny Blaze battling an awful and terrifying demon of his own. And this is by far the most awful Ghost Rider we’ve seen.

Sitting on a craggy mountainside, despondent and bitter, Johnny sees his old teammate the Angel riding with his girlfriend, Candy Southern, in a fancy sports car. Johnny’s animosity leaves an opening for the Ghost Rider to claw his way out of him. The demon then runs the Angel off the road and challenges him to a race, threatening Candy with “a kiss” should he refuse. After putting sufficient distance between them and Candy, Angel knocks GR from his bike, demanding to know “what’s gotten into” him.

“It’s not what’s gotten into me, cretin!” GR reveals.

“It’s what’s gotten out!” He blasts Angel with hellfire and rides away, laughing. The incident eventually brings the Avengers to town.

Since none of the team has any prior experience with the Ghost Rider, they initially labor under the misconception that he is less than the true demon he is. After getting their clocks cleaned—which includes Cap and Tigra experiencing the bitter taste of hellfire— they learn better. The team does a fairly good job reining in the demon after that, though GR seems determined 22 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

to fight on. Then the Angel reappears, wondering if Johnny/the Ghost Rider has a death wish. “I have a theory about you,” he says. “I think that the more bitter and unhappy you are as Johnny Blaze, the more ruthless and savage the Ghost Rider is when he emerges.”

Angel then challenges the demon to kill him, at which point Johnny Blaze takes back control. As Johnny Blaze has committed no crime himself—and won’t accept aid or help from anyone—the heroes simply leave him.

As mentioned, this story marks the Ghost Rider’s heroic nadir. At one point Johnny transforms in order to save a child dangling from a water tower, but the Ghost Rider decides that if the kid “should die by his own hand, what should the Ghost Rider care? What is there to avenge?”

Luckily, Iron Man is there to catch the child when he falls.

WHAT IF?

It should be mentioned that the Ghost Rider made appearances in three issues of What If? during this period.

The first, What If? #17 (Oct. 1979), written by Steven Grant and illustrated by Frank Springer, shows us an alternate reality where Crash Simpson successfully completes the stunt that took his life in our reality—only to wind up killed by the Ghost Rider just a short time afterward instead.

Roxanne then pursues the demon as a result and he kills her as well. Ultimately, the Ghost Rider has to be put down

by Daimon Hellstrom, who ends the story lamenting the tragic bargain Blaze made with his father.

It was a bleak tale, and when asked if he possibly foresaw the darker direction the Ghost Rider title would eventually take, Grant tells BI, “The dark elements were always there; he was a Marvel Horror Hero, after all.

I suspect the relatively lukewarm response the audience had toward much of his initial series was due to Marvel’s failure to exploit that, or, rather, their determination not to, when the smart thing to do with pretty much any character is go for broke.”

What If? #28 (Aug. 1981) gives us an alternate ending to the storyline from Ghost Rider #43–44. Here, Johnny fails to break Azaziah’s mystic globe and the evil mage completes his plan to merge with the Ghost Rider.

He then proceeds to the Vatican, with plans to kill the Pope in a sorcerous ritual that will make him “master of the entire civilized world!” Johnny foils this plan by killing Azaziah/Ghost Rider with a magical scimitar, though he forfeits his own life in the process.

This tale was written by Fleisher and drawn by Tom Sutton— returning to draw the character for the first time since his debut issue eight years earlier.

Finally, there’s What If? #34 (Aug. 1982), a comedy issue. One segment asks, “What If Ghost Rider Had Possessed Someone Else?” as readers are offered readers glimpses of Ghost Grandpa, Ghost Skater, and Ghost Baby. Another segment imagines Ghost Rider as owner of a fast-food franchise called Burger Hell, ordering his patrons, “Have it my way… or else!”

overdue.) Johnny catches on with the Quentin Carnival here, introducing us to owner Ralph Quentin, Corky the clown, beautiful (and nosy) girl reporter Cynthia Randolph, and former head cycle-jock Red Fowler— who’s rather livid that Johnny has basically stolen his spot. A couple issues later, however, Red learns that Johnny is the Ghost Rider (though Johnny doesn’t immediately realize he knows) and goes from being an enemy to one of Johnny’s most loyal friends.

In Fleisher’s final issue, Ghost Rider battles an undead sorceress called the Wind-Witch. Between fight scenes, Fleisher will introduce another new carny character— Madam Olga, a psychic and medium—and begin a subplot with Corky’s son that will be picked up by the next regular writer.

But before that writer gets started, we have a fill-in by J. M. DeMatteis and a returning Don Perlin in issue #67 (Apr. 1982). It’s a sort-of ghost story that has the Ghost Rider serve as a dark mirror for a woman who’s let her thirst for vengeance consume her. It’s a tale that serves as another mile marker on the highway to the strip’s creative zenith.

The Original Ghost Rider (inset) In the Bronze Age, Marvel rebranded the Western hero Ghost Rider as Night Rider. (below) Both Riders met in the 50th issue of Ghost Rider (Nov. 1980).

Original Bob Budiansky/ Joe Rubinstein art courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

FLEISHER EXITS

Fleisher’s tenure may be rapidly drawing to a close at this point, but he’s hardly coasting. In Ghost Rider #63 (Dec. 1981), in addition to bringing back the Orb (with some eye-popping new weaponry), Fleisher beefs up the supporting cast in a major way. (And after so many years/issues of Johnny playing lone wolf, this was probably Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 23

THE STERN RUN

Ghost Rider #68 (May 1982) marks the debut of Roger Stern as the new regular writer. Joining him on the artwork, after years of banging out superb covers, is Bob Budiansky. “I was excited,” Budiansky remembers, “especially because GR allowed me to achieve my goal of becoming a monthly Marvel artist, and I wholeheartedly threw myself into the assignment.”

“I think that [editor] Tom DeFalco was the one who offered the strip to Bob,” Stern says, “and I’m glad he did. Bob was doing such a good job on the covers; he was one of those artists who could really maintain that balance of superhero and supernatural. It was a big plus for the whole book to have a consistent mood.”

The story begins with Johnny entering a church and confessing to a priest, leading to a series of flashbacks retelling Marvel Spotlight #5 almost note-for-note. It’s a great device for catching up potential new readers, and also sets up a bit of a mystery—why would Johnny need to confess so many of these details to some unknown priest, especially since it would all be so unbelievable?

About three-quarters through the tale we get our answer, as the “priest” Johnny’s been confessing to is revealed as no priest at all, but a killer and a crook in disguise. Ghost Rider chases him through the lightning and rain until the killer stumbles off his cycle at a railroad junction. As he tastes the Ghost Rider’s hellfire, we cut away to a train in the distance, sounding its “mournful horn” in a very cinematic touch.

One continuity note about this story: Although they never come out and say it, Satan is retconned into Mephisto here. Several issues in the future, the retcon will be made explicit. “That was my decision, completely,” Stern says. “I’d always thought that the ‘Satan’ connection was a weakness in the origin, as Satan is part of many religious canons. If Satan plays a part in your religion, you might take offense at his being turned into a comicbook character. And, if you don’t believe in Satan, that disbelief might make it harder for you to accept the premise of the series. On the other hand, Mephisto was an established Marvel character—and not part of anyone’s religion, as far as I knew. I thought that making Mephisto part of the Ghost Rider origin made it work better within the context of the Marvel Universe.”

The next issue has a plot that might appear mundane on the surface, as it concerns a jealous drunk creating havoc at the carnival with an earthmover, but there’s more than enough dramatic juice to be found in Blaze’s angst over setting loose the demon inside of him and the struggle to regain control after he does so.

Meanwhile, in subplot land, we have Cynthia digging for dirt on Johnny Blaze and Corky getting word that his son Eliot, a famous clown himself, is on his way “home.” And finally, Dave Simons comes aboard as

Ghost Rider Drive-Bys (top to bottom) Flame-Noggin and Web-Slinger in Marvel Team-Up #58, plus the first of Ghost Rider’s What If? tales.

Draggin’ the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One #80, and making no friends in Avengers #214.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

24 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

inker this issue, completing what would later prove itself the title’s artistic dream team.

Issue #70 (July 1982), “Freaks,” introduces Jeremy, the carnival’s “monster man.” Despite his outward appearance, Jeremy is the proverbial gentle giant.

Eliot also arrives this issue, unnerving his father. Later, when the two are alone together, Corky asks his son, “You gonna go straight this time?”

At this point we cut away to a “remote tropical isle,” where a character we will come to know as the “Freakmaster” orders his lackey Renaldo to procure Jeremy for him. After learning that Jeremy is not for sale—and being physically removed from the carnival grounds by Johnny—Renaldo returns with a band of “freaks” and takes Jeremy by force. After the Ghost Rider catches up to Renaldo and burns him with hellfire, Johnny is shocked to discover Jeremy has decided to go with his “brothers” anyway. “Renaldo an’ his boss may be bad,” he says, “but I bet I can handle them. After all, where we’re goin’, we’ll be the majority… an’ Renaldo will be the freak!”

It’s a neat, O. Henry sort of ending, where the reader is left wondering who the good guys and bad guys really are. There would be several more such endings to come in the near future of Ghost Rider.

Dave Simons once wondered aloud on his website, “How many readers knew the Tod Browning film?” Roger Stern says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen more than a few stills from Browning’s Freaks. I was aware of the film, but it really wasn’t an inspiration.

More of an inspiration—visually—were the ‘Un-Men’ that Bernie Wrightson had designed when he was drawing Swamp Thing. I always loved Bernie’s art, and was always trying to evoke that sort of horror-movie vibe when I was writing Ghost Rider.”

After another DeMatteis/Perlin fill-in that pits GR against Null the Living Darkness, the Corky-Eliot plot comes to a head in issue #72 (Sept. 1982), as Eliot is revealed to be the eponymous clown from the infamous Circus of Crime. While he did not know if Fleisher had originally intended for Corky’s son to be the Circus of Crime’s Clown, Stern says “it made sense to me.” After some strong-arming from his former criminal compatriots—which includes injuring Corky in an arson job—Eliot appears to rejoin the band of villains in the issue’s cliffhanger.

The following issue, however, reveals that Eliot is just setting up the Circus of Crime for a trap, as the Quentin Carnival workers do a fairly good job of clobbering the criminal crew. But Johnny arrives late to the proceedings, still thinking Eliot has betrayed his friends, and the Ghost Rider winds up frying the clown with hellfire. When Red Fowler informs GR of his heartbreaking error, the demon fades away with an almost literal whimper. A spiritually and mentally broken Eliot would remain a supporting character through the strip’s final days.

This issue brought the Stern era to a close. “It was all a matter of scheduling,” according to Stern. “I became quite busy once I landed the Avengers assignment. I was also writing the Amazing Spider-Man and Dr. Strange at the time, and I didn’t want to give either of them up.

Something had to go, and that was Ghost Rider. I’d enjoyed writing the series, and felt badly about having to give it up. But Tom DeFalco was able to get J. M. DeMatteis to write the book, and he did a great job.

“I certainly enjoyed the experience of writing Ghost Rider,” he continues. “There weren’t that many issues, but I was pretty happy with them. And the readers seemed to enjoy them, which is really what matters the most to me.”

Although Stern’s run was rather brief, his accomplishments over this span were remarkable.

Stern not only continued to develop the character of Johnny Blaze in this short time, but also developed the Ghost Rider as an individual character in his own right, along with the relationship between the two (trends J. M. DeMatteis would continue when he took over). In this last issue, for example, GR wonders, “Why can’t Blaze realize that to deny me my freedom is to deny his own innermost hates and passions?!” And later, Johnny and the Ghost Rider have an actual back-and-forth argument with each other in their shared consciousness, one that ends with Johnny realizing, “My curse is your curse too.”

THE DeMATTEIS FINALE

“I was very excited to get the assignment,” J. M. DeMatteis reveals to BI of getting the full-time Ghost Rider job.

“I’ve always loved tales of the supernatural—dark fantasy, as it’s sometimes called—because they allow you to step outside the constraints of standard superhero comics and play with themes that are more philosophical, more metaphysical. Ghost Rider, in particular, had a great metaphor at its heart: man’s battles with his own inner demons, literalized in Johnny Blaze.”

DeMatteis—along with Budiansky, formally credited as co-plotter for the first time—begin with a bang, introducing Centurious, the Man Without a Soul. The villain’s lack of a soul makes him impervious to the Ghost Rider’s hellfire, of course; and along with the Crystal of Souls to complement his other nefarious powers, Centurious is the greatest adversary the demon has ever encountered, apart from Satan himself.

Wicked Wheels (top) Our hero has a run-in with the terrifying trucker Clement Barstow in Ghost Rider #51 (Dec. 1980).

Cover by Budiansky and Al Milgrom, original splash page by Perlin and courtesy of Heritage. (bottom) Dennis Weaver had a similar problem in Steven Spielberg’s Duel, a TV movie that was later released to theaters. (inset) Still, no mean machine is creepier than Killdozer!

Ghost Rider TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Duel © Universal Pictures.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 25

Freakmaster at the very end, all seemed like significant (and portentous) developments.

The following issue sees Don Perlin return to fill in on pencils in a story that separates Johnny Blaze and the Ghost Rider once again, as they get caught up in the infernal machinations of Azmodeus and Mephisto. By story’s end, Johnny and the demon are physically rejoined, their curse renewed, while Azmodeus is destroyed. More notable than any other development, however, is that the Ghost Rider has a name: Zarathos, which Mephisto reveals in surprisingly casual dialogue.

SIMONS SAYS

Gentle Giant Jeremy, one of the “Freaks” from Ghost Rider #70 (July 1982), as remarkably rendered by the GR team supreme, Bob Budiansky and Dave Simons.

Original art courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

GR #75 was the last ink job by Simons over Budiansky as far as interior pages, though he would continue to ink Budiansky’s covers through the end. Outside of this, his final brushes with the Ghost Rider were inking the Perlin fill-in job the following issue, followed by Team America #11 (Apr. 1983), which he both penciled and inked himself.

“I had lobbied to draw this book [Team America #11],” Simons later remembered on his website. “This was the penultimate issue. I got to show what I could do on Ghost Rider solo, and draw lots of motorcycles.”

Teaming with Jim Shooter as writer—Shooter’s own final work with the character whose arc he so strongly influenced—Simons did a great job on the assignment, offering a fascinating glimpse of his individual take on the Ghost Rider doing full art. GR’s battle with Team America’s Marauder was also fairly dramatic, as the two were the cycle aces of the Marvel Universe at the time, and represented yin and yang characters of a sort.

The circumstances of Simons’ departure from the Ghost Rider strip were not controversial. There was no artistic disagreement or falling out of any kind; it was strictly business. As Simons later recalled in an online interview, “That was right around the time when the royalty system was kicking in and people were starting to get their royalty checks. Anyone who worked on an X-Men anything was starting to get these massive royalty checks.

I was looking at that thinking, ‘Oh, I’m getting screwed here’ [laughter].”

Dave Simons passed away in 2009 at the all-too-young age of 54. Budiansky reminisces on their collaboration: “In all my years in comics, it was only during my collaboration with Dave on Ghost Rider that I realized—in retrospect—the artistic heights that could be accomplished in comic-book art, at least when I was the penciler. Dave threw himself into the “GR was also the first time I worked work with such spirit and abandon that with an active co-plotter and Bob I couldn’t wait to see what he would turn in for the next issue. I learned Budiansky and I soon discovered that an awful lot just examining how he we were a good match,” DeMatteis Courtesy of dave-simons.com. says. “We’d get on the phone and start talking and, interpreted and inked the pencils I gave him. When he pretty soon, we’d have a story. We really sparked each left the book, I missed his contribution every day for the other’s creativity. It was a wonderful collaboration, one rest of my run, and never failed to remind him of that I look back on fondly.” whenever I would see him at the Marvel offices.”

The following issue introduces two new characters: Kevin Dzuban would do some fine work on inks in Vincenzo, a carnival magician, and the villainous Steel the strip’s final months, but the chemistry with Budiansky Wind. Vincenzo is a kind and cheerful soul, while Steel did not have quite the same magic.

Wind is a former artist whose body and psyche have been irreparably scarred by tragedy. She joins the Quentin Carnival NIGHTMARES in order to run Johnny off, though she ultimately fails.

Ghost Rider #77–78 (Feb.–Mar. 1983) offered a two-part Ghost Rider #75 (Dec. 1982) was not celebrated as an narrative across two issues. One part featured Nightmare anniversary issue, but it still felt like one. The introductions (of Dr. Strange fame) exposing the truth about Zarathos’ of Steel Wind and Vincenzo, to go along with the appearance past to him, while the other part has Johnny attempting of a shadowy female figure (later revealed as Roxanne to rescue Vincenzo after the magician was subject to Simpson), the mystery of what Steel Wind might be holding the mad experiments of the Freakmaster’s surgeons. over Ralph Quentin, Ghost Rider forcing the transformation Subsequently, Johnny is forced to fend off Renaldo’s on Johnny Blaze for the first time, and the return of the attempts to use those same surgeons to turn him into

26 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

some kind of man-cycle centaur.

Nightmare’s journey through the past is most enlightening, revealing that Zarathos is an ancient entity once worshipped as a god by primitive man. In order to put an end to Zarathos’ reign of terror on Earth and save the girl he loves, a young prince sold his soul to Mephisto. After his fall, Zarathos was left the pawn of Mephisto for several millennia, with memories of his true nature and history stripped from him—until now.

For a time, Nightmare’s plan to liberate the Ghost Rider from the constraints of Blaze’s conscience (so that he can once again freely terrorize the Earth and thereby expand Nightmare’s power in the psychic realms) appears to work. But then a vision of Mona Simpson inspires Johnny to retake control of the demon, just as he was about to tear Renaldo limb from limb.

With Renaldo thwarted, Johnny collects Vincenzo and returns to the carnival in GR #79. Upon their arrival, Johnny is shocked to learn that Freakmaster is already there and, moreso, is now a partner in the carnival with Ralph Quentin. Freakmaster reveals much of his personal history here, including his family background as the son of two horribly abused sideshow freaks, leaving Johnny (and the reader) to wonder just how evil he really is, if at all.

Eventually, Freakmaster’s true nature is uncovered, as Johnny discovers his plans to surgically alter nearly all the carny workers into bizarre freaks for his new sideshow. Ghost Rider foils these plans, but when it comes time mete out the hellfire, Freakmaster tells him he should punish Ralph Quentin if it’s truly the guilty he’s after. Quentin then confesses he was the ruthless carny owner that abused the Freakmaster’s parents decades earlier. The shock of hearing this and the confusion it causes the Ghost Rider gives Johnny the opening to take back control of his physical form. Freakmaster then agrees to leave, finding a moral victory in the knowledge that he has broken Ralph Quentin. It’s another great, gray ending that leaves the reader questioning whom the good guys and bad guys really are—most appropriate for a story titled “Shades of Gray.”

The issue ends with a last-panel cliffhanger featuring the return of the most important supporting character in the strip’s history, a “voice from the past” that had not been heard in over five years.

Hero and Hellspawn in One Man (top) Ghost Rider vs.

Johnny Blaze on the Budiansky/Simons cover of GR #76 (Jan. 1983). (bottom) Dynamic Don Perlin made a return to the book in that issue, inked by Dave Simons. Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

PUT ON THE RED LIGHT

“We had ample warning about the cancellation,” J. M. DeMatteis remembers, “and that allowed us to do something that rarely happens: create an actual finale, wrapping up Johnny’s story and giving him the happy ending he deserved. And that happy ending had to involve Roxanne.”

After an emotional embrace, Rocky speaks with Johnny privately, telling him of her new life in the Midwestern town of Holly, where she now lives with her aunt and her aunt’s family. The town seemed an idyllic paradise until a religious figure calling himself the Sin Eater began turning the townspeople into figurative zombies.

It doesn’t take much pressure to get Johnny to agree to go back there with her and help figure out what’s going on.

The return of Roxanne Simpson should have been a joyous moment, but somehow it felt ominous. Vincenzo’s newfound psychic powers warn of doom, and Red Fowler “can’t shake the feeling that I’m never gonna see my biking buddy again” as Johnny and Roxanne ride off. Even if you weren’t aware of the strip’s impending cancellation, the sense of an ultimate ending was almost inescapable.

In Holly, it is revealed that Centurious is the power behind the Sin Eater, who has been using the Crystal of Souls to drain the townspeople. But this reveal is nothing next to the big twist: that Centurious is the prince who sold his soul to Mephisto several millennia earlier in order to vanquish Zarathos. Centurious takes Johnny’s soul with the crystal, which thrills Zarathos at first, as it gives him complete freedom in the physical world. But the demon quickly grows weak and realizes he will soon die without Blaze’s soul to anchor him to the earthly plane. This was all part of Centurious’ plan, of course, and he relishes humbling Zarathos before watching him slowly waste away and die.

Ultimately, the Ghost Rider finds enough strength to break the magical crystal, setting free all of the stolen souls while drawing Centurious into the crystal, physically, when it reforms. This enrages Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 27

Happy Endings (left) Budiansky and Simons’ cover to the series’ final issue, Ghost Rider #81 (June 1983). (right) The Robbie Reyes version of Ghostie joined the cast of TV’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in 2016. (opposite page) An unbelievable 2015 Bob Budiansky commission, from the collection of Michael Browning.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

the demon, amazingly enough, as he feels cheated of his true revenge.

The Sin Eater then re-emerges (after having been violently cast aside

by Centurious), offering to use the crystal to absorb the demon. Johnny almost ruins things when he tries to take back control, but Roxanne convinces him to let Zarathos go as she declares her love for him. The demon ends up in the crystal with Centurious, the two at each other’s throats for the rest of eternity, while Johnny and Roxanne literally ride off into the sunset together, the saga having reached its conclusion with this final issue, Ghost Rider #81 (June 1983).

It was as neat and perfect a bow to tie up a comic series that you’re ever likely to see.

A BITTERSWEET END

In the issue’s text piece, DeMatteis remarked that despite the happy ending, “I don’t feel like kicking up my heels and shouting with joy.” Regular readers of the book could readily sympathize, as they knew that in its final years, Ghost Rider had reached creative heights that few comics had ever matched.

In a serial medium like comic books, where a strip can have many different writers and artists over the course of years, it’s amazing to look back on Ghost Rider and see how well it all came together.

From the moment Gerry Conway had Johnny initiate the transformation in Ghost Rider #22, the demonic side of Blaze seemed to grow in autonomy and malevolence with every single issue thereafter, even as the strip passed from writer to writer. It was clearly not planned, but it feels like it was when one goes back and reads it all today.

At one point, Ghost Rider had a chance at a second life as a direct-only title. As Tom DeFalco remembers, “It came down to two titles: Ghost Rider and Ka-Zar. The direct sales department thought Ka-Zar would sell better in the direct market, but Ghost Rider had been slowly rising in sales in both newsstand and direct so I fought hard to save it. I lost that fight.”

Two years after the Ghost Rider finale, Johnny (along with Roxanne) pops up in Defenders #145 (July 1985) looking for a job courtesy of Warren Worthington, a.k.a. the Angel (which, after the events of Avengers #214, took some stones!). What was the purpose of this reappearance?

Writer Peter B. Gillis recalls, “I had some plans for Johnny Blaze that were based on him, as I suggested in the one appearance Don [Perlin] and I did with him, of doing him as a happy-ending character—someone who made it out alive, still connected with the Defenders but no longer

into superheroing. Unfortunately, as we were doing that very issue, we got the word that the book was being canceled.”

Though things never had a chance to go anywhere in plot terms, it seems apropos that Don Perlin, who had drawn more Ghost Rider stories than anyone else, would pencil the final appearance of Johnny Blaze in the Bronze Age. Five years later, in 1990, a new Ghost Rider series was launched with great commercial success, featuring a fresh mortal identity (Danny Ketch) for the flaming-skulled cycle rider. Though the series eventually burned out after eight years and over 90 issues, it showed the concept still had legs (as well as a lot of fans left from the old days). Roger Stern tells BACK ISSUE, “I know that after the next [1990s] incarnation of Ghost Rider became a big hit, our stories were reprinted as The Original Ghost Rider Rides Again and sales were through the roof, well over 200,000 copies an issue. Maybe it was just Ghost Rider’s time.”

Ghost Rider would be revived again a few more times in the 21st Century, with nearly all of these iterations including Johnny Blaze in some form or other.

THE BIG SCREEN

In the lettercol of Ghost Rider #67 (Apr. 1982), editor Tom DeFalco announced that “a major producer has optioned our Brimstone Biker for a possible upcoming motion picture. We’ll tell you more as things develop!”

Well, it took a quarter century, but the first of two Ghost Rider movies (based on the original Johnny Blaze mythology) finally hit theatres in 2007. In hindsight, it seems rather amazing that GR got his own feature film before Iron Man or the Avengers did. It would certainly seem to speak volumes about the character’s popularity and commercial viability that this did indeed occur.

In 2016, actor Norman Reedus, who stars as Daryl Dixon on The Walking Dead television series, was asked by Uproxx if he’d be interested in playing the title character in a movie reboot of Ghost Rider. “Hell, yeah,” he said. “It would be a blast. Do I get a skull face that’s on fire and all that stuff? F*** yeah, I’m down.”

There’s just something about the image of a guy riding a motorcycle with a head that’s a flaming skull…

DAVID TORSIELLO is a freelance writer and editor living in the New York metro area.

He maintains a classic comics blog at http://crustymud.paradoxcomics.com/.

28 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 29

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by D e w e y

Cassell

I don’t like romance comics.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I have an appreciation for the artwork of romance comics, but it seems like most of the stories in the old romance comics revolved around pining for someone’s attention or playing hard to get or jealousy over a friend or rival. It was not exactly the stuff of legend.

Romance comics rose in popularity in the late 1940s and 1950s, in the wake of World War II. Unlike horror and crime comics, romance comics had no problem passing the Comics Code. But with changing times and the re-emergence of superhero comics, by the late 1960s romance comics were, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Naomi Scott, editor of the 1979 Fireside book, Heart Throbs: The Best of DC Romance Comics, put it this way: “Romance comics were popular for almost thirty years because they showed a simpler life. In the late fifties and early sixties, television was stealing a large share of the comic market—action adventure comics, as well as romance. But the changing morality of the sixties and seventies killed romance comics forever.” [Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #81 for more about Heart Throbs— plus the revelation of Naomi Scott’s true identity!]

NIGHT SHIFT

In an interview with Jim Amash in Alter Ego #70 (July 2007), former Marvel writer and editor-in-chief Roy Thomas explained the origin of Night Nurse: “[Stan] wanted to do some books that would have special appeal to girls.

We were always looking for ways to expand our franchise.

We had a lot of superhero books. You can’t just go on putting out more and more books that are in exactly the same genre, but if you could find ways to nibble around the edges… you can maybe cover a little more territory. So maybe a couple of women characters might bring back a few of the female readers who’d been lost to comics over the years with the decline of humor and romance comics.” This motivation served as the genesis for several comics Marvel introduced in the early 1970s, including The Cat, Shanna the She-Devil… and Night Nurse.

But Scott noted the challenge they faced: “Interestingly enough, romance comics were written and drawn primarily by men. Even the advice columns, with bylines attributed to Jane Ford and Julia Roberts, were written by men. Over the years there were women artists and story editors, but until recently the comic industry was dominated by men.”

This dichotomy was something Marvel intended to change with the new titles, as Roy Thomas tells BACK © Luigi Novi / ISSUE: “My idea—this was not part Wikimedia Commons. of Stan’s initial idea—was to try to get women to write them. And, of course, if we could get a woman to draw them, too, that was great.” It was an

Hello, Nurse!

Excitement, romance, and sensible shoes were hallmarks of Marvel’s Night Nurse #1 (Nov. 1972). Cover by Win Mortimer.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 31

What the Doctor Ordered Night Nurse artist Win Mortimer and his wife Eileen. Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. (below) Know your night nurses!

Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

is shot and captured, and Linda eventually turns down a marriage proposal to remain a nurse at Metro General with her friends.

The cover of the first issue enticed the reader with, “Enter the world of danger, drama, and death! All the glamour, the heartache, the throbbing excitement of a big-city hospital.” The story in the first issue largely lived up to that billing, although it did not come across as particularly glamorous. The depiction of the training of the nurses was interesting and the storyline regarding the hostage crisis was dramatic and well executed, but it was almost as if Marvel felt compelled to include a romantic element to the story to appeal to female readers.

Sometimes comic-book companies reach back into admirable goal, but easier said than done, since there their past and bring forward a character to the present were still few women in creative roles for comics at that day, often placing them in different circumstances. time. Linda Fite wrote The Cat, the first three issues Patsy Walker is a good example. Patsy appeared in of which were penciled by Marie Severin and Paty romance comic books published by Marvel (and its Cockrum, but inked by male artists, and the last issue predecessor Timely Comics) from 1944 to 1967. Then was drawn entirely by men. Carole Seuling wrote the in the mid-1970s, when Greer Nelson became Tigra and left her Cat costume behind, Patsy picked up early issues of Shanna the She-Devil, but Steve the mantle as Hellcat and became an Avenger.

Gerber scripted the last two issues and [For more on Patsy and the Cat, see BACK the entire series was drawn by men.

ISSUE # 17.] It might have seemed there Similarly, Night Nurse was written by Jean was a similar backstory for Night Nurse.

Thomas and Linda Fite but illustrated The name of the Linda Carter character

by Winslow Mortimer. Still, each was drawn from a 1960s comic book book bore the imprint of at least called Linda Carter, Student Nurse. one female creator.

However, Roy Thomas sets the record The new comics from Marvel straight: “She isn’t that character… just were action- and adventurehas the same name. I don’t recall if that oriented. The Cat became a superhero was Stan’s idea or mine.” after being given an experimental drug Linda was clearly intended to be and fought Marvel villains like the Owl. the star of Night Nurse. Marvel comics Shanna the She-Devil was a female during this time period typically had version of Tarzan, harkening back a bubble to the left of the title logo to similar heroes of the Golden featuring a static image of the lead Age, and she became a close Courtesy of Dewey Cassell. companion of Ka-Zar in his adventures. And then character, in this case, Linda. She was also featured there was Night Nurse, which appeared at first prominently on the cover, and the story in the first glance to be a romance comic, but actually wasn’t. issue is told chiefly from her perspective. However, It was living proof of the old adage—you can’t judge the other two nurses were integrally involved in the story and as the series progressed, the focus on Linda a book by its cover.

The first issue of Night Nurse introduces the diminished somewhat.

In the second issue, the tagline at the top of the reader to Linda Carter, blonde-haired child of Dr. and Mrs. Carter from Allenville, who are first page says, “Stan Lee presents: Linda Carter, Night proud their daughter is going to train to become Nurse!” but the story revolves primarily around her a nurse. Joining Linda at Metro General is Georgia roommate Christine Palmer. The police commissioner’s Jenkins, an African-American whose family lives in a daughter is struck by a hit-and-run driver and the poor neighborhood only blocks from the hospital. accident is witnessed by Linda Carter. Carter and Rounding out the trio is red-haired Christine Palmer Palmer get pulled into the operating room to assist from a wealthy Midwestern suburb, whose father the surgeon who is operating on the injured girl, has made it clear that if she leaves home, she can Dr. Sutton, a close friend of the police commissioner. never come back. They struggle at first, both as Sutton is taken with Palmer and enlists her to be his students and roommates, but a shared homesickness special assistant at Metro General, and they begin serves to bond their friendship. Linda falls in love to see each other socially as well. However, Carter is with a wealthy patient, while Georgia’s brother suspicious about Dr. Sutton, and it isn’t long before gets involved in a plot to hold the hospital hostage Palmer finds out that Sutton has been forging to end the brownouts that are rampant in the prescriptions to finance his drug and alcohol problems. surrounding neighborhood, echoing themes of The climax of the story comes after the police social consciousness prevalent at the time. As commissioner’s daughter takes a turn for the worse. things escalate out of control, Georgia’s brother When Dr. Sutton operates on her again, she dies.

32 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

An inquest brings his crimes to light and as Sutton is arrested, Palmer leaves the hospital disillusioned.

The third issue opens at Christmastime, with Metro General playing host to an underworld crimeboss, Victor Sloan, who has been shot by a new rival in town. Georgia hesitates to help him, having just learned that her brother was convicted and sentenced to prison for his role in the extortion plot in issue #1. She relents when Linda reminds her of their “Nightingale Pledge.” But when the police are lured away from their guard detail, Georgia goes for help, while Linda hides Sloan in a medicine room, only to be discovered by a hit man sent to finish the job. Resident doctor Jack Tryon tackles the hit man and with help from Linda, they subdue him until the police arrive. Of note is that Christine Palmer does not appear in this story.

Issue #3 marked the first appearance of a letters column, titled “Night Desk.” Many of the letters had more to do with how to pursue a career in nursing than the comic book. Writer Jean Thomas used the letters column to explain to readers why she and artist Win Mortimer were well suited to their creative roles: “Many of you are planning to become nurses someday. Like millions of other girls, I did too! When I went to college, however, I developed other interests and switched to a double major of psychology and education. But my younger sister stayed true to her plans, and so did my sister-in-law—they both trained at the same hospital school of nursing in St. Louis, Missouri. Not only that, but artist Winslow Mortimer just recently attended his daughter’s graduation from nursing school! So we Night Nurse staffers have plenty of friends and relatives to give us ideas—and give us a scolding if we go too far wrong.” One reader found the story in the first issue “melodramatic,” noting, “A friend of mine is a nurse’s aide and from what she says, the problem in the hospital is not people trying to blow the place up, but lack of staff.”

The fourth issue is the only story that does not take place at Metro General, and it focuses exclusively on Christine Palmer. Gone is “Linda Carter” from the “Stan Lee presents Night Nurse” at the top of the splash page, although the bubble next to the cover title logo still bears Linda’s image. The recap on page two implies that when Christine left Metro General, she worked at several hospitals in different cities before happily landing the job of physiotherapist at Sea-Cliff Manor. However, she is puzzled when she arrives in town and no one will drive her to the house. The matriarch of the manor, Edna Porter, has hired her to care for her nephew Derek, who is paralyzed from a boating accident and does not want to be helped. Storms and freak accidents, plus a mysterious light at a nearby abandoned lighthouse, add to the intrigue. When Christine stumbles upon a secret passageway, she learns the truth that Derek is not paralyzed and is involved in drug trafficking. The loyal butler intervenes to keep Derek from throwing Christine off the cliff. Romance is not an element of this story. In fact, the story bears more resemblance to comics like The Witching Hour, and that phrase is ironically mentioned in one of the captions.

The other change of note in issue #4 is that Linda Fite wrote the dialogue for the story, based on a plot by Jean Thomas. Fite, who had been writing The Cat, recalls, “Roy asked me to finish that issue for Jeanie Thomas.” About this time, Jean Thomas began working on Marvel’s CRAZY humor magazine and later contributed to the first 15 issues of Spidey Super Stories.

Just as the three titles all started around the same time and with the same premise of attracting female readers, so they all experienced the same fate. Night Nurse and The Cat were both canceled after four issues. Shanna, the She-Devil lasted one more issue before being cancelled as well. Writer Jean Thomas offered an explanation for the fate of Night Nurse in an interview with Brett Weiss in BACK ISSUE #44 (Sept. 2010): “Night Nurse was an attempt to create a comic book for the same audience of young girls who read such book series as Cherry Ames, Sue Barton, and Nancy Drew. Maybe the comic-book format just didn’t appeal to that group. It may also have been difficult to distribute or display: too serious to be with romance comics but not male-actionoriented enough to be with superhero comics, so regrettably low sales led to cancellation.”

Ms. Marvels Night Nurse was one of a trio of Bronze Age titles starring women leads. Joining NN were (top left) The Cat (cover by Marie Severin and Wally Wood) and (top right) Shanna the She-Devil (cover by Jim Steranko). (bottom) Marvel’s first Linda Carter—no relation to Night Nurse—on the cover of her Al Hartley-drawn 1961 first issue.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 33

Hit and Run (left) Linda Carter fends off a frenzied Commissioner Fenton Greeley on the cover of Night Nurse #2 (Jan. 1973). Art by John Romita, Sr. and Frank Giacoia. (right) Linda witnesses the accident involving Greeley’s daughter, Betsy, on the issue’s splash page. Art by Win Mortimer, with Romita corrections.

Both pages courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

NIGHT NURSE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE

One might logically have assumed that Night Nurse was not part of the Marvel Universe, since unlike The Cat and Shanna the She-Devil, there was no mention of other Marvel characters in the series.

But that would be a bad assumption, as Roy Thomas explains: “How do you know Night Nurse didn’t take place in the Marvel Universe, just because no superheroes appeared in it? I think I made up the name Metro General for the hospital, and it seems to me like later I used that name for a hospital in a Marvel Universe story, perhaps in the ’90s, though I can’t recall for sure. But Night Nurse was not intended to be outside the Marvel Universe any more than, say, Millie the Model has been.”

As with The Cat, a fifth issue of Night Nurse was in the works before the series was canceled, but it was never finished. Mortimer penciled the entire story, but it was not lettered or inked, and it is uncertain who © Marvel. plotted it, although it was likely Jean Thomas. The focus in the fifth story shifted back to Linda Carter.

When a shop owner is robbed and shot, an innocent young man is mistaken for the suspect and injured by police. Carter is kidnapped by his friends, who are hiding him until the real killer is found, but in the meantime, his condition is deteriorating.

34 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Carter calls her roommate Georgia Jenkins for help.

Georgia teams up with Christie Palmer, who has just returned from her ill-fated adventure at Sea-Cliff Manor (recounted in issue #4). Together, Georgia and Christine go to the shop and find the stolen jewels hidden inside a piano, but they are discovered by the real thieves. The police arrive in the nick of time, enabling Linda to take the wounded young man to Metro General, where she meets up with her friends Georgia and Christine.

As for why the unpublished story appears to have only been 14 pages long, Roy Thomas comments, “I’ve no idea why it would be short (assuming it’s finished), unless perhaps we’d decided that we should run some reprint in the back of it to save money... but it’s hard to see what we could’ve reprinted unless we ran across silver prints of one of the old Timely/Atlas nurse titles, or perhaps a romance story of some kind.”

The Cat went on to make guest appearances with Spider-Man in Marvel Team-Up #8 and Spidey Super Stories #12, then later found a second life with the Avengers (and a third life as Tigra). Shanna joined Ka-Zar in the first two issues of his title in 1974 before moving to Daredevil and later Savage Tales. But for years, the only appearance of Night Nurse was as a joke in a 1982 one-shot Marvel No-Prize comic book.

It seems that perhaps Night Nurse was simply an idea ahead of its time. The stories were well written and entertaining, and the artwork by Win Mortimer was excellent. Mortimer, like most artists from his generation, had drawn his fair share of romance comics, while also illustrating a plethora of superhero adventure stories for DC Comics featuring Superman and Batman. Mortimer inked his own pencils on Night Nurse, effectively blending the styles of both genres. Roy Thomas shared that sentiment, noting in Alter Ego #70 (July 2007), “And while Night Nurse was less exciting—Winslow Mortimer was a much quieter artist—it was really the right kind of look for a book of that type. I think Mortimer’s work didn’t compare unfavorably with that of Al Hartley and some of the other

Prescription for Peril

artists who’d worked on similar comics in the past like Linda Carter, Student Nurse.” With covers by Mortimer and John Romita, Sr., it was a very attractive package. The original comics are pricey on the secondary market, but in 2015, the four original Night Nurse issues were collected into a reprint edition, along with Daredevil #80, allowing both the classic stories and recent incarnation to be enjoyed by new and old fans alike, myself among them.

But I still don’t like romance comics.

Sincere thanks to Roy Thomas, Linda Fite, and Jean Thomas for their insight, and Heritage Auctions for many of the images.

DEWEY CASSELL is the Eisner Award-nominated author of over 35 articles and three books, including The Incredible Herb Trimpe, available from TwoMorrows Publishing. He is currently working on a book about Mike Grell and is searching for one of the two Night Nurse HeroClix from WizKids.

(top left) Night Nurse #3 (Mar. 1973).

Cover by Mortimer. (top right) Christine Palmer makes the cover of issue #4 (May 1973). Cover

by Romita and Joe Sinnott. (middle) Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple, patching up Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, on Netflix’s Daredevil. (bottom) Rachel McAdams as Doctor Strange’s Christine Palmer.

Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Daredevil © ABC Studios/DeKnight Entertainment/Marvel. Doctor Strange © Marvel Studios.

TM & © Marvel Charaters, Inc.

Then, in issue #58 of Daredevil (May 2004), writer Brian Michael Bendis depicts the Night Nurse caring for a badly wounded Matt Murdock after fighting the Yakuza (see inset). When reporter Ben Urich enquires about her, Matt responds, “She’s the night nurse. She’s good people. She’s sympathetic to… costumed persons who get a little nicked up in the, uh, the call of duty. People like me—we all know we can come here to get patched up. No questions asked.” Others, like Luke Cage and Iron Fist, also benefit from her kindness. It is later revealed that she was rescued by a superhero and wants to repay the community of superheroes by tending to their injuries. She is typically referred to as “the night nurse,” but it is eventually confirmed that she is Linda Carter and now has a medical degree.

The Night Nurse also appears in 2006 in Marvel’s Civil War, siding with Captain America, and in the Doctor Strange miniseries The Oath, culminating in a romantic relationship with Strange. In addition, Christine Palmer appears in the 2004 miniseries Nightcrawler, which takes place in part at Metro General Hospital.

So, like the Cat and Shanna, the Night Nurse has proved to have a lasting role in Marvel comics.

But the Night Nurse has managed to do something that neither the Cat nor Shanna has to date— make the leap into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

(No, I’m not talking about the 1931 film starring Barbara Stanwyck.) When the television show Daredevil debuted on Netflix in April 2015, one of the supporting characters was a nurse named Claire Temple, portrayed by Rosario Dawson, who befriends DD and bandages his wounds. (Claire Temple in Marvel comics is a physician associated with Luke Cage.)

In an interview with Eric Goldman for IGN (www.ign.com), Daredevil showrunner Steven DeKnight revealed, “Originally, Rosario Dawson’s character had a different name. She was going to be the actual Night Nurse from the comics, [but] the feature side had plans for her down the road. So… we just used another name; it’s the same character.” Dawson has also appeared as Claire Temple in the Jessica Jones and Luke Cage series on Netflix. The “real” Night Nurse made her debut in the feature film Doctor Strange, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role and Rachel McAdams as Christine Palmer. It is not certain why Marvel chose to use Palmer rather than Linda Carter in the movie.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 35

DC Comics has a long history of vile villains who have plagued our favorite heroes over the years, but none are quite like Eclipso. While the Joker, Lex Luthor, and Black Manta often come face-to-face with Batman, Superman, and Aquaman, Eclipso breaks the mold in that he lives within protagonist Bruce Gordon!

DARK ORIGINS

The cover of House of Secrets #61 (Aug. 1963) touts the introduction of “Fantastic Eclipso… Hero and Villain in One Man!” Written by Bob Haney with art by Lee Elias, the feature tells the tale of Dr. Bruce Gordon, a premier solar-power scientist who travels to Diablo Island to view an eclipse. While waiting for the eclipse, Gordon encounters Mophir, a tribal sorcerer. The two scuffle and Gordon is scratched by a seemingly magical black diamond possessed by the sorcerer. The eclipse begins and Mophir becomes confused, stepping backward and plummeting off the edge of a cliff. Mophir perishes, but Gordon appears to be unscathed. Appearances can be deceiving, though, as Gordon soon learns that he is now host for the villainous Eclipso.

Whenever in the vicinity of a solar eclipse, Gordon loses his will and Eclipso is unleashed. It’s discovered that solar energy and natural light will vanquish Eclipso, and throughout the Silver Age, Bruce’s girlfriend, Mona, and her father, Dr. Bennett, seek to help Gordon rid himself of Eclipso through a seemingly endless series of solar experiments. While somewhat of a C-level villain, Eclipso was apparently compelling enough of a character to make 18 appearances in House of Mystery, culminating with issue #80 (Oct. 1966).

ECLIPSO VS. THE JLA… AND METAL MEN?

Eclipso made his first Bronze Age appearance in Justice League of America #109 (Feb. 1974). “The Doom of the Divided Man” starts off with a shocker as Hawkman announces his resignation from the Justice League. Katar explains that he and wife Shayera have been called back to Thanagar, their tour of duty on Earth complete. The team is in the midst of expressing their dismay when Bruce Gordon arrives via teleporter carrying a worse-forwear Red Tornado. Explains the solar scientist to the slack-jawed JLA, “I’m Doctor Bruce Gordon—and to some extent, I am responsible for the harm done to your colleague!” The Red Tornado steps in and recounts that he had gotten a job as Gordon’s lab assistant and was helping the scientist with his controlled light transmission experiments. The android continues, “I don’t know how it happened—perhaps I was responsible—perhaps not— but, two-thirds of the way through the operation, vital circuits began to overload—and there was nothing I could do to stop them!” In a flashback sequence, Gordon is thrown to the floor from the force of the explosion and the Red Tornado witnesses three spectral figures emerging from the scientist’s body, “their identical faces all contorted into the same evil mask.” A trio of Eclipsos attacks the Red Tornado and the hero proves to be no match. Gordon

Bad Moon Rising The evil Eclipso returns, in Metal Men #48 (Oct.–Nov. 1976). Cover art by Walter Simonson.

TM & © DC Comics.

36 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

TM

by S h a n n o n

E. Riley

Threeclipso!

The JLA vs. the triple-threat Eclipso, in Justice League of America #109 (Feb. 1974). By Wein, Dillin, and Giordano.

TM & © DC Comics.

goes on to explain that it is he who is Eclipso and that his latest experiment was meant to imprison the villain within him permanently.

Instead, a flaw led to the release of three Eclipsos hellbent on menacing the Earth. Batman deduces that a greater threat lies in the release of Eclipso from Gordon. Says the Darknight Detective to the scientist, “It’s the law of conservation of matter and energy! Nothing can be created from… nothing! The real Eclipso comes from latent energies the black diamond imbued within you—but those two extras your accident conjured up—according to the computers, they are drawing their energies from Earth itself! Unless we find them and destroy them within six hours—the stresses will tear this planet apart!”

Writer Len Wein and stalwart artists Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano deliver a crisp tale in which the League divides and conquers to take down the three split-faced devils. Black Canary, the Atom, and Aquaman face off against an Eclipso in the dark waters of the Atlantic, while Batman and the Flash vanquish an Eclipso in sweltering Death Valley as Hawkman, Green Arrow, and the Elongated Man take down the Dictator of Darkness aboard an aircraft. The entire JLA reconvenes aboard their satellite headquarters with the trio of Eclipsos and recovered black diamonds that threatened the very stability of the planet. Suddenly, the three clones merge into a giant Eclipso and the beast swats the Justice Leaguers away like flies. Eclipso then fires a bolt through his diamonds, fully anticipating to atomize the JLA—but one of the diamonds had been rigged by Batman and Eclipso returns to his human host. Reveals the Caped Crusader, “I secretly coated his black diamond with special chemicals and left the gem where I was sure he’d make a play for it! As soon as he started to fire one of his energy blasts through the diamond, he triggered the reaction that sent him back into Dr. Gordon’s body!” With Eclipso back within Bruce Gordon, the team bids farewell to the departing Hawkman.

After his defeat at the hands of the Justice League, Eclipso disappeared for a few years. He would turn up again in Metal Men, of all places.

The series had earlier returned from its cancellation at the tail end of the Silver Age, picking up the previous numbering with issue #42 in late 1972 and resuming a bimonthly publishing schedule as a reprint series for a three-issue run. Metal Men was later revived again, with new stories, starting in issue #45 in 1976. “Who is Bruce Gordon and Why is He Doing Those Terrible Things to Himself?” brought our shadowy villain back to the DC Universe in Metal Men #48 (Oct.–Nov. 1976), pitting him against Doc Magnus’ team of element-based robots.

The tale begins with Mona Bennett bursting into Magnus’ lab, desperately begging for his assistance.

She recounts Bruce Gordon’s ordeals with the Master of Darkness, from the destruction of Solar City to Gordon’s efforts to rid himself of the devil with a variety of high-intensity light experiments; his most recent trials had gone awry and unleashed Eclipso once again. Freed, but with Gordon’s persona still submerged within, the beast immediately retrieves his black diamond from the scientist’s study and discovers data in his files that will put the wheels in motion for a return to Diablo Island, where Gordon first received his wound from the black diamond. Magnus, Bennett, and the Metal Men track Eclipso to the Peruvian Andes, where Metal Man Tin fashions a white-hot torch that temporarily severs the connection between Eclipso and Gordon. Gordon quickly explains to the team that they’ve returned to the location where he fought Mophir and his sun cult, and where Eclipso was first unleashed. Within Mophir’s cave, they discover a tablet inscribed with an eclipsed sun. As Iron retrieves it, an earthquake is triggered and the entire group scrambles for safety. Magnus directs Iron to move the Metal Men’s flying transport and in doing so, it blocks the sun and Eclipso is freed yet again.

Eclipso absconds with the tablet and speaks aloud the hieroglyphs, conjuring the ancient god Umbra. Umbra utters, “Soon… the others shall awaken... to join me! And soon... the Earth shall be ours!”

It’s announced in the letters column of Metal Men #48 that Martin Pasko had come on board to script the issue in place of the departing Gerry Conway (who plotted the story with Walt Simonson). Pasko and I have communicated frequently over the years and I reached out via email to see if he recalled how he got the assignment. Says Pasko, “At this time, Gerry was writing and editing a lot of first issues—‘pilots,’ so to speak—and then handing them off to other writers with the second issues. I’d become one of his go-to guys for that; I took over two titles that Gerry had started, so he knew I was able to pick up where he’d left off without too jarring a change in style or approach to story. Steve Gerber was supposed to be the new regular [Metal Men] writer, taking over from Gerry, but had to bow out after one issue due to other commitments, so Gerry co-plotted #48 with Walt [Simonson] and started looking for someone to dialogue it. Since Gerry, Walt, and I had already worked together happily, and I knew how to interpret Walt’s very loose breakdowns, I guess I was the logical choice.”

The concluding chapter, “The Dark God Cometh,” appears in Metal Men #49 (Dec. 1976–Jan. 1977). Umbra rewards Eclipso for summoning him by increasing his power a thousand-fold, and he uses it to promptly mop up the floor with the Metal Men. Eclipso then abducts Mona and is set to sacrifice her to Umbra—but the Metal Men regroup and swiftly form a giant magnifying glass, transforming Eclipso back into Bruce Gordon and saving Mona from certain death. With Mona now safe and Umbra temporarily immobile while he recharges for another battle, the group returns to the cave and Gordon recounts the history of Diablo Island and ultimately his dark origins as the host for Eclipso. He explains that the island dwellers worshipped a sun god, but in reality Umbra was a god of darkness.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 37

Taking Umbra(ge) In the hands of Pasko and Simonson, Eclipso’s menace was elevated to new heights. From Metal Men #49.

TM & © DC Comics.

38 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Says Gordon, “…the high priests of Umbra possessed a gift from their god—a black diamond—a fragment of the jewel we saw on Umbra’s ‘forehead.’ This ‘serving-stone’ was handed down among the wizard priests from generation to generation… and used as a weapon to enforce the priest’s rule over the cult.

Through the millennia, Umbra’s worshippers determined to one day bring him back from oblivion. The last in the long line of priests was Mophir… who fought me when I inadvertently challenged his authority while on an expedition here. Mophir died in our fight—but not before he scratched me with the diamond—to ensure that the line of servants of Umbra would not die out. I became that new servant: Eclipso.” As Gordon is completing his tale, Umbra comes to life and fires lethal beams at Doc Magnus, Mona, and Bruce Gordon. The beams transform Gordon once again into Eclipso, while Mona and Magnus are seemingly vaporized. Eclipso, believing Umbra attempted to destroy him as well, turns on Umbra, and the two are now locked in battle. Magnus, as it turns out, had evaded death thanks to the robot Tina transmuting herself into a protective cocoon—and the scientist returns in the nick of time, ordering the Metal Men to fashion themselves into a giant laser beam. Powered by Eclipso’s black diamond, the laser beam pummels the pulsing jewel in Umbra’s forehead and ultimately brings an end to the dark god.

Eclipso, too, is vanquished as Gordon is returned to his senses.

As Pasko stepped in for the departing Gerry Conway, I was curious if Conway had already plotted the finale or if Martin was in the position of having to generate the plot points for “The Dark God Cometh!” The writer recalls, “Not the ‘plot points’ so much as the ‘connective tissue’—the timing of who was doing what, where, and when; what was intended to play for comedy, etc. And it wasn’t even a written plot, per se; just a story conference at which all three of us jotted down some notes which Walt then turned into breakdowns.”

Walter Simonson’s time on Metal Men was all too brief: He provided pencils starting with issue #45 and relinquished interior art to Joe Staton by issue #50. Nevertheless, Walt Simonson’s art is fantastic and really amps up the kinetic energy of the Eclipso storyline. I asked Pasko if he had any recollections of his collaboration with Simonson on these issues. Gushes Pasko, “Walt is one of my favorite collaborators of all time, and after doing the Dr. Fate reboot with him and Gerry, I was eager to work with him again. I thought Gerry’s approach to Metal Men was a bit more straight-faced than I wanted to treat it. I’d always found Bob Kanigher’s writing on it hilarious (if not necessarily intentionally so), and with Gerry’s blessing I took it more in a ‘gonzo’ direction, which Walt facilitated, at first unwittingly.

Walt had a great sense of humor and playfulness in doing his roughs: He included a lot of funny marginal notes that were intended for my amusement only, such as a quote from Monty Python that he offered as a transitional caption (‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’). He also did this design thing where he’d ‘play’ a sound effect in an enlarged gutter across the width of the page, between tiers. So I started taking some of those marginal toss-offs, like the Python line, and bringing them onto the page, creating this bizarre transitional text in display lettering that was bigger than a caption, but not exactly a chapter heading because it was right in the middle of the page.”

Pasko concludes, “And since Walt was inking all the borders and balloon shapes, and doing the display lettering himself (Gaspar Saladino and Ben Oda lettered only the body copy), Walt effectively created the unique look of the book that was the model for how Joe Staton and I approached the next several issues. And the gonzo approach we took to Eclipso was a big part of that, too.”

Of the choice to include Eclipso as the main villain in this Bronze Age tale, Pasko says, “As a DC editor, Gerry had a mandate both to create new titles and to revive ‘dormant’ properties in their own books; the relaunches (which is what we called stuff like Metal Men because the characters were the same and hadn’t been redesigned) were a response to that mandate. As I recall, Gerry took note of Eclipso in that

JLA story (which I believe Len Wein wrote), and at one point planned to pitch management on an Eclipso title that Gerry would write himself. I think the Metal Men story was intended to be kind of a ‘dry run’ for him that would let him get a feel for the character. But life had other plans.”

BRUCE GORDON, FREE AT LAST?

“The Symbiont Syndrome!” is the first of a two-part Eclipso backup story appearing in Adventure Comics #457 (May–June 1978).

It would also be the last in a series of Bronze Age supporting backups to the main Superboy feature: Adventure Comics switched to the Dollar Comic format with issue #459 as part of the DC Explosion of the summer of 1978.

The six-page Len Wein-written tale begins with Professor Simon Bennett and daughter Mona imbuing Dr. Bruce Gordon with a concentrated dose of ultraviolet light, effectively separating Eclipso from Gordon. Now a distinct being no longer symbiotically tied to Gordon, Eclipso escapes the protagonists’ hidden lab by blasting through the ceiling thanks to a rocket-powered-jewel assist.

Though weakened by the separation, Gordon feels a sense of responsibility for unleashing Eclipso upon the world and vows to take him down—even if it means sacrificing himself to do so. As Gordon, Professor Bennett, and Mona discuss their dilemma, Eclipso is already wreaking havoc. The dark menace attacks an armored car holding the Star of Allah, renowned as the most precious ruby on Earth. Eclipso proceeds to tear the car asunder and is in the midst of destroying a jewelry store when Gordon arrives and assaults the villain with a light grenade, momentarily stunning him. Gordon proceeds to tackle Eclipso, but he manages to evade capture with a powerful gem blast. The yarn ends with a cliffhanger: Bruce Gordon is rapidly fading from existence due to the severed symbiotic energy flow between Bruce and Eclipso.

The tale concludes in Adventure Comics #458. The previous installment was penciled by Joe Orlando with inks by Frank Giacoia; here, Orlando is ably assisted by Bob Layton on “He Who Survives!” Having absconded with the Star of Allah, Eclipso makes his way to the Whelan Planetarium in an effort to draw energy from the stars to amplify his powers and ensure his invincibility via the Geiss Projector. Not far behind, though, are Gordon, Mona, and Professor Bennett. They’ve tracked Eclipso to the planetarium after rigging a plasma field to control Bruce’s dwindling atoms. Not only does the plasma field help keep Gordon’s corporeal body together, it also serves to deflect Eclipso’s deadly energy bolts.

Eclipso manages to temporarily blind Gordon with a black-light blast. Thinking quickly, Professor Bennett rigs the controls to the planetarium’s “laserium show” to fell Eclipso with an intense ray of light. It’s pure hell for the “schizophrenic man-monster.” Gordon recovers, leveraging the Geiss Projector to imbue himself with the power that was meant for Eclipso. While Gordon and Eclipso are locked in battle, the Geiss Projector short-circuits due to the overwhelming energy and fuses the two combatants back together again. Professor Bennett expresses his relief that, for now, it’s over. A solemn Gordon retorts, “I only wish it were, Professor! But so long as that malevolent monster lives within me—it can never be over! Not the until the day one of us—dies!!”

I was curious about Len Wein’s affinity for Eclipso, as he’d used the villain in the aforementioned JLA tale, this two-parter for Adventure Comics, and a Green Lantern

story (as detailed in the next section of this article).

Wein tells BACK ISSUE, “I’ve been an Eclipso fan since the very first story illustrated by the late, great Lee Elias, and followed by the indescribably talented Alex Toth. There was something about the Jekyll/Hyde quality of the character that just struck a personal chord with me.

When the series writer, whom I believe was Arnold Drake, who was also, I think, the creator of Deadman, another of my favorite characters, found a way to split Eclipso off from Bruce Gordon, so they could actually battle face-to-face, I was hooked. Since there was no regular Eclipso series during most of the time I worked at DC, I appropriated him to use as a villain wherever I could, as I had put Chemo into Superman and the Gentleman Ghost into Batman. God, that was fun.” [Editor’s note: Actually, it was Bob Haney who created Eclipso and wrote his Silver Age adventures.]

Short-Lived Adventure The first of a two-part Eclipso backup appeared in Adventure Comics #457 (May–June 1978). By Len Wein, Joe Orlando, and Frank Giacoia.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 39

IN BLACKEST NIGHT

Eclipso makes his return in 1981 by way of a trio of Green Lantern stories, all plotted by Marv Wolfman and penciled

by Joe Staton. Hal Jordan and his partner Tom Kalmaku go in search of a kidnapped Carol Ferris in Green Lantern #136 (Jan. 1981). Thinking that Bruce Gordon may have information about Carol as he was present during a bombing that leveled Ferris Aircraft’s Coast City testing facilities, the two enter the scientist’s apartment only to find him chained to a wall. Gordon warns Green Lantern and Tom to stay back—but it’s too late. Eclipso frees himself from Gordon’s body and his energy blasts collapse the building around our protagonists. Snarls Eclipso, “I leave you now, Green Lantern… and I offer you luck…

You will need it when we next meet!”

And meet again they do in “Total Eclipso!”

Green Lantern #138 (Mar. 1981) sees a time-phasing Hal Jordan return from the future to the ravaged building he left Eclipso and Tom Kalmaku in in the aforementioned issue. Jordan proceeds to free Tom from the rubble he’s trapped under, blowing Eclipso out of the apartment complex and subsequently burying him. Eclipso recuperates as Jordan beams Tom out of harm’s way, blasting the Emerald Gladiator with the rays of his mystic black diamond.

GL retaliates, manifesting two green suns and burning Eclipso so that he reverts to Bruce Gordon. Wolfman and scripter Roy Thomas pay tribute to the 1941 horror classic The Wolf Man with this awesome Hal Jordan line: “Amazing! I’d seen Bruce Gordon become Eclipso, just before I was shanghaied into the 58th Century—but it’s still startling to see him pull a Larry Talbot on me.”

With Gordon back in control of his faculties, he recounts his terrible origin story to Green Lantern and speaks of his endless quest to finally rid himself of Eclipso. Carol Ferris had recently offered Gordon a role at Ferris Aircraft designing a solar-powered jet, hence his presence at the facility when she was kidnapped. While GL flies off to check on Tom, the now apartment-less Gordon checks into a small motel to rest—only to be hypnotized by his wrist watch. Gordon drives off into the night to Ferris Aircraft, where Eclipso takes control, levels the security team, and launches a satellite into space to trigger an eclipse (Eclipso refers to this as his “murder moon”). Green Lantern notices the eclipse, and fearing Eclipso’s hand in it launches himself into orbit, only to be hit by the villain’s jet-black rays, altering GL into a half-positive, half-negative being. Stammers Hal, “I-I feel a tug of war going on inside me—as if my good instincts were doing battle with the evil side of my nature. But what happens—if the evil side wins??”

Green Lantern #139 (Apr. 1981) sees Jordan split in two, as his warring sides—both positive and negative— duel for control. Hal (the positive one) thinks quickly and retrieves a purple bolt of cloth from Earth, enveloping it around his doppelgänger. Hal remarks, “Since I was fighting a negative version of myself, I suspected its weakness might be the color purple—the chromatic

Green Lantern vs. Eclipso The Lord of Darkness fought not one but two Emerald Crusaders throughout GL #136, 138, 139, and 186.

TM & © DC Comics.

40 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

opposite of my own ring’s vulnerability to yellow. That purple shroud cut off its power source—the murder moon—and my evil half just dissipated.”

Meanwhile, Eclipso has retreated to the inside of the satellite, where he has birthed a group of nega-men to man the operations and continue with an all-out solar assault on terra firma, triggering a devastating earthquake and encapsulating Los Angeles in a golden force beam. Green Lantern struggles to maintain order amidst the chaos inside the energy-cone until he’s felled by falling debris. Tom Kalmaku comes to his rescue and the two reconvene in Ferris Aircraft’s L.A. plant. Tom relays to GL that Eclipso is demanding $1 billion or he’ll “fry Los Angeles like an omelet!” Hal’s Justice League compatriots Batman, Firestorm, and Superman make cameo appearances trying to pierce the energy sphere from the outside, to no avail. Jordan comes up with a plan and uses his ring to fashion a gigantic solar receptor, placing it between Eclipso’s satellite and the sun—thereby cutting off the murder moon’s power supply. Eclipso sends his nega-men after GL but the hero makes short work of them. Inside the satellite, Eclipso has strapped himself to his ultimate weapon: a solar device he’s made Gordon develop via subconscious command that will exorcise and kill the scientist. With no time to spare and Gordon’s life hanging in the balance, Jordan destroys Eclipso’s computers and Gordon is once again separated from Eclipso, free from the influence of the induced eclipse.

In desperation, Eclipso blasts GL with a powerful ray from his black diamond but misses Jordan and tears a hole through the side of the satellite. The fiend is promptly pulled out into space, seemingly lost forever.

I reached out to Marv Wolfman to see if he had any anecdotes to share about these Eclipso-focused Green Lantern tales. Says Wolfman, “I honestly don’t remember much about those issues other than the fact that I used Eclipso, a character I had really liked. And I remember them mostly because I autograph those issues a lot and see them often. But though I remember well most stories I’ve done, there are a few [that], for whatever reason, fall through the cracks.”

Eclipso would make his return to the pages of Green Lantern in the Len Wein-penned tale entitled “In Brightest Night…!” Illustrated by Dave Gibbons, the story appears in issue #186 (Mar. 1985) and sees the villain returned to his orbiting satellite after having been sustained by the darkness of space. He’s made his way back to his satellite where he’s apprehended Bruce Gordon and Ferris Aircraft pilot Rich Davis and his solar-powered jet by way of a black-ray tractor beam. Eclipso forces Gordon to remove the power systems from the plane in an effort to finally be rid of the scientist. However, Gordon dupes Eclipso, short-circuiting the system and momentarily subduing him with a solar flare. Wasting no time, Davis escapes in the solar jet as Gordon and Eclipso tussle. Davis, his heart already weak and his death imminent, manages to land the jet—but expires shortly thereafter. Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris rush to the pilot’s side only to find him gone from this mortal coil. Remarks Jordan, “Poor Rich— all he really wanted was one last shot at a little glory… death is a hell of a price to pay for that.”

Meanwhile, John Stewart and sometime Green Lantern adversary the Predator arrive on the scene, intent on taking down Eclipso and his satellite permanently.

Stewart quickly shuttles Gordon and the Predator away, facing down the dark beast on his own. Eclipso fires a

deadly beam at GL, which is deflected by a ring-conjured shield—and it ricochets throughout the satellite, destroying its internal energy regulator. Without the control of the regulator, the tractor beam is transformed into a death-ray and begins a path of destruction. Stewart and Eclipso continue their pitched battle earthside, almost evenly matched, black diamond versus power ring. Their fight takes them dangerously close to the death-ray, and despite a sincere warning from Stewart, Eclipso is vaporized. With Eclipso out of the picture, Stewart now has to contend with the satellite, which is set to explode due the power overload. GL creates a giant baseball bat and sends the satellite into orbit, where it explodes with the intensity of a star. The story ends back on Earth, as Carol Ferris remarks to Gordon, “Well, at least you came out of this ahead, Bruce. Eclipso is finally gone… forever!” Looking shaken and not at all assuaged by her words, Gordon responds, “But is he, Carol? Can that kind of evil ever truly be destroyed? Can it?”

ECLIPSO FACES OFF AGAINST THE OUTSIDERS

“I found good stories could be had by using DC characters that had not been used for some time,” Mike W. Barr explains to BI regarding his use of Eclipso in The Outsiders #17–18 (Mar.–Apr. 1987). “I revived Kobra in Batman and the Outsiders with some success and decided Eclipso might be similarly used; he had not appeared for two years.

I was familiar with the concept of Eclipso—he had appeared in an issue of The Brave and the Bold [#64—ed.]—but I had not followed the character regularly. But even before writing him, I had picked up several back issues of House of Secrets, because the Eclipso stories were drawn by the great Alex Toth.

When I decided to use the character, I had access to the DC library of bound volumes of back issues to do my reference.”

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night—!” in The Outsiders #17 begins with a series of museum break-ins across North America, as a cult—identified as the People of the Dark—steals various relics and idols from the South Pacific. The People of the Dark are led by the mysterious Priestess, and all are clad in the familiar purple-and-yellow garb of Eclipso. The first scene unfolds in a Gotham City museum as Batman encounters the cult and instantly has suspicions about their

“Total Eclipso!”

Marv, Roy, and Joe in their blazing glory. Original art to the splash page of Green Lantern #138 (Mar. 1981). Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 41

Batman vs.

Eclipso (left) The enmity between the Caped Crusader and the Hero and Villain in One Man stretched back to this Silver Age issue of Brave and Bold, #64. Cover

by Gil Kane. (right) They’re at it again, two decades later, in Outsiders #18!

Cover by José Luis García-López and Jim Aparo.

TM & © DC Comics.

connections. As he battles the masked figures, the Darknight Detective notes, “There is something odd afoot here… and from their costumes, I’m afraid I know what it is!” Ultimately, the cult fells Batman, absconding with both him and an ancient tablet.

A day later, we find Outsiders Brion (Geo-Force) Markov and Lia (Looker) Briggs taking an audience with the prime minister of Diablo, Kenneth Tokelau, and his wife at their country’s consulate in Los Angeles.

While Markov and the prime minister discuss their respective nations’ interests, Tokelau’s wife Adela entertains Briggs, telling her about a stone idol adorning their residence and its historical significance, particularly as it relates to “when our people were ruled by superstition and ignorance… some of our older citizens still fear the ancient powers…” Adela is not able to finish her thought, as an explosion rocks the consulate. The People of the Dark burst in in search of the idol but are confronted by Geo-Force and Looker. The pair of Outsiders find themselves overwhelmed by the cult’s dark-light weapons until reinforcements arrive in the form of Halo, Black Lightning, Katana, and Metamorpho. The entire Outsiders team finds themselves outmatched by the shadow substance wielded by the Priestess, and the cult ends up escaping with the stone idol.

Back inside the consulate, the prime minister tells the Outsiders that the thieves’ garb “resembles that of a cult I believed long dead.

I remember them… they exerted an unsavory influence over the more superstitious tribes on Diablo.” Tokelau continues, “I was raised among a native tribe before my parents sent me off to school. I used to watch the demonstrations of the cult’s priest, Mophir. He called his cult the People of the Dark. Some of us did not believe in his powers, but none of us laughed. However, Mophir engineered his own destruction when he attempted to kill a scientist who had come to Diablo to study a solar phenomenon.” That scientist was, of course, Dr. Bruce Gordon.

The prime minister tells the Outsiders that Gordon and Mona Bennett are currently conducting his experiments on Diablo and asks for the team’s help in finally putting an end to the cult, lest his nation’s people “slide back into the old ways of superstition!”

The Outsiders arrive on Diablo but are rebuffed by Gordon, who does not want them interfering with his plot to finally be rid of Eclipso.

The heroes feign their departure, instead going in search of the People of the Dark outside of Gordon’s lab. The Outsiders come upon the cult and engage them in battle. Katana, Halo, and Metamorpho strike first,

taking out several foes. It is Geo-Force, though, who steals the show.

Muses Barr, “[Issue] #17 contains one of my favorite bits—when a gun is pulled on Geo-Force, he takes a bite out of the chamber, then spits the bullets at his assailants. This is right out of the world of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and probably (hopefully) drove the literalists nuts.”

Warner Bros. homage aside, the team ends up getting captured and secured in the cult’s temple, where they are reunited with Batman and Gordon (who had been apprehended in his lab). Gordon is promptly dragged off by several cult members and lashed to an altar. Under the cover of a solar eclipse, the Priestess utilizes the stolen idols to conjure forth Eclipso. Bellows the reincarnated beast, “It is good to be whole again… after all those months spent as dissipating energy. After Green Lantern lured me into the path of my satellite’s destructive laser beam… they thought me dead… but I cannot die. Not as men can. You restored me, Priestess, and I shall never forget it!” Eclipso is now a separate entity in full control of his own will, thanks to the ancient power of the artifacts gathered by the People of the Dark. The Priestess bestows upon Eclipso additional dark gems that had been hidden away over time and the villain uses them to reverse the solar eclipse, pulling the moon back over the sun—keeping the Earth in total darkness. Notes Barr, “I tried to amplify the scope of Eclipso somewhat by giving him other gems through which he could conduct his powers, rather than just the black diamond he had used since his origin. This didn’t catch on.”

The tale concludes in The Outsiders #18 with “…Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light!” The total eclipse has triggered chaos across the globe in the form of tidal waves and massive weather disturbances.

Meanwhile, the Outsiders have retreated and Eclipso sends the People of the Dark after them. They manage to outwit the cult and circle back to the bowels of the temple to free Dr. Gordon and Bennett. A lone cult member witnesses this and alerts Eclipso, who arrives and engages the Outsiders in battle. Eclipso is momentarily stunned by Katana’s blade and remarks, “I am hurt, woman, it is true… but as I have remarked, Eclipso is no mortal man, but the personification of a concept… and the concept could not be destroyed before—much less now!” In the ultimate “Who’s going to blink first?” scenario, Batman grabs Bruce Gordon and presses a Batarang into his throat, drawing blood. “Leave, Eclipso—or Bruce Gordon dies,” challenges Batman. “You wouldn’t,” Eclipso snarls.

“Try me,” replies the Caped Crusader. Eclipso relents and returns to the

42 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

temple, convinced that even the death of Bruce Gordon will soon no longer diminish his powers.

Eclipso proclaims his intent to make the Priestess his wife, but she reveals herself to be not only the daughter of Mophir but the prime minister’s wife, Adela Tokelau.

Says Tokelau, “No! I am the worthy one! I betrayed those who trust me to serve you—my people—and my husband, this nation’s president! I lied to him, used a double to act as Priestess when my presence was required! I have sacrificed all for you!” Eclipso replies icily, “Not just yet…” and vaporizes her with a blast of his black diamond.

“Now you have sacrificed all for me.”

Outside the temple, the Outsiders make short work of the remaining cult members and make their way to where Gordon’s solar storage batteries reside. Eclipso, now at full strength thanks to the mystic idols and the eclipse, senses Gordon’s return and vows to finish him once and for all.

Looker intuits his pending arrival and Mona begs Batman, “Please, can’t you take Bruce away from here? Eclipso will kill him!” “He’ll try, Miss Bennett—that’s what I’m counting on,” asserts Batman. “He’s right, dear. I’m through with running”—Gordon is ready to make his last stand.

Eclipso arrives, blasting through a wall. The team springs into action as Geo-Force pummels the villain with a null-gravity force blast while Metamorpho conducts energy from the solar batteries and bathes Eclipso in sunlight. Weakened but still standing, Katana enters the fray and proceeds to slice off Eclipso’s arms and legs. His body in pieces but his life essence still present, Eclipso proclaims, “Fooools… I cannot be destroyed… I will recover…” It’s at this moment that Bruce Gordon charges forward and absorbs the beast’s essence once again, proclaiming, “There’s one prison that can hold you, Eclipso… me… and maybe it’s a fate we both deserve.”

Despondent, Gordon turns to his beloved and cries, “I’m sorry, Mona… I’ll understand if you leave me now.”

Mona, undeterred, responds, “Darling, I’ve never been prouder of you than I am now. We may never be free of Eclipso’s curse, but we’ll fight him… together.”

Barr further reflects, “It is thought, I believe correctly, that middle-’60s DC characters like Eclipso and Metamorpho were created in an attempt to capitalize on the ‘Marvel style’ of character who were more flawed than the typical DC hero. To that end the ending of the story was, I hope, suitably tragic in keeping with the nature of the character.”

The cover of The Outsiders #17 proclaims “Batman is Back!” and this proves to be no false advertising as the character rejoins the team. Was this by editorial decree, or was Barr eager to write the character again within the team dynamic? And what of continuity concerns with the other books Batman was appearing in at the time? The writer explains, “It was my decision to bring Batman back to the team, in an attempt to counter sinking sales. It may have been premature for me to have ever taken him out of the book, but as much as I love Batman, I wanted to see if—as George Costanza would say—my boys could swim. I probably should have bitten the bullet (in a different sense than did Geo-Force) and renamed the book Batman and the Outsiders, but hindsight is always 20/20. DC was very unconcerned about the book’s sales and didn’t seem to care if the sales trend was reversed or not. Due to this, I paid as much attention to the continuity of the other Batman books as they paid to mine.”

Veteran artist Jim Aparo handled the pencils and inks for this storyline and was aided by colors from Adrienne Roy and Carl Gafford. Of Aparo, Barr says, “Jim was a pleasure to work with. He was familiar with the entire DC Universe and rarely needed any swipe. Regarding this story, I believe all I told him was that the villain was

Showdown! (top) “Go ahead, punk. Make my day.” (bottom) Mophir’s daughter’s not too happy with Eclipso. Both sequences from The Outsiders #18,

by Barr and Aparo.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 43

When Presidents Go Bad An eclipsed Commander in Chief gives DC’s mysterious stranger the what-for in The Phantom Stranger #3 (Dec. 1987). Cover by Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell.

TM & © DC Comics.

Eclipso and asked him if he needed any reference.

He needed none for Eclipso, but wanted some swipe on some of the civilian characters like Bruce Gordon and Mona Bennett. Jim was from the Milton Caniff school, as was the renderer of my favorite version of Eclipso, Alex Toth, so Jim seemed right at home with the character.”

LORD OF CHAOS

Eclipso’s most notable storyline came just after the end of the Bronze Age in the form of 1987’s The Phantom Stranger miniseries, written by Paul Kupperberg with stunning art by Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell.

The series establishes Eclipso as a significantly more potent entity with powers amplified by the Lords of Chaos—allowing the demon to go toe-to-toe with the historically omnipotent Phantom Stranger.

Kupperberg masterfully weaves a tale of the Phantom Stranger questioning his existence and mission, being stripped of his powers by the Lords of Order, and grappling with Eclipso’s plot to cover the Earth in darkness. Across four issues, the Phantom Stranger races to defeat Eclipso against the backdrop of a world erupting in chaos, from natural disasters to the looming threat of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union (all resulting from the machinations of the Lords of Chaos and Eclipso). Our mystical protagonist is aided by a diverse cast of some of DC’s best supporting characters, including Dr. Bruce Gordon, Commissioner James Gordon, Jimmy Olsen, Lieutenant Colonel Valentina Vostok (Negative Woman of the Doom Patrol), and Dr. Jenet Klyburn of S.T.A.R. Labs. [Editor’s note: Kupperberg, plus artists Mignola and Russell, recently discussed this Phantom Stranger miniseries at length in BACK ISSUE #92.]

Mignola and Russell illustrate perhaps the creepiest version of Eclipso yet, often setting the villain in shadowy silhouette with nothing but his gleaming teeth and eyes visible. While the interiors are stellar, it’s the covers that are absolutely magnificent. The cover of The Phantom Stranger #1 (Oct. 1987) is a classic depiction of our immortal hero, emerging from a darkened alley with newspapers scattered in the wind, their headlines telling of plague, famine, and war. The illustration rivals the classic representations of the character by Jim Aparo, Gerry Talaoc, and Neal Adams. Mignola and Russell portray Eclipso facing down the Phantom Stranger in final battle at Stonehenge on the cover of issue #4 (Jan. 1988), but perhaps the best cover of the limited series is that of issue #3 (Dec. 1987): It features an eclipsed President Ronald Reagan tearing into the Phantom Stranger with a machine gun! [Author’s note: No US presidents were harmed in the making of this cover. It was a demonic doppelgänger, folks!]

Kupperberg puts the Phantom Stranger through his paces and shows the character embracing humanity in ways that he hadn’t before.

In the concluding pages of the series, with Eclipso vanquished and order restored, the Stranger tells Dr. Gordon, “Mankind gives me my strength, my friend! Every soul that hopes or fears or needs adds that much more to what I am. You made me, Bruce Gordon! You and every being on this wondrous word are my creators and soul-mates… and from them have my powers been returned!”

And what of the series’ villain, Eclipso? He’d previously appeared sporadically throughout the Bronze Age, as I’ve recounted throughout this article. How had Eclipso come to be the foil for the Phantom Stranger? Had Kupperberg always been a fan of the character? “I’ve been a fan of Eclipso since the original Bob Haney and Lee Elias run in the 1960s, which also included a few stories drawn

by Alex Toth, but I don’t think he had been used much in recent years,” Kupperberg notes. “When I was looking for a villain for the mini, I went through the list to see what characters were available, and Eclipso’s name just popped out at me. Light and dark. Yin and yang.

He was made to order for the story I had in mind.”

Kupperberg’s The Phantom Stranger miniseries truly elevated Eclipso’s status in the DCU, taking him from something of an oddball relic of the Silver Age to an evil god-like being imbued with a frightening level of power. Modern Age creators would take Kupperberg’s idea and run with it, as evidenced by the massive Eclipso: The Darkness Within crossover event that spanned DC’s 1992 Annuals and the resultant Eclipso ongoing series that ran from 1992–1994. The character would continue to appear in various incarnations, from being a central figure in the 2003 “Princes of Darkness” storyline in JSA to possessing the Atom’s ex-wife Jean Loring in 2005’s Day of Vengeance miniseries.

While these stories will most certainly be covered in a future installment of BACK ISSUE, it’s clear that the concept has legs. In my email conversation with Len Wein, the writer states, “I think Eclipso endures for the same reason the story of Jekyll and Hyde perseveres; it’s the ultimate story of man’s inhumanity to man.” Other characters may inherit the mantle, but Dr. Bruce Gordon remains ever vigilant in his quest to finally rid the Earth—and himself—of the scourge that is Eclipso.

SHANNON E. RILEY has been reading and collecting comics since 1978, when his dad bought him his first book, Detective Comics #475. Find him on Instagram @ShannonERiley and on Facebook at facebook.com/shannoneriley.

44 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

by D o n

Va u g h a n

The adoption of the Comics Code by the Comics Magazine Association of America in October 1954 sent a seismic shift throughout the comic-book industry. Used to doing pretty much whatever they wanted within the pages of their magazines, publishers suddenly found themselves facing significant restrictions regarding content— including a ban on almost all elements of the supernatural.

Warned the Code: “Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.”

Such were the rules for more than 15 years.

Then came the 1970s, and the realization that many provisions within the Code had become obsolete. In 1971, the CMAA announced a TM new Code that loosened restrictions in several areas—including horror. Suddenly, vampires, werewolves, and their otherworldly brethren were fair game once again.

Marvel Comics was one of the first major publishers to jump at the opportunities presented by the new Comics Code. DC, however, moved a bit more slowly.

Though various creatures of the night appeared occasionally in DC’s mystery titles, it wasn’t until 1981— a decade after the new Comics Code debuted—that DC offered up a suitable rival to Marvel’s wildly successful Tomb of Dracula: “I… Vampire,” which premiered in House of Mystery #290 (cover-dated Mar. 1981).

I... Vampire was developed by writer J. M. DeMatteis, with a bit of guidance from Len Wein. “Len was editing House of Mystery and Weird War Tales and he wanted to launch ongoing series in both titles,” DeMatteis tells BACK ISSUE. “I pitched Len an idea I had on hand— Creature Commandos—for Weird War Tales, and for House of Mystery, he provided me with a title—I... Vampire– and sent me off to develop something. I came back with another idea I’d had cooking for a while, Greenberg the Vampire. Len didn’t think the tale of a Woody Allen-ish, New York vampire fit the bill (I later sold the idea to Marvel), but he liked the fact that there was a love story between two vampires at Greenberg’s core. Len told me to play with that concept. I thought it over and came back with Andrew Bennett and Mary, Queen of Blood. And we were off!”

DeMatteis was paired with artist Tom Sutton, a veteran cartoonist with a flair for the macabre. Together, they developed the look and feel of I...

Vampire, quickly pushing it to the forefront of the book. By issue #310 (Nov. 1982), I... Vampire was featured in larger type on the cover than House of Mystery. “Tom Sutton was Len’s call,” DeMatteis notes, “but I thought he was perfect for the series. His work dripped with mood and mystery.

And he was a rock-solid storyteller.”

Dead Man Walking The first appearance of Andrew Bennett— star of “I… Vampire”—in House of Mystery #290 (Mar. 1981). Cover by Joe Kubert.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 45

AOK(aluta and Kubert) Covers (right) Bennett’s love goes batty in this scene from HoM #290’s inaugural “I… Vampire” story, by DeMatteis and Sutton. (left and opposite page) Between Michael Kaluta and Joe Kubert, the covers for HoM’s I… Vampire series never (yes, we’re gonna say it) sucked.

TM & © DC Comics.

WE… VAMPIRES

I... Vampire told the story of Andrew Bennett, a lord in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, betrothed to sweet, red-haired Mary Seward. One evening, while riding through the woods, Bennett encounters a strange old man who he soon realizes is a vampire. “I will teach you the truth I alone have lived with for five hundred years,” the man says as he bites Bennett on the neck. As the life ebbs out of him, Bennett is revived by a vision of Mary and manages to kill the vampire with a stake to the chest. Bennett also perishes, only to awaken three days later as one of the undead.

Returning to his quarters within the castle, Bennett relates his story to Mary, who begs him to also make her a vampire. “I love you more than life itself,” she says. “I must be by your side for all eternity. Make me what you are, my love.”

Bennett initially refuses, but finally relents.

Mary’s transformation is far different from Bennett’s. Whereas Bennett awakened horrified and unsure, Mary is beside herself with glee.

“There is power in me… all the unbridled power of Hell at my command!” she states. She suggests that they unite to take over the kingdom and then the world, but Bennett refuses. Thwarted, Mary turns into a bat and flies away. Reveals Bennett: “That night I vowed that I would find her again… that I would save the soul that I had despoiled.”

The story picks up in modern times. Bennett had been chasing Mary for hundreds of years, determined to stop her mad plan of world conquest. Working with him are elderly vampire hunter Dimitri Mishkin and pretty Deborah Dancer, associates who have their own reasons for assisting Bennett. In the introductory story, the trio are attacked by Mary’s undead minions.

After a fierce struggle, they gain the upper hand and are certain they have Mary in their grasp, only to learn that their captive is actually one of Mary’s servants in disguise. Mary has escaped yet again.

46 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

The story continues in HoM #291 (Apr. 1981), which features a terrific cover by Joe Kubert.

In fact, Kubert illustrated the covers for nine of the 24 issues of House of Mystery that featured the I... Vampire saga. Joining him on cover duty was Michael Kaluta, who illustrated the covers for House of Mystery #93, 295, 302, 304, 305, and 309 through 319. Interestingly, I... Vampire did not appear in House of Mystery #292, 294, 296, 298, 300 and 301, perhaps because DC wanted to see how the series would be received by readers before committing to a monthly schedule.

In the second installment, titled “Night of the Living Undead,” Bennett and his colleagues infiltrate a private club called the Gates of Hell where vampires can mingle without interference.

Bennett hopes to find Mary there, and overhears gossip about a money-making operation for Mary’s vampiric organization, the Blood Red Moon, involving a heroin dealer named Emil Veldt. Bennett warns a family doing business with Veldt that their association will lead only to a horrible death, at which point Veldt turns into a bat and flees out a window. Bennett confronts Veldt in his home and throws Veldt’s drug kit out the window. Veldt lunges after it, dying horribly when hit by the sun’s rays.

The third chapter in the I... Vampire saga, featured in HoM #293 (June 1981), has Bennett and his colleagues going up against a racist organization called the American Freedom Party, led by one Q. B. Stonewall. During an altercation with a black state senator named Eugene Olive, who wants the organization gone, Stonewall is felled by a heart attack, which Bennett believes is merely a ruse. Members of the American Freedom Party set fire to Olive’s home, trapping his wife and children. Dmitri saves the youngsters, but is unable to save Olive’s wife.

Bennett flies to Stonewall’s hotel, where he learns that Stonewall is dead. Bennett then realizes that Stonewall’s attractive assistant is the real vampire and flies off to kill her. However, Dmitri

arrives and drives him away with a cross, allowing the woman to escape in wolf form. Dmitri reveals that the woman, who appears young enough to be his granddaughter, is actually his mother.

Bennett, Dmitri, and Deborah continue their quest to find Mary in House of Mystery #295 (Aug. 1981). On a mountain pass they are driven off the road by an oncoming car, requiring a quick and daring escape. Deborah then confronts Dmitri about his actions earlier, and the elderly Russian relates the story of how his mother was turned into a vampire by Mary when he was a child. Abandoned and distraught, young Dmitri was befriended by Bennett, who took the boy under his (bat) wing and taught him the ways of the vampire hunter.

Over the next few issues, Bennett and his cohorts encounter a number of strange people and stranger circumstances as they continue their pursuit of Mary and the Blood Red Moon. In HoM #297 (Oct. 1981), which saw a price increase from 50 cents to 60 cents, along with a promise of “more chilling pages of story and art,” they encounter vampires at a California Zen retreat.

It’s a just-average standalone tale that doesn’t particularly advance the “hunt for Mary” storyline.

A NEW WRITER

In #299 (Dec. 1981), written by Bruce Jones and illustrated by Sutton, a hitchhiking Bennett is picked up by a man in a pickup truck. As they drive, Bennett thinks back to an earlier incident in which he, Deborah, and Dmitri are attacked by humans under Mary’s employ. The men drive the trio’s truck off the road then shoot up Bennett’s coffin with him inside while Deborah and Dmitri are forced to watch.

Bennett’s body is then exposed to the sun. But before he can perish, an earthquake conveniently occurs and Bennett, Deborah, and Dmitri plunge into a subterranean cave. When help finally arrives, Bennett flees in bat form so he can return to his mansion and quench his thirst. Realizing he poses a dangerous threat to his friends, Bennett decides then to go off on his own.

Bennett is roused from his thoughts when he and the truck driver are attacked by more of Mary’s henchmen. They are driven off the road and the salesman is killed, his face burned beyond recognition. Bennett quickly changes clothes with the dead man and flees on foot.

Why did DeMatteis leave I... Vampire?

Greener pastures. “Marvel made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he explains. “I signed an exclusive contract with them, so I couldn’t continue with I... Vampire.”

Jones continues the story in HoM #302 (Mar. 1982). Bennett eventually finds his way to the home of the driver who gave him a lift and is offered a room by the man’s wife, June, who is also caring for their young son, Teddy.

Bennett befriends the boy over their mutual interest in astronomy and takes him and June to a carnival for a little evening fun. Later, one of Mary’s minions enters the house and drives a stake through Teddy’s heart as the boy sleeps,

believing he’s Bennett. A devastated Bennett encounters June at Teddy’s grave and is attacked yet again as he tries to explain his predicament.

Bennett and June flee in June’s car and manage to evade the attackers, though June perishes from an arrow to the back.

The Jones-scripted “Carnival of Souls” is the lead feature in HoM #303 (Apr. 1982). Still separated from Deborah and Dmitri, Bennett infiltrates a carnival, where he meets journalist Margo Jennings. After saving Margo from one of Mary’s goons, he sends her away with a promise of more info if she’ll meet him later that night. Hidden behind a Frankenstein’s Monster mask, Bennett is brought into Mary’s inner circle, where he learns that the Blood Red Moon have kidnapped the infant granddaughter of industrialist J. Brown Wooley.

There’s just one hitch: The cops have surrounded the hotel where the child is being held, so a plan is hatched to use the carnival’s Ferris wheel, located right next to the hotel, to sneak her away. Bennett meets up with Margo later that night and enlists her aid in saving the kidnapped child, but Mary intervenes, killing Margo and plunging a stake into Bennett’s chest.

Ernie Colón assumes the art chores in HoM #304 (May 1982), which continues the story from the previous issue. Mary orders her henchmen to place the dying Bennett in a carnival funhouse coffin, where he looks just like one of the monster mannequins.

Mustering the last of his mental reserves, Bennett psychically reaches out to a young woman who is going through the fun house with friends and compels her to remove the stake from his chest, saving his life. Bennett then races to the scene of the kidnapping, arriving just as the child (who, oddly, looks like a ten-year-old boy rather than an infant girl, as stated in the previous issue) is tossed from a hotel window into the waiting arms of one of Mary’s henchmen atop the Ferris wheel. A fight ensues and the boy almost dies, but Bennett manages to save him as the Ferris wheel bursts into flames, engulfing everything around it. Bennett initially believes Mary and her crew have died in the inferno, only to have his hopes dashed when he spots a single bat fleeing the scene.

Jones takes the story in a decidedly different direction in HoM #305 (June 1982), illustrated again by Colón. As newspapers tout the development of a serum that appears to cure cancer, Bennett encounters a number of vampires who have curiously died without a mark on them. Mary, he finds, has fled to Egypt, so he gives chase, encountering a group of nasty desert vampires along the way. The situation looks bleak, but the monsters suddenly fall dead before they can kill him. Bennett continues into the desert, where he finds Mary near death. Saved by Bennett, Mary informs him that the cancer serum has made human blood fatal to vampires. But Mary has a plan: escape Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 47

Who’s Who, Version 1 Courtesy of Heritage, original art to the I… Vampire entry from Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #11 (Jan. 1986). Pencils

by Tom Sutton, inks

by Dick Giordano.

TM & © DC Comics.

through time via the rings of Kur-Alet, an ancient Egyptian king. Bennett believes they can use the rings to return to a time when they were still human, and agrees to help Mary find them, only to be doublecrossed when Mary uses one of the rings to go back without him. Bennett takes a second ring off Kur-Alet’s mummified remains, which brings the long-dead king back to life. They battle, and Bennett bashes the mummy’s head with a rock. He then utters the chant that activates the ring, disappearing in time just as Deborah and Dmitri arrive on the scene. The episode concludes with Andrew arriving in 1888 England, where he finds a woman dead—an apparent victim of Jack the Ripper—and hears Mary’s deranged laughter in the distance.

SUTTON SWINGS BACK

Tom Sutton returns in HoM #306 (July 1982), where we find Bennett being pursued by a mob that believes he’s Jack the Ripper. He turns into a bat and escapes, but a lack of food has weakened him and he falls from the sky.

Bennett awakens in the care of Dr. Jonathan Kelsey and

48 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

his assistant, Penny Bower. Kelsey explains that he had given Bennett a life-saving blood transfusion and offers him a position as his assistant once he’s feeling better, which Bennett accepts.

Bennett ponders why Mary would want to go back to Victorian England, then remembers that Dr. Barr, the elderly scientist who invented the cancer vaccine that made human blood so deadly to vampires, was the son of a woman who narrowly escaped Jack the Ripper’s murderous onslaught. Mary, he realizes, wants to kill the woman and ensure Barr is never born. Bennett enlists Penny Bower’s assistance in finding Mary, and they catch her immediately after Mary has murdered Penny’s sister, a streetwalker—and the apparent mother of Barr. Mary readies herself for a return trip to the present, where the vaccine theoretically no longer exists, but is stopped at the last minute by Dr. Kelsey, who makes mention of a third Bower sister before admitting that he’s the real Jack the Ripper. Mary finishes the time-travel incantation as Dr. Kelsey prepares to kill her, allowing Bennett to throw himself atop the demented serial killer. Dr. Kelsey attempts to stab Bennett in the back with a large blade but

Bennett turns into a bat, causing Dr. Bower to fatally impale himself.

Bennett flees the scene as the police arrive and offer assistance to Penny. One of the officers, we learn, is Joseph Allen Barr, the father of the doctor who developed the cancer serum.

House of Mystery #307 (Aug. 1982), scripted by Jones and illustrated by Sutton, finds Bennett thrown forward in time, thanks to the ring of Kur-Alet, which compels him to follow Mary wherever she travels. He saves a young girl named DeeDee when she accidentally falls from a cliff into the ocean, at which point we cut to Deborah, who is having a nightmare about the same bizarre incident.

Dmitri believes it’s because Deborah and Bennett have developed such a close bond, and suggests they use the link to rejoin Bennett.

Meanwhile, Bennett befriends DeeDee’s family, who invite him to stay with them. By watching the evening news, Bennett learns that he’s in 1964 Maine, but is unsure what Mary plans to do there. While DeeDee watches television, Bennett excuses himself to go to bed, then slips out to kill something so he can feed.

While he’s out, Mary snatches DeeDee. Under hypnosis, Deborah relives the moment when Mary used DeeDee to lure Bennett to her, and orders him to give her his ring in exchange for the youngster’s life. It is then revealed that DeeDee is Deborah. (Surprise!) Bennett tosses the ring into the sea, but Mary reneges and throws DeeDee over the cliff. Bennett saves her but is impaled on a tree. Still in a trance, Deborah breaks through and inhabits her younger self’s body. With all her might, she pulls Bennett from the tree, saving his life.

House of Mystery #308 (Sept. 1982) opens with the ring Bennett threw into the ocean coming to rest on the skeletal finger of a long-drowned seaman.

With Mary having again disappeared through time, Bennett and DeeDee enlist the aid of a fisherman to help them retrieve it. Bennett dives deep and finds the wreck of a German U-Boat, where he is attacked by the resurrected crew. While the crew holds him down, Bennett watches as the ship’s captain—the ring on his finger— disappears through a hole in the hull and reaches the surface, where he attacks DeeDee and the fisherman. Bennett joins the fray, snatches the ring from the dead Nazi, and travels through time to a period before he and Mary had transformed into vampires. Mary is happy to see him, and Bennett believes they can lead a happy life together once again, unaware that the evil Mary is also on the scene. Bennett spots his previous self, knocks him unconscious, hides him in a barn, and swaps clothes with him. A short time later, Mary attacks her other self, noting, “Now, my sweet self, you’ll soon be on the path to your true destiny!”

The story picks up in HoM #309 (Oct. 1982), with Bennett saving an innocent girl unjustly accused of being a witch, then fleeing as a bat. From there he travels to a costume party, which is interrupted by the witch hunters and the girl Bennett had saved. As she tells her bizarre story, the younger Bennett, having escaped from the barn, crashes the party, tells everyone he, too, was the victim of a warlock, and attacks his older self, who is dressed in costume, accidentally setting the place on fire in the process. Mary then orders the witch hunters to seize the older Bennett, but is stopped when she realizes her younger self is trapped in a closet and about to burn to death.

Younger Mary is saved in the nick of time, and older Bennett uses the opportunity to escape via his own ring, reappearing in contemporary Manhattan.

THE MISHKIN AND COHN TEAM

Beginning with HoM #310 (Nov. 1982), Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn took over the writing chores from Bruce Jones, with art by Adrian Gonzales (pencils) and Tom Sutton (inks). Traveling through time to contemporary New York City, Bennett curses the ring of Kur-Alet and throws it into the river, knowing that once Mary joins him, as she must, that her reign of terror will be confined to modern times.

Bennett hails a cab and makes the acquaintance of pretty young woman named Susan. They go out for a drink and Bennett becomes enamored of her. She tells him about a man she met at a party who cast an inescapable spell over her, and Bennett eventually realizes that she is a vampire who has yet to master her special abilities. Bennett instructs her in the ways of the vampire, but Susan fears she’ll turn evil like Mary and kills herself by embracing the rising sun. “I didn’t turn to look back as I sought a place in the still dark city to wait out the day,” Bennett says as he flies away.

“But I wondered if… when my mission is finally over…

I would find the same courage as she… to open wide my arms and embrace the killing sun’s arrival, as in the terrible ecstasy of my final moments a new day dawns.”

Mishkin recalls that he and Cohn had been writing for House of Mystery, as well as the other DC anthology titles, for around a year when editor Karen Berger asked them to take over I... Vampire. “I’m certain we worked full-script on the series,” he tells BACK ISSUE. “We would have worked out the plots together, and maybe even blocked out the pacing somewhat, before one of us

I’ll Stake Manhattan Title page to the I… Vampire tale in House of Mystery #310 (Nov. 1982). A Mishkin/Cohn/Gonzales/Sutton production. Scan courtesy of Andy Mangels.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 49

Who’s Who, Version 2 Courtesy of Heritage, original Tom Sutton art to the I… Vampire entry from Who’s Who in the DC Universe #2 (Sept. 1990).

TM & © DC Comics.

50 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

would write the script. Then the other would edit/ suggest/quibble/revise.

“Looking back on the stories now, my guess is that the first drafts were mine. I say this because the dialogue is pretty facile throughout, and pretty much indistinguishable from anybody else’s solid, standard writing of the time. I was the one who, for good or ill, more easily slipped into that kind of groove, whereas Gary’s approach to dialogue has always been more distinctive and quirky.”

Adds Cohn: “The only thing that attracted me to the series was that it was regular work (and pay) and it might be a good showcase for us. I wanted to do it well, and I guess whatever we did was the best we could do at the time. But I didn’t like the series or the character, so it was really just a gig.”

House of Mystery #311 (Dec. 1982), written by Mishkin and Cohn and illustrated by Paris Cullins, Adrian Gonzales, and Tom Sutton, finds Bennett in a movie theater watching a revival of Woodstock. On screen a woman appears to be dancing by herself and Bennett recalls his experiences at the seminal music festival, where he thought Mary and the Blood Red Moon would be recruiting young blood. A girl named Debbie and her friends are intrigued by a strange school bus, and are invited to a party of the bus’s vampiric inhabitants. Debbie experiences a sense of foreboding and walks away, only to be approached by one of the vampires.

Bennett intercedes and quickly dispatches Mary’s undead minion. Debbie tries to get her friends to leave with her, only to stumble on Mary draining the life from her boyfriend. Again she flees, and again Bennett saves her.

Bennett later realizes that the girl is a younger version of Deborah Dancer.

Bennett leaves Debbie with Dmitri and retires to a coffin in a truck. Debbie is sleeping next to the coffin when the truck is attacked by a human member of the Blood Red Moon. Bennett is awakened by Debbie’s scream and quickly dispatches the intruder. That night, Bennett walks through the festival crowd, killing vampires as he encounters them. Debbie watches from the bushes and is attacked yet again, but runs away after being saved by Dmitri. She later encounters her friends, all of whom have been turned into vampires. They tell her that being a vampire is wonderful, but Debbie encourages them to embrace the love that’s all around them.

Unfortunately, they cannot, and perish “in a sea of peace and love.” Debbie is confronted by Mary, but Bennett saves her from Mary’s wrath. As the sun rises, Mary transforms into a bat and flies away. Back in the theater, Bennett notes that it was then that Debbie joined him and Dmitri on their quest. The scene in the movie, of Debbie seemingly dancing alone, is actually of her dancing with Bennett, whose image cannot be captured on film. The final panel shows Bennett at a phone booth telling Deborah that he is coming home.

Cullins, just 22 at the time, was relatively new to the comic-book industry when he was put on I... Vampire with Adrian Gonzales. “When Tom Sutton joined in, that’s when it became meaty and worthwhile,” he tells BACK ISSUE. “The work became very passionate. I took a liking to I...

Vampire not just because of the work we were doing on it but because of the one and only Mike Kaluta, who did many of the covers. We became very good friends.”

Cullins also enjoyed working with Mishkin and Cohn.

“Their work always had a touch of humor to it, and I took to that,” he notes. As for Sutton inking his pencils, Cullins enthuses, “I wasn’t just pleased, I was enamored.

I liked his work. It was very free-flowing. He had a unique technique with the brush.”

Bennett goes underground—literally—in “The Thing in the Tunnel,” the lead feature in HoM #312 (Jan. 1983), illustrated by Adrian Gonzales and Tom Sutton. The reason?

A trainman has gone missing in a New York City subway tunnel, leading Bennett and his crew to ponder whether vampires are involved. Bennett visits the scene of the incident, turning to mist to avoid detection. Further down the tunnel, he meets Maggie Carle, a reporter with the Daily Post, who also is investigating the incident. They find the body of the missing trainman, his body “a bloodless pulp.”

Bennett and Maggie hide in the shadows when an armed search party from Barr Research Laboratories walk by. Maggie is snatched by a bizarre monster, and Bennett gives chase. The creature turns out to be a huge spider that Bennett believes was once human. They fight, and Bennett is bitten. But just as the spider creature is about to get the best of him, Maggie knocks it unconscious with a pipe. At that moment, the armed team from Barr Research Laboratories finds them and orders the duo to accompany them.

House of Mystery #312 (Feb. 1983) opens with Bennett and Maggie at Barr Research Laboratories, where they meet Dr. Barr himself. Though 93 years old, Barr appears to be in his 40s. Bennett is taken away and thrown in a cage, which he easily escapes by turning into a rat. He then uses his vampiric mind control to force a guard to tell him all he knows, including the fact that Barr has developed some kind of eternal youth serum. Bennett searches the laboratory and comes across a cage full of weird, man-size, spider-like creatures. A lone human begs for help and informs Bennett that the creatures are actually the basis for the cancer serum.

Two scientists with guards enter the room, forcing Bennett to turn into mist to avoid detection. The group remove the man Bennett had been talking to and take him to “the extractor.” Bennett then reveals himself and attacks the scientists, one of whom tells him that a serum derived from the spider creatures protects the human body from cancer. Bennett finds Barr getting ready to drain Maggie of her blood. The mad scientist explains to Bennett that he has been using the cancer serum to get rid of his vampiric competition, then admits that the whole thing was a hoax—the serum doesn’t really cure cancer. The two vampires go at it, and Barr reveals an antidote to the vampire-killing serum. He taunts Bennett, expecting him to soon die from the spider-creature’s toxic bite in the subway tunnel, only to be killed by Maggie, who escaped her bonds by turning into mist. That’s right: Maggie also is a vampire! She admits to working with Mary, but gives Bennett the antidote so he can save himself. “Just don’t tell Mary I gave it to you without a fight,” she says as she turns into a bat and flies away. “She’s not somebody I’d like to have mad at me!” The lab burning down around him, Bennett takes the antidote and makes his escape.

House of Mystery #312 (Mar. 1983) introduces us to Edward Trane, one of Bennett’s earlier assistants in his ongoing battle against the Blood Red Moon. The story opens with Trane kidnapping Deborah in an effort to get Bennett to reveal himself. He tells her how, seven decades earlier, he offered to help Bennett’s crusade by going undercover as one of the Blood Red Moon’s human servants, only to be discovered as one of Bennett’s allies. Bennett attempted to save him, but was captured and held prisoner for several days, until his hunger was ravenous. According to Trane, the Blood Red Moon then gave him to Bennett, who drank his blood and turned him into a vampire.

Paris in Russia Paris Cullins, as inked by Tom Sutton, on the splash page from Mishkin and Cohn’s I… Vampire tale in House of Mystery #316 (May 1983). Scan courtesy of Don Vaughan.

TM & © DC Comics.

Bennett arrives to save Deborah, but is trapped with her in a windowed room by Trane, who is certain that Bennett will turn on the girl just as he turned on him decades before.

Trane watches as Bennett becomes increasingly weak from hunger. A desperate Deborah offers herself to ease his agony, but Bennett refuses.

On day three, Trane returns to find that Deborah has killed Bennett by breaking a chair and plunging a piece of wood into his heart. He races into the room, enraged at being cheated out of his victory, only to grabbed by Bennett, whose “death” had been a ruse. The men struggle and Trane gets the upper hand, only to have Deborah stab him in the back with a wood stake. As Trane lies dying, Bennett explains that it wasn’t him who turned Trane into a vampire, it was members of the Blood Red Moon. Trane’s drive for revenge had been for naught.

MR. BENNETT GOES TO WASHINGTON

Mishkin and Cohn, supported on the art side by Paris Cullins and Tom Sutton, take Andrew Bennett’s saga to Washington, D.C., in HoM #315 (Apr. 1983). Bennett, Deborah, and Dmitri are walking through Washington Square Park when the park is swarmed by a group of religious fanatics wearing what appear to be Ku Klux Klan outfits with red crucifixes on the chest. They start to beat up hippies and other undesirables and Bennett, Deborah, and Dmitri must fight their way free.

The brawl dies down when a sound truck arrives and Rev. Edgar Warnock, founder of the American Crusade, starts lecturing on how America has turned to sin. Bennett and his companions are about to leave when Dmitri realizes the young woman at Warnock’s side is his mother.

To learn the relationship between Warnock’s crusade and the Blood Red Moon, Deborah volunteers at the headquarters of the American Crusade.

After some indoctrination she is admitted into the group and given a personal audience with Warnock, who tries to turn her into a vampire.

However, his attack is thwarted at the last minute by Dmitri’s mother, Dunya, who tells Warnock that Deborah is one of Bennett’s associates.

The next evening, a trap is set for Bennett, who is attacked by members of the Blood Red Moon and put on a burning pyre. Meanwhile, Warnock prepares to turn Deborah into a vampire but at the last minute is stopped

by Dmitri. Deborah and Dmitri find Bennett on the pyre and struggle to save him. While Dmitri takes on the assembled vampires, Deborah climbs the pyre and pulls the stake from Bennett’s chest, saving his life. Together, the trio turn the tables on the vampires.

Believing Bennett to be dead, Warnock meets with a young senator who likely will be president one day. He’s about to turn the politician into a vampire when Bennett and his colleagues once again ruin the party. Bennett kills Warnock, then uses his psychic powers to wipe the senator’s mind so that all he’ll remember is escaping from a terrible

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 51

Grand Finale The I… Vampire series concluded in House of Mystery #319 (Aug. 1983); HoM itself closed its doors two issues later. Cover by Kaluta, interior sequence by Mishkin, Cohn, and Sutton.

TM & © DC Comics.

fire. In the last panel, we learn that Dmitri has left his friends to find his mother once again.

As one reads I... Vampire, it quickly becomes obvious that Mishkin and Cohn have a fondness for popular music, as evidenced by the titles of many of their stories. House of Mystery #316 (May 1983) is a good example, featuring a story titled “Back in the U.S.S.R.!” that finds Bennett and Deborah traveling to the Soviet Union in search of Dmitri Mishkin. Outside the Moscow Airport, Bennett and Deborah are approached by KGB agents, one of whom fires a strange sun-ray weapon at Bennett, wounding him.

Bennett learns that there is a secret Kremlin plot afoot and he and Deborah soon find themselves at a special installation devoted to the study of vampires. They are attacked by a pack of were-beasts and captured by Col. Yuri Rashnikov, a vampire who plans to turn the entire Soviet leadership using a special serum that instills immortality without the usual downsides of vampirism. At that moment, members of the Blood Red Moon arrive and a melee ensues, but Bennett and Deborah are rescued by Dmitri, who has become a vampire.

More Soviet shenanigans follow. In HoM #317 (June 1983), Bennett, Deborah, and Dmitri are attacked by vampires but use the sun-ray gun to save themselves.

Moments later, Dmitri’s mother, Dunya, with Mary at her side, shoots Dmitri in the shoulder using a sun-ray rifle. The trio flee to a small cottage, which Dmitri recalls as his childhood home and the place where his mother was turned. After turning back a swarm of vampires, our heroes are confronted by Dunya, who shoots Bennett with a sun-ray rifle. Moments later, as she prepares to kill Deborah, Dmitri kills his mother with a stake to the back.

Dan Day takes over the penciling chores, with inks by Sutton, in HoM #318 (July 1983). Bennett decides to test the powder that promises to eliminate the worst aspects of vampirism and becomes transformed. No longer is the sun deadly to him, nor does he need blood to survive.

52 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

He and Deborah move on to Paris, where they continue their hunt for Mary. Bennett befriends a female vampire and tricks her into taking him to the hiding place of the Blood Red Moon. Bennett plans to hunt the vampires during the day, when they’re sleeping, but his plan falls apart when, after a night in a coffin, he finds that he has become paralyzed. Mary tells him that he is the victim of rigor mortis, an after effect of the serum that was supposed to save him. The compound, he learns, is effective only if taken before someone is turned into a vampire.

And so we come to the end of our story. House of Mystery #319 (Aug. 1983) opens with Andrew Bennett slowly dying, his body in literal decay, while Mary taunts him. She bites Deborah in front of him and begs him to live long enough to witness Deborah turn. Bennett experiences numerous dreams, wonderful sequences drawn by Sutton that come alive with an almost hallucinogenic quality.

Finally, Mary brings Deborah before Bennett and orders her to cut off his head. Instead, Deborah attacks Mary, who is stunned that her “slave” isn’t under her control after all. The women fight and Deborah eventually drags Mary into the sunlight, informing her that she took the second packet of the Soviet serum before she had been bitten, making her immune to the ravages of the sun. Mary dies and Deborah returns to Bennett’s side, comforting him during his final minutes. As she expresses her love for him, Andrew Bennett’s body turns to dust.

“This was the good part—killing him as dead as dead could be,” observes Cohn. “The word came from our editor that the series was being canceled, and we were to kill him so dead he couldn’t ever come back (which, of course, has turned out to be a comics impossibility; they all come back).

So we had a lot of fun figuring out how to really destroy Andrew Bennett, and I think that last issue is the best part of what we did. Even the writing was pretty solid.”

Miskin agrees. “Being given the opportunity to write a real ending was something to relish, and I think what

we did was solid and even emotionally rich. I also like the fact that Deborah Dancer, the damsel, got to play a decisive role rather that being a prop, and that she believably became a tougher person as we led up to that moment, although it wasn’t clear to me on rereading exactly how she knew for sure that the serum she took would do what it did.”

I… VAMPIRE FOREVER

House of Mystery housed I... Vampire through its entire ’80s run, with one exception: a team-up between Andrew Bennett and Batman in The Brave and the Bold #195 (Feb. 1983). Written by Mike W. Barr and illustrated by Jim Aparo, the story has Andrew Bennett in Gotham investigating a spate of vampire killings, and Batman assisting a mob boss whose daughter has been bitten. Ultimately, they join forces to take on Mary and the Blood Red Moon. Bennett is shot saving Batman’s life, but Batman returns the favor with a blood transfusion.

“Editor Len Wein wanted a Batman/I…Vampire crossover for Brave & Bold #195 and apparently thought I was the guy to write it,” Mike Barr tells BACK ISSUE. “Batman and the supernatural (as opposed to science fiction) can be a good match, depending on the approach, and I think this one worked pretty well. Such stories force Batman to reconsider his rationalistic view of the universe, which is always fun.”

Barr continues, “I recall asking Len why he didn’t assign the tale to either I…Vampire creator J. M. DeMatteis, or then-current I…V (Heh… ‘i.v.’) writers Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn, but I’ve forgotten Len’s answer. Whatever he said, it alleviated my fears that I would be taking work away from any of those colleagues, all of whom were friends.

Artist Jim Aparo was not familiar with Bennett, but from the masterful job he did, you’d think he’d been drawing Bennett his entire career.

“Len later told me that [DeMatteis] liked the story, particularly the opening narration, in which Bennett expresses a major regret for his vampiric state—that he is now unable to enjoy a simple sunrise.

This hopefully brought to the reader’s mind a factor about Bennett he had not considered… which is the basic definition of characterization.”

One might assume that Andrew Bennett’s death in his House of Mystery series would mean the end for the heroic vampire hunter, but we’re talking comic books here, so of course, such was not the case.

In fact, over the years, Bennett has made a number of reappearances throughout the DC Universe. He played a significant role in J. M. DeMatteis’ run on Dr. Fate (in which we learn that he didn’t really die at the end of I... Vampire, and in fact can’t die at all), and also appeared in the 2006 miniseries Day of Vengeance, written by Bill Willingham, and the 2008 miniseries Reign in Hell, penned by Keith Giffen. In addition, Bennett showed up as a minor character in a Brian Azzarello-scripted Dr. 13 tale which appeared as a backup story in Tales of the Unexpected featuring the Spectre #2 (Jan. 2007), and starred in the story “Seeing is Believing” in DC Universe Halloween Special 2009 (Dec. 2009). Written by Michael Siglain and illustrated by Kelley Jones, the story finds the Outsiders working together to prevent the resurrection of Mary, Queen of Blood. Unfortunately, Deborah Dancer uses the opportunity to also resurrect Andrew Bennett. Enraged at being awaked from his eternal slumber, Bennett turns on Deborah and appears to kill her.

I... Vampire was resurrected as part of DC’s New 52 (as I, Vampire) in 2011. Written by Joshua Hale Fialkov and initially illustrated by Andrea Sorrentino, the series offered a more contemporary take on Andrew Bennett as he allied himself with a variety of individuals, including John Constantine and Batman, to take down Mary and finally put an end to the Blood Red Moon. Sadly, the series ended with #19 (June 2013). Three collected editions have been released as of this writing: Tainted Love (2012); Rise of the Vampires (2013), which also includes Justice League Dark #7 (May 2012) and 8 (June 2012); and Wave of Mutilation (2013).

Thirty-five years after the debut of I... Vampire, those involved in its run look back with varying memories. “I see all the faults of a young writer just starting to learn his craft,” DeMatteis says of his involvement.

“At the same time, I see the passion that I poured into it. And I’m very grateful that the character has lasted all these years. I was thrilled when, a couple of years ago, I got to renew my acquaintance with Andrew Bennett when I was writing Justice League Dark.”

Gary Cohn is a bit more cynical, noting, “I consider this particular work of ours to be pretty weak (and I think the property itself is weak).

When the collected edition came out a few years ago I read the whole

When Batmen Meet Batman and Bennett join forces in The Brave and the Bold #195 (Feb. 1983), by Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo.

TM & © DC Comics.

series for the first time in years. My takeaway is that Tom Sutton was a fantastic artist who did brilliant work on the series, and we blowed the vampire up real good at the end. Otherwise, I thought it was mopey, turgid, pointless, badly written stuff.”

In hindsight, Dan Mishkin is a bit gentler. “My assessment may partly be colored by the fact that we were still learning our craft,” he explains.

“And what better place to do that than in a backwater anthology comic that no one is reading? (Though, in terms of raw numbers, ‘no one’ in the early 1980s probably translates to ‘smash hit’ in the 2010s.) It’s also interesting, as it was in the case of OMAC, to take over a series and have to analyze the craft and intentions of those who went before you.”

Andrew Bennett lived, died, and lived some more. He had a good run and now awaits his next supernatural adventure. “I’d love to see DC develop I... Vampire as a movie,” DeMatteis tells BACK ISSUE. “I think it has tremendous potential in that arena.”

DON VAUGHAN has had a love affair with comic books since he was 11 years old. His writing has appeared in an eclectic array of publications, including Military Officer Magazine, Nursing Spectrum, Filmfax, and The Weekly World News.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 53

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conducted by M i c h a e l

Eury

on Oct. 17, 2015 at the Fayetteville Com transcribed by Steven Thompson

ic-Con

MICHAEL EURY: I’m Michael Eury, editor of BACK ISSUE magazine, and some years back I was the editor of a comic book called The Maze Agency, which we’ll talk about in a moment or two. But the creator and writer of that comic, and many other comics, is here to my right.

Would you please say hello to Mr. Mike W. Barr! [applause] We’re going to start by talking about Batman, though. I have a photocopy here of an inscription [Barr laughs] that Mike made on my personal copy of the graphic novel Batman: Son of the Demon, published in 1987, but signed by Mike in 1989.

MIKE W. BARR: What was the occasion of that? Do you remember?

EURY: Let’s see... Were you visiting the Comico office for The Maze Agency?

BARR: Maybe.

EURY: Okay, ’89. April 26th, ’89. Son of the Demon was roughly a year and a half, two years old at that point. [to audience] Has anybody read this graphic novel?

Okay. You remember Son of the Demon. There is something that happens at the end of Son of the Demon, a little “present” left behind. You know what I’m talking about? What was it? A new person. A baby? [to Mike] So, do you say “ROSH” al Ghul or “RAYSH” al Ghul?

BARR: I say “RAYSH” al Ghul. That was how Denny O’Neil it should be pronounced.

EURY: And that’s what Julie Schwartz said, too.

BARR: Yeah.

EURY: Although almost everybody in the world says “ROSH” al Ghul because of the movies. If you look at some of the earlier comics featuring Ra’s al Ghul, you’ll actually notice his first name is lettered with a macron over the “a” to signify a long “a.”

“R-R-RRAYSH” al Ghul. I don’t know if you have to roll the “r” like I just did, though.

The Son of the Demon was a great graphic novel drawn by Jerry Bingham and written by Mike, and it features the birth of the child of Batman and Talia at the end of the story. [Barr laughs] And it was very controversial because shortly after that, the Batman movie comes out.

BARR: Yeah, it was about two years after that.

EURY: Yes. And Batman was a merchandising icon again.

BARR: Mm-hm.

EURY: And so DC Comics was having some issues with the baby.

This is the inscription. “To Michael Eury. Read this book quickly! It might not exist much longer! Best, Mike W. Barr. 4–26–89. P.S. On second thought, SCREW continuity! Stories, like Tinkerbell, last as long as we want them to!”

I just love that, because some stories—well, they might not be greeted favorably at a certain time, but later on they become part of the canon. [Barr laughs] That baby, of course, was Damian Wayne, now a major character in DC’s Batman comics. So, Mike, what do you think about this—Damian, son of Batman, and all that’s been going on with the character in recent years?

Disavowed, Then Allowed Mike W. Barr’s Batman: Son of the Demon graphic novel (1987), illustrated by Jerry Bingham.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 55

The Parent Trap (top) Barr’s inscription to BI editor Michael Eury regarding Son of the Demon’s controversial ending. (bottom) A glimpse of Jerry Bingham’s artistry in original art form.

Page 68 of Son of the Demon, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com).

TM & © DC Comics.

56 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

BARR: Well, it’s all very strange, because at the time you would have thought that I had taken—as they say—a pee in the punchbowl up at the DC offices. And the thing was that people sort of said to me, “How could you have done this?”

And I said, “Look, it was edited by Dick Giordano, who was the vice president of DC. He knew what was going on.”

Everybody talked about it as though Jerry Bingham and I had sort of put the story sheets together at night and snuck them into the printing plant and sent them out without anybody knowing about it! [Eury chuckles] But everybody at DC—well, a lot of people at DC—knew about it because there were a lot of black-and-white Xeroxes of the artwork sent out to some of the editors. So they acted like we were doing something incredibly subversive, and my attitude was simply to tell that that was the last thing that anybody would expect to happen in the story. At one point in the story, Talia tells Batman that she’s pregnant, and at that point, I know that every reader—’cause this is what I would think—every reader reading that book is gonna look up and say, “Okay. She’s gonna lose the baby by the end of the story, ’cause they can’t have this kind of thing stay at DC. It’s not gonna happen.” And sure enough, later in the story, Talia says to Batman, “I’ve lost the baby.” So at that point you think, “Okay, fine. The shoe’s dropped. Let’s just go back to normal.” Then at the end of the story, you find out that Talia’s lying, that she has had the baby and it has been given up for adoption. Which I think is a pretty good one-two punch. Because no one who’s ever read this story and told me about it has said they’ve [ever] been able to forget it.

So it was immediately a point of extreme contention among people at DC, and as I said, people sort of pointed at me and said, “Why did you do that?” [chuckles] And I sort of pointed at Dick and said, ‘Well, he let me do it!” [Eury laughs] And Dick, by that time… he took a few days off and was waiting for the furor to die down. I just sort of weathered the storm.

A couple years later there was a sequel called Bride of the Demon, and I was told that we were not allowed to even reference anything that happened in Son of the Demon. I said to DC, to Denny O’Neil, who edited Bride of the Demon, “Look, I can write this whole thing out of continuity, you know? I can do that.” And he said, “No, we can’t even refer to it. We’re not even allowed to.” [DC president] Jenette Kahn told me—after Son of the Demon came out—that she had been told by her higher-ups at Warner Brothers that if there was ever any reference made to this story again, she would be fired.

Nowwwww... I’m not sure that’s at all true. Anyway, but that’s what she said to me. So that just goes to show you how controversial this story was, and we didn’t set out to do anything controversial. We had just set out to do a good story.

EURY: When I read it, I remember going, “Wow!” But I wasn’t necessarily expecting you or any other writer to follow up on it.

I looked at it as a story—especially since it was a self-contained graphic novel and not in a regular comic, which is where you’d usually find continuity-linked material.

BARR: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

EURY: It’s interesting how what was in the ’80s considered a toxic concept has now become part of DC’s continuity— and they’re proud of it!

BARR: Yes. EURY: But, so as not to pick on DC… since then, the company and the culture have changed.

BARR: That’s true.

EURY: In 1989, the idea of an illegitimate child was still very shocking, and I think we have, just as a culture, become more accustomed to the reality of that happening.

BARR: Now, on some calendar of events DC published for the 75th anniversary of Batman, it says on the highlights, “1987,” which I think is when this came out, “Damian Wayne appears in Son of the Demon.” So I thought, “Okay. We’ve been acknowledged. We’ve been made legitimate. We’ve gone

World’s Finest Offspring (top) The then-shocking, now-canonical final page to Son of the Demon, revealing the infant who would grow up to become Damian Wayne. (bottom) Two decades later, few pitched a fit over Superman’s “illegitimate” son in Superman Returns.

TM & © DC Comics.

mainstream.” It was very odd, because not long after… When did Superman Returns come out?

EURY: Uh… ’96? No, that doesn’t sound right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: 2006.

EURY: 2006! I was a decade off. Sorry.

BARR: Yeah, yeah. And when I saw it, Superman Returns, I thought, “Well, this is a story where Superman has an illegitimate child.”

And it’s acknowledged that this child that Lois Lane calls son is the illegitimate child of Superman… and Lois Lane. And I thought that if you think of an illegitimate child as bad—[to audience] and as Michael has said, society has changed greatly over that, which is good because there’s no reason that the child himself should bear that— EURY: Absolutely.

BARR: —because he or she had nothing to do with it. What would they do when Superman has an illegitimate child? I mean, obviously, Batman is an icon of virtue, but Superman is the icon of virtue. Superman is like Jesus almost, you know? So Superman has an illegitimate child.

He didn’t know it, but neither did Batman. It’s just funny to see how things changed in, say, 19 years or so.

EURY: Tell us how you got started in comics. What was your first job?

BARR: I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading comics. As a kid, my mother and I would go grocery shopping on Friday night—I would tag along—and we would stop at the drugstore and she’d give me a dime and I’d trot into the drugstore and buy a comic book. And that was our custom for, again, as long as I can pretty much remember. The comic book that I bought with that dime was invariably either a Batman title or one of Julie Schwartz’s superhero titles, because those were the comics that I liked. Then later on, as much as I loved comics, I realized I had no artistic talent. I can’t draw at all. But I began to realize, when you read comic books and you read the letters columns and all that and you read the credits of the stories—those few stories that had credits— that someone actually wrote the stories. The artists did not write the stories despite what all those Batman stories that said “by Bob Kane” would lead you to believe. So I thought, “Well, I can’t draw stories but I can write ’em. I can think of things for Batman to do.”

So I began toying around here and there with the idea of writing scripts.

I eventually submitted a script to Julius Schwartz for a character called the Elongated Man. This was, like, back in 1973 or something like that.

That was eventually published in Detective Comics #444. So I sold my first script to Julius Schwartz, which is pretty cool if you think about it. There are guys in this business who worked their entire careers and never worked for Julius Schwartz, but always wanted to. So that was my first story.

EURY: [to audience] For the benefit of people that are younger, Julie Schwartz was a man. He was an editor at DC Comics for many, many years.

1st AUDIENCE MEMBER: [to Barr] Are you a comic-book legend of some sort?

BARR: I’m sorry?

1st AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are you a comic-book legend?

BARR: I… well, I… EURY: He is a comic-book legend.

BARR: I… see. No one can really call himself a legend.

EURY: [laughs] Julie Schwartz called himself a legend.

BARR: Well, that’s true.

EURY: He said he was a living legend.

BARR: Well, Julie broke all the rules. I guess if you’re a legend, you can break all the rules.

EURY: [to audience] We’ll open the floor for some questions in a minute. [to Barr] Let’s continue our conversation now. So, your first sale was an Elongated Man story.

BARR: Yes. The Elongated Man was sort of amateur detective who could stretch like Plastic Man. I always felt a great deal of affection for the character because he wasn’t too serious in a day when comics were getting increasingly serious. Basically, he was independently wealthy and he had superpowers. He was a member of the Justice League and he traveled around the country with his beautiful wife, solving crimes.

To me that’s, like, the ideal existence. I had submitted an earlier story about him that never went anywhere. Then I thought of this other idea and submitted it, and that one got bought.

EURY: Refresh my memory. Who drew it?

BARR: That was drawn by the late Ernie Chua. Ernie Chan, who was called Ernie Chua in those days because he was an immigrant and apparently the American authorities somehow messed up his name and spelled it “Chua” instead of “Chan.” That’s the story I heard, anyway.

EURY: I heard that, too.

BARR: Yeah, so it took him several years to correct that. He did most of his work in his later years under the name Ernie Chan.

EURY: So, after that, what was next? You ended up on DC’s staff eventually as, what? A proofreader, originally?

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 57

BARR: Yeah. I sold one or two more strips through the mail. Nothing really cataclysmic. Not anything you could make any kind of a living on. But then I was offered a job on staff by Paul Levitz, who was in those days… I’m not sure if he was DC’s editorial coordinator, but he basically ran the office whether he admitted it or not. Paul offered me a job as a DC proofreader, so I moved from Ohio—where I’m from—where I was making at a job about $87 a week working at Sears and Roebuck as a janitor, basically, to taking a job in New York—a far more expensive city—for the princely sum of $100 a week. If you take a 40-hour week, I was making two and a half dollars an hour. It’s the kind of thing you could only do when you’re 25.

EURY: …and you love comics!

BARR: Yes! EURY: A lot of people followed that route. Did you have roommates?

Where did you live?

BARR: No, I had a small studio apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, pretty far out from the office. The rents, of course, in Manhattan… like anyplace else, the closer you are to downtown, the more expensive it is, and things get less expensive sort of at a radius—the farther the radius goes, if that’s the proper term.

EURY: The longer your subway trip, the less your rent will be.

BARR: Exactly! Exactly, yes! There’s some inverse proportion there that works out fine.

So I lived in that apartment for two years. Then I lived in an apartment in Queens, which is another borough of New York. I moved into an old apartment that my friend Frank Miller used to live in.

Frank had moved into a larger apartment in the same building with his girlfriend, and I moved into that apartment.

EURY: This was an interesting time at DC. Things were starting to change and become the DC that we knew for a long time, at least until the New 52 reboot, perhaps.

When did you start as DC’s proofreader?

BARR: It was October 3rd, 1977.

EURY: And the DC Implosion happened not long after.

BARR: Not long after, yeah. They had announced the DC Explosion by that time. DC announced that they were adding eight pages of story to every one of their books.

These were usually bad. Rather than extending the main features, which the available personnel couldn’t do, just physically couldn’t produce that much more material, they added a number of backup features usually relating to the lead feature. Superman’s backup would be the World of Krypton or something related to Superman, the Superman universe. Same with Batman and Wonder Woman and a lot of the other characters. And a lot of them used that space to introduce new characters.

EURY: [to audience] Has anyone here ever heard of Cancelled Comic Cavalcade? You know what that is?

A Nose for Mystery Barr’s first published DC tale, an Elongated Man short story in Detective Comics #444 (Dec. 1974–Jan. 1975).

TM & © DC Comics.

The DC Explosion—like Mike said—had a lot of new material coming out, then the market tanked, which gave birth to the DC Implosion, and an edict comes down one day that cancels… how many titles was it, Mike?

BARR: Well, a lot of titles got cut. The thing is, it was one of those deals that, when you walked into the office that day, you knew something was wrong but you didn’t know what. You could just sort of feel it in the air. And I had no idea what was going on, so I was really keeping a low profile that day.

EURY: People were just more sober that day. [Mike laughs] Or not sober.

It was the ’70s, after all! [laughter] BARR: Yeah. “Unusually solemn,” let’s put it that way. And I didn’t know what was going on until Jack [C.] Harris, who was an editor at DC in the ’70s, who had the office next door to mine, came into my office and he extended his hand to be shaken and said, “Congratulations.

We get to stay.” And at that point, I didn’t know that it had anything to do with getting fired… but a couple of people did. Two editors— Larry Hama and Al Milgrom, whose names may be familiar to many of you—they were on staff at DC at that time and they got fired.

EURY: To personalize the business more for you folks, too, it’s easy when you’re reading a comic book just to think, “I’m reading a story. This guy wrote it, that guy drew it, that woman colored it.” Whatever. But it is a job, and when something like this crisis happens where they end up canceling a lot of titles in one fell swoop, people lose their jobs. So I guess that was a pretty bleak time for a while.

BARR: Mm-hm. Oh, yeah.

EURY: So then comes Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, which, for copyright protection purposes, printed in black and white—Xerox copies, essentially—a lot of the material that was due to be published but wasn’t.

And you proofread all this material.

BARR: I proofread all this stuff, yeah.

If it means anything—and it doesn’t— I’m the only guy in the world who ever got paid to read Cancelled Comic Cavalcade. ’Cause it was my job! I had already proofread all those stories before the books and the backup features were canceled.

Everybody was surprised by this, even the higher-ups at DC. Apparently, the rumor is, and I don’t know if we’ll ever know if this is absolutely true, is that Warner Brothers kinda said, “What are you doing? We never said you could do this kind of expansion, and sales don’t warrant it so pull back.” I was one of the guys who was given a list of freelancers just to call and say, “Stop working on that story. You’ll be paid for what you’ve done but stop working on it.”

Which, of course, for any freelancer, is the signal to work harder. [Michael laughs] “Yeah, finish the story overnight so you can get paid for the whole thing.” You know, it doesn’t matter of you’ve got 15 pages left that you haven’t done. They’ll do it overnight so they can get paid for it. Which you can understand.

EURY: And as you know, it’s very difficult to be the one who makes those phone calls.

BARR: Yeah.

EURY: I made a phone call like that to you at Comico the Comic Company, of Norristown, Pennsylvania. My first job in comics, I was editing The Maze Agency, which is a detective comic series that Mike created, drawn by Adam Hughes—although it was Alan Davis who did the ashcan preview book for the series, right?

58 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

BARR: Yes. EURY: Adam Hughes was the artist of the series. So Comico ends up having financial problems and such and I had the unsavory task of calling you and a handful of other people to say that the plug is being pulled on your books, and it’s—[to audience] Again, we’re showing you a little bit about the nuts-and-bolts aspect of the job—[to Barr] you get attached to your colleagues and your projects.

They’re a lot of fun, and it’s really painful to have to say goodbye or “I’ll see ya later.”

BARR: Yeah.

EURY: Detectives are a recurring theme with you, with The Maze Agency and Batman.

BARR: Mm-hm.

EURY: What piqued your interest in the detective story genre?

BARR: I don’t know exactly. It began when I was 15 years old. By that time, I had begun reading, you know, adventure fiction, and I was a big fan of the Leslie Charteris character, the Saint—Simon Templar, the Saint—who is not as well-known as he used to be. There was a long-running TV series in the ’60s starring Roger Moore.

He used to be, like, James Bond, famous in the literary world. Not so much anymore. They made a TV pilot a couple years ago starring Adam Rayner, the star of Tyrant, which is on FX now. But apparently it never sold, which is too bad because you can find some snippets of it on the Internet and it looks pretty good.

But anyway, so I was a big fan of Simon Templar and he occasionally functioned as a detective. He was called “the Robin Hood of modern crime,” because he basically stole from the rich and gave to the poor and the rich were usually criminals who he killed while doing it.

[laughs] So those were detective stories to some extent, but more adventure stories.

Then, in 1967, by total accident, I ran across the first Ellery Queen mystery, which is called The Roman Hat Mystery.

I had no idea what was going on, and by the end of the story I had no idea how Ellery was going to solve it. And at the end, he pulls these brilliant these brilliant thrusts of logic, which you could see if you were as good as he was.

You could have seen ’em coming. I was just so taken by this that I immediately fell in love with the Ellery Queen stories, and then with the detective genre in general. So I became an avid reader of a lot of different detective stories and learned a lot about the history of the genre.

EURY: Your writing the character of Batman was the culmination of two loves—your childhood love of reading Batman comics and your affinity for the genre of detective stories…

BARR: Yes, although I’ve only done a handful of actual whodunits in Batman over the years. Most of them are adventure stories citing Batman’s role, because Batman’s role is just so cool that it’s—or was so cool in those days— that it was just too much fun not to play around in.

EURY: Well, as a reader of your Detective Comics run in the ’80s that Alan Davis drew—or drew most of, at least—you had a great handle on a character that other people had a hard time with, Jason Todd.

BARR: Robin. Right.

EURY: [to audience] How many of you have read those particular stories? They’re wonderful! And they’re functional detective stories with a resurgence of the supervillains, particularly Scarecrow. [to Barr] But the way you characterized Jason Todd was not as the punk that he was in his earliest

MWB Survived the DC Implosion! …However, these characters gathered in Cancelled Comic Cavalcade did not.

Cover to issue #1 by Al Milgrom, cover to #2 by Alex Saviuk.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 59

From Team-Ups to Super-Team Barr wrote several of the final issues of The Brave and the Bold before that title was canned, making way for his popular Batman and the Outsiders (BATO) book. Art for both covers by the amazing Jim Aparo.

TM & © DC Comics.

stories. You portrayed him as an exuberant kid. He was having a good time being a sidekick to Batman.

BARR: Well, I thought the punk part was, originally he stole the wheels off the Batmobile.

EURY: Mm-hm.

BARR: Which is kinda like stealing the wheels off Air Force One. [both laugh] But, you know, how’d he get away with it? In one of the James Bond movies, somebody tries to break into one of Bond’s cars and immediately it explodes and kills the guy.

EURY: I can think of two examples from Hollywood, though, where the Penguin ripped off or commandeered the Batmobile.

BARR: Okay.

EURY: So if you’re the Penguin, you can take the Batmobile for a joy ride.

BARR: Okay. Maybe. Yeah. So I have no idea how you’d steal the wheels off the Batmobile. So… basically, when I wrote Detective Comics, I was told Dick Grayson was no longer Robin. Jason Todd is Robin. Where I was going with that, a lot of that with Jason Todd as juvenile delinquent— was that not retconned?

EURY: It was! They retconned it pretty quickly into it, because I think the audience was not reacting favorably to this character. They sort of rebooted Jason Todd pretty early into the character’s run at DC. BARR: I think a lot of that maybe came after my run on Detective. I’m not a hundred percent sure, because it’s been such a long time. And I never asked about this. I never asked why Jason Todd is Robin instead of Dick Grayson. I knew Dick Grayson had been made into the character of Nightwing, which was a whole different thing. But I didn’t know why Jason Todd was Robin because Jason Todd obviously is somebody else’s son and I was told Jason Todd’s father at least is still alive. And well! And Jason Todd is Robin just when he’s staying with Bruce Wayne, when his own father is out of town.

I know why Batman, psychologically, would put Dick Grayson in the position and danger of Robin. And my rationale for this—and not only mine but I may have even taken this from somebody else—has always been that, well, Batman didn’t want Dick Grayson to grow up to be him. He wanted Dick Grayson to grow up and to have a normal life—to fall in love, to have kids, and all that. So he’s giving Dick Grayson a chance to work out that same rage that he felt when he lost his parents as a child rather than hold onto it his entire life as an adult.

That works out fine for Dick Grayson. I have no idea why you’d do that with Jason Todd, why you would put Jason Todd—a boy who is not your son, not even your foster son or your ward—in that kind of danger. I didn’t ask, because I was afraid if I asked they would say, “You know, you’re right. Let’s not do that,” and then I would have just basically screwed up the whole machine… so I decided not to do that.

I don’t know if that answers your question.

EURY: It does.

You once told me—maybe a couple of years ago—that you had tossed out an idea about how to restore Dick Grayson to being Robin again…

BARR: [laughs] Yeah. What I said was—and this was when they were talking about whether Dick Grayson was gonna become Nightwing— I had written this in an issue of BACK ISSUE, in fact, in a letter to you.

EURY: Yes, I remember now.

BARR: Basically, my solution… In those days, they were all very confused about, “What are we gonna do?” And they would assemble a committee of, say, 20 people to decide what to do. It was sort of like living in a communist country, in a way. And again, because there would be a committee of 20 people to decide every factor, they weren’t sure what was gonna happen with Robin—whether Dick Grayson was gonna be Robin or somebody else was gonna be Robin or whatever. And I said the solution to this was pretty easy. In the Batman issues on sale in June, Dick Grayson comes back to Wayne Manor for the summer. He’s a college student. Okay. College is out for the summer, he comes back, lives in Wayne Manor, and he and Batman have Batman and Robin adventures for the issues on sale in June, July, and August. Then in September, one morning Bruce goes into Dick Grayson’s bedroom and kind of pulls off the covers and says, “Hey, chum! Time for you to go back to school.

Now you’re in the sixth grade.” And Dick Grayson pops his head out and he’s 12 years old. And you never explain it and you never mention it again and you certainly never try to rationalize it. [laughs] They sort of said, “Nah. We’re not doin’ that.” One of the guys who was involved with Robin—I won’t say who, but one of the writers who was involved with Robin—basically, when he heard this plan, kind of started running around the office throwing his feces around, you know, like a Capuchin monkey, because he was just so enraged by it!

EURY: [to audience] That’s a picture that’s going to be in your head the rest of the day. [laughter from audience]

60 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Mike, you had the interesting task of taking a long-running team-up title—The Brave and the Bold— and writing its last handful of issues.

BARR: Mm-hm.

EURY: Brave and the Bold for a long time teamed Batman and other superheroes and it was, I guess, starting to get a little stale, and something was needed to replace it. So Batman and the Outsiders came about. Tell us how that happened.

BARR: Well, what happened was—the story I was told is that one of DC’s foreign clients—DC has a huge foreign market for its material where they actually take the printing plates or negatives from those and print them in foreign languages… in their own languages. They don’t sell the English editions. Well, some of them do, of course, overseas, but they print their own versions of the DC comics. Well, one of the publishers—I believe it was in South America, but I could be wrong—I was told was selling Batman as a weekly book. They were publishing basically Batman, Detective, World’s Finest, and Brave and Bold under the title Batman as a weekly comic book.

So whatever was going to replace Brave and Bold on the schedule had to be a Batman title. So I came up with the idea, and proposed this to Len Wein, who was the Batman editor at that time, of Batman as the leader of a superhero team. Half of them were novices and they really wouldn’t know what they were doing, and Batman would teach them basically the same way he did Robin. They liked that very much and it turned out to be Batman and the Outsiders.

We brought in Metamorpho and Black Lightning from the existing DC Universe and created three new characters called Geo-Force, Halo, and Katana.

EURY: Katana achieved multimedia acclaim through that Batman cartoon of two years ago, but now, she’s going to be part of Suicide Squad.

[Editor’s note: This interview occurred before the release of the Suicide Squad movie.]

BARR: Yeah! In May of this year [2015] I got a call from Geoff Johns, who is the [chief creative officer] of DC and writes a lot of books for them… We’d never spoken before! We’d emailed a little bit but we’d never really spoken, so I was quite surprised to receive a personal phone call from this very busy executive. And he said, “In about two hours, the word is going to drop about the cast in the Suicide Squad and Katana is going to be one of the characters in there.” I was delighted by this!

It meant not only would the character be in the movies, which is always very intriguing if you’re a creator, but also, there would be for the estate of Jim Aparo—because Jim Aparo passed away about ten years ago—there would be money for us from that. So that’s cool! And she was also in Arrow! Another version of Katana was also in Arrow last season.

EURY: Tell us a little bit about working with Jim Aparo.

He was a wonderful artist. A lot of people will say he’s underrated. I’m not sure it that’s the case. I think in recent years, a lot of praise has been heaped upon him in appreciation for his work.

BARR: Well, that’s true. I don’t know if he’s underrated, because as you say he was fortunate enough during his lifetime to begin receiving royalties and reprint fees on the immense amount of work he did.

Jim was really a pleasure to work with. Jim was one of the rare artists who did everything except the scripts on the books. It was sort of the Golden Age fashion, almost…

Jim was a guy who penciled the book, he inked the characters in the book, and then he lettered it himself.

That was how they used to do it back in the Golden Age of Comics, but then it became more profitable for them to split up, say, the creator of a popular feature, into just penciling the episodes… Oh, like Bob Kane, for instance.

We’re assuming that Bob Kane did some of the stuff that appears under his name. [chuckles] But anyway, so you would send Jim a script and a pile of blank art boards and what you’d get back in three weeks, you’d get a cameraready comic book that needed almost no time in production, no need for corrections. There were never misspellings in his lettering unless they were in the original script.

And sometimes he would fix those!

EURY: He was a non-descript looking fellow. Did you actually meet Jim, or work with him over the phone?

BARR: Actually, all the time we worked on Batman and the Outsiders—and The Outsiders after that—we met only like three or four times physically, but I talked to him on the phone a lot. Every week, at least. Every week, I would

She’s Got Soul(s… in Her Sword) Breakout star Katana—seen last summer in Hollywood’s Suicide Squad—on this Alan Davis-drawn delight from BATO #23 (July 1985).

Courtesy of Heritage. (inset) Katana of the movies, Karen Fukuhara.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 61

Moonlighting at the Independents (top left) Barr’s The Maze Agency #1 (Dec. 1988), from Comico the Comic Company. Cover by Adam Hughes and Rick Magyar. (middle left) Mike W. Barr with Maze Agency cronies Adam Hughes and Michael Eury (seated) in Eury’s DC Comics office, circa late 1989. (bottom left) TwoMorrows’ own Dewey Cassell getting Mike’s autograph at the October 2015 Fayetteville Comic-Con. (right) Barr’s treatment of Jason Todd Robin is fondly remembered by many readers of his Detective Comics run with artists Alan Davis and Paul Neary. Cover to ’Tec #569 (Dec. 1986).

The Maze Agency TM & © Michael W. Barr.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

62 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

talk to him on the phone every Friday. “Jim what’s up?

How ya doin’? You need more script yet? What’s goin’ on?” Physically Jim looked a little like the comedian/actor Arnold Stang, whose likeness I guess you can Google.

EURY: He represented an old guard. He probably was part of the last generation of artists who really just treated it as a job. I’m not trying to minimize his creativity, because he was brilliant! But he delivered. It was a job.

You sat down, you drew. He was not finding a distraction to get him away from the drawing board that day, he delivered those pages.

BARR: Yeah, he loved the character of Batman, but when we took Batman out of Batman and the Outsiders, he was not in any way distraught by that. He didn’t say, “Well, then, I’m gonna quit and go do another Batman book.”

His attitude was simply, “Okay. Well, I like drawing Batman, but if he’s not in the book anymore, that’s okay.”

EURY: But he ended up eventually doing the main Batman book.

BARR: Yes. EURY: Including the famous “Death in the Family” story arc where Jason Todd was killed. Have you read this?

BARR: Oh, don’t get me started on that!

EURY: It was a phone call-in, where fans called in to vote on either Robin living or Robin dying, and obviously, Robin did not survive. I’m gettin’ you started on that.

Tell me about it.

BARR: Don’t get me started! [Eury laughs] Well, in those days, there was a period in the late ’80s where—well, actually, not the late ’80s, but—there was a third Outsiders series that started in 1992 and lasted until 1994. After 1994, I wasn’t doing a lot of work at DC, not from lack of trying. But I think this happened—when did the Jason Todd thing happen?

I wanna say ’89.

EURY: “Death in the Family” ran in late 1988 [in Batman #426–429], and the Batman movie premiered during the summer of 1989.

BARR: So I was still working for DC in those days. Not a whole lot, though. I knew about this just only what I heard from the fan market, which, with the Internet not being as developed in those days, was nowhere near what it is now. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but they never asked me.

EURY: I think that DC’s corporate reaction was not unlike what we were discussing at the beginning of our conversation. All of a sudden, with that Tim Burton movie, Batman had become not just one of their comic characters but a mega-million-dollar-generating commodity, with many children joining their parents in those long lines to see the Batman movie with Michael Keaton. So, to have these things like, “You’ve murdered Robin and you voted on it by phone!” and “Batman’s got an illegitimate child!”… You can see why this drove the suits crazy!

I’m gonna open the floor for questions in just a minute, but I do want to talk to you about The Maze Agency first. I interviewed you and Adam Hughes for that back in 2003 for the second issue of BACK ISSUE. BARR: Oh, yeah! That’s right!

EURY: What a wonderful series. What’s happened to those characters, Jennifer Mays and Gabriel Webb?

BARR: Well, I’m still talking to several publishers about bringing ’em back, and some of them seem to be interested. They’re also interested in what’s known as the “library,” the back issues of the characters, the back issues of the series, and being able to reprint and collect those, which would be really cool if they were to do that, because the creators of those stories would receive reprint payments for them. I can’t tell you anything for certain, but I’m always out there pitching it.

It’s kind of funny. It’s a source of frustration—and this is me whining now—that all the publishers are always saying, “Oh, we need more diversity. We need something besides superheroes. We have to have something different.” And if you take ’em The Maze Agency… [to audience] The Maze Agency, for those who don’t know it, is basically a straight whodunit detective story. There’s no fantasy elements in it. It doesn’t take place in outer space or in the future. It’s basically a romantic fantasy about a man and a woman who solve crimes. My gag about that is that the only fantasy elements in it are that love is real and that justice is real. [audience laughs] Because they always catch the killers and put ’em behind bars, or they confess or something happens to them.

And so every publisher that I took this to was sort of aghast, saying, “We can’t do this. It’s not superheroes.”

All right. Fine. Make up your mind, you know? Pick a position, please. If you want to do only superheroes, that’s cool. But just tell me! [Eury chuckles] EURY: [to audience] Now, Mike W. Barr has also written Camelot 3000, Star Trek, Green Lantern… and a lot of stuff we didn’t really get into. If you have any questions about any of those series, or if you want to ask more Batman questions, please raise your hand. [to audience member] Yes? 2nd AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned earlier that you were friends with and lived in the same building with Frank Miller and you did “Batman: Year Two” in Detective Comics #575 to 578.

BARR: Something like that, yeah.

2nd AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was there much discussion with Frank Miller about “Year Two” since it was coming out of his “Year One”? Was it the direction you were going?

BARR: No, it’s not the direction I was going. I walked into the office one day and was told, “Frank Miller is doing four issues called ‘Batman: Year One’ and you’re going to do a four-issue series called ‘Batman: Year Two.’” I had had a reputation for being something of a

whiner [laughs] or a malcontent. Let’s put it that way.

And maybe they were surprised when I said, “Okay.”

Because… I’m not gonna say it was a bad idea, because it sold well and I was able to tell a good story. I would have just rather continued telling stories of just Batman and Robin in that four-issue run. But that story that we told in that four-issue run was, I think, a pretty good one because it’s been reprinted in trade paperback several times.

There was not any consultation between Frank and me. We were quite close in those days, but he was doing his thing and I was doing mine. I didn’t want to be accused of… I mean, obviously we were sort of piggybacking on “Batman: Year One,” but I wanted it to be its own thing as well. I just didn’t want it to be an imitation Frank Miller story.

Originally, they had called for “Batman: Year One” and “Batman: Year Two” to run concurrently. The same month, in Batman and Detective. Somebody at DC— I believe it was a woman named Peggy May, who was in charge of publicity or some such… she and Jerry

Batman: Artists Two Barr’s “Batman: Year Two,” appearing in 1987’s Detective #575–578, didn’t miss a beat, despite an unexpected change in artists from Alan Davis to Todd McFarlane.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 63

Batman vs. the Reaper A gripping battle page from Year Two’s ’Tec #576, illo’ed by Todd McFarlane and Alfredo Alcala.

Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

Ordway later married—said, “Well, maybe this was not a good idea and that maybe ‘Batman: Year One’ should run first in its entirety, and then ‘Batman: Year Two,’ just to avoid confusing people.” And they thought that was a good idea, so they did that.

Alan Davis, who was the regular artist on Detective at that time, dropped off. That’s a whole ’nother story.

The last three issues of “Batman: Year Two” were drawn

by Todd McFarlane, who, in those days, was not as famous as he would become but was already building up a reputation. And this all happened before I was even aware of it. But I thought Todd—coming in in a pinch as he did—did a really great job, because his style is totally different from Alan Davis’. Alan is all sort of curves and flowing and Todd is all sort of sharp angles, you know, stuff that you’re kind of afraid to touch because it’s like a porcupine. You’ll hurt yourself on it.

And they both do excellent versions of Batman, but they’re totally different. I thought he worked out fine.

One of the feathers in my cap, I guess, is that there are two people that Todd McFarlane has drawn Batman with—scripts by me and scripts by Frank Miller. So that’s pretty good company.

64 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

3rd AUDIENCE MEMBER: I guess coming after Frank Miller, because you had a reputation as well, were you nervous at all going after Frank?

BARR: Not nervous, no. The only thing I was concerned about was would I be able to do some of the things that I wanted to do? Being a classic Batman fan, more so than Frank, I think—with no offense to Frank—I wanted to draw some parallels to some of the classic Batman stories. There’s a Batman story in either issue #48 or 49 of Batman that’s basically the story of Batman’s origin but retold from a modern perspective and then bringing in new stuff to it. It’s the story of how Batman finally discovers the man who murdered his parents and what happens after that, and I did a slight parallel on that in “Year Two.” My only concern was, “Is the editor going to say yes or no?” One of the points involved Batman carrying a gun, which, you know, he never does. And I thought it would be really cool to say that Batman was so sort of emotionally affected by finding the man who murdered his parents that he’s driven to carry a gun, which made sense within the context of the story at the time. And it was also not just any gun. It was the gun that killed his parents. And I thought that was just so cool. They would have had to have given me a written edict saying, “No, don’t do that.” But they didn’t. [Editor] Denny O’Neil, bless his heart, said, “Okay. Yes. Let’s do that.”

4th AUDIENCE MEMBER: You said that you wanted a more classic Batman than how Frank did him, but he kind of changed Batman, made him darker and grittier.

Were you concerned that there were gonna be some issues between you and the editor with how you wanted to do it?

Because it is a continuation. Were you concerned? Was there any friction there between what you wanted to do and what was already set up?

BARR: No, there wasn’t. Denny O’Neil, as he’s said other places, was wise enough—well, Denny would not use the term “wise enough” about himself—but he realized that every creative team was going to have its own take on the character. So as long as Batman fell within certain parameters, it could either be Frank’s version, which was very dark and very sort of streetwise and hardboiled, or my version, which was maybe a little softer and maybe a little owing to some of the Batman stories that had gone before. But that was okay as long as it was a good story.

5th AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I assume you’re a fan of the new policy of creativity over continuity?

BARR: Is that the new policy? I’m not saying it’s not.

I just have never seen that anywhere, like, written down that way.

Well, they’re still pretty tied to continuity. I’m writing a Katana series which will… it doesn’t tie in to the movie but it’s basically, obviously poised to capitalize on the movie when it comes. It’ll start appearing in January [2016] and go for six issues and then I’m told it will be collected for a trade paperback when the [Suicide Squad] movie comes out. At least I think that’s the plan but things might change. [Editor’s note: This was Katana: Cult of the Kobra, now collected as a TPB.] EURY: Who’s the artist?

BARR: The artist is a guy with the really cool name of Diogenes Neves. He’s done a lot of other work for DC and it’s all terrific. He draws really well. He draws really beautiful women, and I’m sure he’ll do a great Katana.

But there have already been some notes like, “Well, this can’t happen because it already happened earlier in the Katana solo series,” which I didn’t write. “So you can’t do that.” And that’s okay.

5th AUDIENCE MEMBER: I feel like they have certain stories like, obviously, as far as Batman, he’s gonna have

his costume or whatever, but I swear I read that somewhere that they’ve moved it to where they’re more concerned about creativity on a single-shot story than having a huge, overarching— BARR: Well, that would be fine if they were. I can work under any rules as long as I’m told what they are. When you come back and say, “You can’t give Batman a child,” my response is, “Well, why didn’t you tell me this when we were producing the story?”

[Eury laughs] You can’t come back after the book is in print and say, “This book that’s in print? We’re saying it’s not in continuity.”

EURY: As long as the rules weren’t fluid, too.

BARR: Yes! EURY: Because that was a problem after Crisis. God rest his soul, Dick Giordano, mentor of mine, friend of mine, who was the editorial director at DC during and immediately after Crisis on Infinite Earths, was the kind of creative administrator who said, “You go ahead and do your own thing.” And what Crisis really needed was a taskmaster to say, “These are the rules we’ve set and you’ve got to follow this.” That wasn’t Dick’s personality. So with Crisis, continuity started to diverge very shortly thereafter, and there didn’t seem to be consistent plans.

BARR: Yeah, that’s true. I disagreed with the idea of Crisis on Infinite Earths and did not do a Crisis crossover in Outsiders. Batman and the Outsiders was the only DC tile that did not do a Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. And that was either me being a prick or me standing on my principles, depending on your point of view.

Maybe both, saying, “No, no. I’m not doing that.” I could do that because I was also the editor of BATO. Now, if they’d come to me and said, “Look, you have to do this. We’re ordering you to do this,” I would have done it. And it would have been whatever best story I could have written at the time under those circumstances.

But nobody did. And I kept waiting for somebody to say, “Okay, next month has to be the Crisis crossover…” but they didn’t. But again, that also was held against me to some extent later. “Oh, well, you didn’t do a Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover…”

Like any corporation, they see any act of diverting from the corporate path as heresy, and that pretty much ruins you forever there. But what are you gonna do?

EURY: [to audience] We have time for one final question. Give us a zinger.

6th AUDIENCE MEMBER: What’s your favorite Batman story?

BARR: My favorite Batman story that I wrote, or period?

Of the ones I wrote? There are actually two of them, and they widely diverge. There’s a story Alan Davis and I did called Full Circle, which is basically… I think it’s like 64 pages and to me it basically taps all the elements of what a Batman story should be.

It’s got the origin, it’s got Robin, it’s got a cool villain, it’s got a deathtrap for Batman, and it contains vital information about his origin. The other one was also with Alan Davis and it was just an eight-page story that we did for Batman Black and White. It’s called “Last Call at McSurley’s.” McSurley’s was a bar that we introduced in the first two issues of Detective that we did, which is this incredibly sleazy underworld hangout, and Batman just kind of goes there in disguise and listens and gets information on what the criminal element is doing. Those two are my favorites.

EURY: May I add a coda to the question? What is your favorite Batman story you did not write?

BARR: Did not write.

EURY: Correct. And does it involve giant props?

BARR: It does, yes! My favorite Batman story—if you had to pick one Batman story, which, I guess is the question—in Detective #265, which goes back to, like, 1957 or something like that— there’s a story called “Batman’s First Case,” which was written

by Bill Finger, and which contains the origin of Batman and a villain called the Clock that, of course, works on a clock motif, as all those Batman villains did in those days. Again, it’s got a deathtrap, it’s got the origin, it’s got Batman. There were no supernatural or alien elements, which were coming to be prevalent in the series in those days. It’s as gritty a crime story as they would have done in those days with a guy who dresses like a bat, and it’s just an excellent story. I take it out every few months and re-read it again, for technique.

Playing Favorites (top) The Year Two sequel, Full Circle, is one of Mike’s favorite Batman stories he produced.

Cover art by Davis and Farmer. (bottom) Barr the Batfan cites “Batman’s First Case” in Detective #265 (Mar. 1959) as a personal fave from Bat-stories he didn’t write. Cover

by Curt Swan.

TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 65

66 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 67

BATMAN #226 ALTERNATE COVER

by NEAL ADAMS

Batman—comics’ ultimate “Creature of the Night”—has been drawn by many of the medium’s finest illustrators throughout his history that now spans nearly 80 years. In this special Batman installment of Rough Stuff, we ooh and ahh over the pencil art of five masters who each left their indelible marks upon the Darknight Detective. (Unless otherwise noted, art scans are courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions.) captions by

Michael Eury

Neal Adams’ stark “Man with Ten Eyes” cover for Batman #226 (Nov. 1970) was one of many unforgettable Batman covers the talented Mr. Adams produced for editor Julius Schwartz during the early Bronze Age. As this stunner shows, Neal had an alternate take on this image, with the Caped Crusader appearing more disoriented than in the published version (see inset). While this is a gorgeous rendering, we think the decision to redraw Batman’s posture heightens the cover’s mystery and impact.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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Batman and Robin TM & © DC Comics.

BATMAN AND ROBIN

by RAMONA FRADON

Ramona Fradon was known during the Silver Age as the Aquaman and Metamorpho artist, but for many kids cutting their teeth on “DC TV Comics” during the 1970s, her rendition of Batman (as well as Superman, Wonder Woman, and other Justice Leaguers) was their first, in the pages of DC’s long-running Super Friends title. This undated pencil sketch from an unidentified contributor harkens back to happier days.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 69

PRE-DARK KNIGHT BATMAN

by FRANK MILLER

It’s unlikely that any regular BACK ISSUE reader needs a history lesson on how Frank Miller’s groundbreaking Dark Knight miniseries of 1986 revitalized the character. A few years earlier, while Miller was still producing his popular Daredevil run at Marvel, Frank sketched Batman—a character he first drew in 1979 for DC Special Series #21, a.k.a. Super-Star Holiday Special—at a Lone Star Comics store appearance in Dallas, Texas, circa 1982.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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BATMAN COMMISSION

by JIM APARO

Jim Aparo asked Neal Adams for his “blessing” to draw the Darknight Detective in the Adams style, but beginning with issue #98 of the Batman team-up title The Brave and the Bold, Aparo made his mark on the character, becoming for many THE Batman artist of his generation and continuing onto other Bat-books for two decades. Aparo mostly inked (and lettered) his own work during the ’70s and early ’80s but later penciled pages for other inkers. This commissioned illo from the ’90s offers a rare look at Aparo’s penciled Batman art.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 71

KILLING JOKE PRELIM

by BRIAN BOLLAND

Did the Bronze Age produce a Batman story more controversial than Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s 1988 epic, Batman: The Killing Joke? Say what you will, pro or con, about its disturbing portrayal of the Joker and its treatment of Barbara Gordon, there is no disagreement over the fact that it is one of the most lushly rendered Batman stories—ever. Here’s an opportunity to see Bolland’s beautiful work in breakdowns, from page 11 of the graphic novel.

Batman TM & © DC Comics.

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by S

teven Wilber

There was a time when Marvel Comics was known for producing multiple one-hit wonders. Failed characters and/or series became the norm, though some have survived with minor cult status, many of which have been covered in the pages of BACK ISSUE. But one character, we’ve been waiting for just the right moment to cover. As of the writing of this article, 1991’s one-shot from Marvel Comics, Nightcat, “America’s Hottest Singing Sensation and Marvel’s Newest Superhero!”, celebrates its 25th anniversary.

BI was lucky enough to speak to members of the creative team behind the comic book… and after some investigative journalism, BACK ISSUE located actress Jacqueline Tavarez, who portrayed the title character for promotional appearances, for whom Nightcat is loosely based upon.

BI also discovered the voice behind the album that coincided with the one-shot’s release and secured a tell-all interview!

THE PREMISE

As revealed in Nightcat #1, Nightcat shares a backstory similar to Marvel Comics’ first “singing sensation,” the Dazzler (see BACK ISSUE #90). Nightcat is Jacqueline Tavarez, a hopeful singer with a disapproving policeman father who raised his daughter on his own when his wife died after her own singing career failed. “Jackie” creates the Nightcat disguise as a stage persona that hides her true identity from her father and friends. The winner of a recorddeal contest, Nightcat earns immediate success, but quickly uncovers a drug ring being operated out of the recording studio. Its owner, millionaire Amanda Gideon, and her own personal scientist, Dr. Ecstasy, are attempting to develop a marketable drug that gives users superhuman traits of animals. When Jackie is found snooping, she’s taken prisoner and injected with the new test formula.

Her father, undercover as one of Gideon’s henchmen, tries to rescue Nightcat, but is shot in the process, and dies as he realizes the rock star is really his daughter.

The chemicals and adrenaline running through Jackie give her retractable claws, night vision, enhanced speed, and agility. While using her career as a recording artist as a front, Nightcat dedicates herself to honing her skills, mind, and fortune to crimefighting, working her way to eradicating Amanda Gideon’s influence and empire.

THE MUSIC

Lefrak-Moelis Records (LMR), a division of RCA, was a small record-producing company based in New York City that had a track record of successful freestyle-type artists like Stevie B. (“Party Your Body”) and Jaya (“If You Leave Me Now”). It was LMR that had a new record deal ready and was waiting for an original star. “The Nightcat album was already

Artful Elegance This painted cover for Nightcat #1 (Apr. 1991)

by Joe Jusko was also used on the cassette and CD cover of the nine-track album.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 73

set for me to sing the vocals,” Jacquline Tavarez explains. “My favorite song on the album is ‘Let Me Be Your Only Girl,’ where you can hear me sing the hook of the song.”

Who was this mysterious woman who would beat out hundreds of others to vie for stardom, and was she prepared for life as a singing superhero? “I was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the States when I was three years old,” Tavarez says. “[Before Nightcat,] I had prior acting and dancing experience. I went to acting school in Queens, then signed up with a petite model agency in New York City, Judith Models. I was the first girl in her agency to land a national commercial for Fayva Shoes, in 1987. That gig landed me with the Screen Actors Guild. I also did modeling shows at the Javitz Center in New York City.”

In the comic book, Jacqueline wrote a special dedication: “The comic is dedicated to Charles Stein, New York City’s elite pioneer of building companies in entertainment and a mogul businessman. It was a pleasure and an honor to have met Mr. Stein and I will always be very thankful to have been hired by Black Cat Entertainment, a company where Mr. Stein was CEO.” As to the life of a newfound celebrity, if only briefly, Tavarez reflects, “I was very proud and excited that Marvel Comics used my likeness and name for Nightcat.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was one of the first Hispanic heroes to be part of an incredible world! I did special appearances on talk shows and dance shows, plus press conventions. Nightcat was the inspiration for Stan Lee’s hit TV show, Who Wants to Be a Superhero. I will always have fond memories of Nightcat. Fans of Marvel Comics are loyal and loving. Twenty-five years later, I am still in shock of the experience!”

But before Nightcat was preparing for her debut and the comic book was in production, another serious artist had already been hard at work ensuring the Nightcat album would have its own voice. BACK ISSUE is pleased to introduce singer/songwriter Nikki Gregoroff.

“I moved to New York City when I was 18 and got lucky. I started working as a singer right away,” Gregoroff says. “My first major gig was when I was hired to sing backup for an artist named Peter Allen. We recorded a live album at Carnegie Hall in New York and toured the US, Canada, and Australia. From there I went on to sing with Joe Jackson, Britney Spears, and Jewel, among many others.

I fell into quirky projects like Nightcat [and] Pokemon (the movie and TV show), as well as Sonic the Hedgehog. And ironically, all these years later, I’m writing songs for another cartoon, the new Lego TV show called Lego Friends.”

As to how one goes from singing backup for Joe Jackson to singing as a superhero, Gregoroff illuminates BI readers by saying, “I got a call from one of the songwriters on the Nightcat project. I had worked with the writer before, so he knew my voice and thought it was a good fit for the songs. They told me that they wanted to hire me to record the lead vocals and backgrounds.

It was not uncommon at that time to have a professional session singer record the vocals or ‘ghost vocals,’ as they were referred to. I think the intention was always to have an actress who can sing portray the superhero.”

What about the sound of Nightcat? “Honestly, I thought the songs were catchy and fun,” Gregoroff says. “I’m not really a dance- or pop-music lover, but I can appreciate a well-written song in any genre.” As for the sole single, “#1 House Rule,” written by Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Angie Stone, “I’m not sure how well the single did.

I didn’t follow the release except for reading a review or two in the New York City newspapers. That’s the life of a session singer… always on to the next project!”

Upon being reminded of the project’s silver anniversary, Ms. Gregoroff tells BACK ISSUE, “Has it been 25 years? Wow! I remember learning the songs really quickly and not having

Forever Your Girl (left) Sorry, Dazzler—Nightcat actually cut a record as Marvel’s singing superhero!

Art by Denys Cowan and Jimmy Pallmiotti, from Nightcat #1. (below) Recording artist Nikki Gregoroff. For more info on this talented performer, visit www.nikkigregoroff.com.

Photo by Monika Broz.

Nightcat TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

74 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

Marvel Mayhem Writer/editor Barry Dutter shares with BACK ISSUE these candid shots of Jacqueline “Jackie” Tavarez’s visit to the offices of Marvel Comics, circa 1991. a lot of time to record. I’m a perfectionist, so recording with tight deadlines was challenging. We recorded at Jive Records’ studio in NYC, where so much great music was being made. It was kind of a crazy job being hired as the singing voice of a Marvel Comic character. As a singer-songwriter I have my own sound, which is nothing like the voice I came up with for Nightcat. But working on that record was definitely a lot of fun!”

THE (REAL) SECRET ORIGIN

Nightcat was originally the brainchild of talent manager Don Kessler, who was looking to promote an album and his latest discovery, one Jacqueline Tavarez. It was Don’s friendship with Marvel mainstay, Stan Lee that brought about the idea of creating a superhero singer.

According to Kessler, “I met Stan Lee, and he and I became friendly and eventually friends along the way. When I introduced Jackie to Stan, he had come up with an idea for a character that was kind of like Spider-Man, but a cat, and he felt she was perfect for the part.”

With Stan Lee on board, publishing giant Marvel Comics was game to move forward. Nightcat co-plotter Barry Dutter notes, “This was at a time when Marvel was publishing a lot of licensed books—there were movie and TV adaptations… there were literally hundreds of comic books coming out every month from Marvel and DC and other publishers.” With that, editor Bob Budiansky (of Ghost Rider, Transformers, and Sleepwalker fame) was given the challenge of taking this loose concept and the likeness of Jacqueline Tavarez and finding the right team to invent a dynamic story.

“I was the special projects editor,” Budiansky explains. “Just about all the out-of-the-mainstream editorial projects came to me. I think Stan Lee brought the project to Marvel’s attention. The idea that turning a disco singer—Nightcat—into a comic-book superhero would somehow propel the real Nightcat into a successful real-life pop star seemed very gimmicky to me. If the music wasn’t good—and my impression of what I heard back then was that it wasn’t anything special, not that I was an expert on pop-disco music—then no amount of comic-book exposure was going to sell records. Plus, I thought it placed a tremendous burden on the actual person, Jacqueline Tavarez, to have to play this role of a superhero while pursuing her singing career. Those fake personae worked for KISS, because their fans were in on the joke, but in Nightcat’s case, this was no joke—Jackie was supposed to be Nightcat.”

Longtime Marvel writer and editor Jim Salicrup was brought aboard.

Shortly after, Barry Dutter was included.

“I was brought in fairly early,” Dutter says. “Jim Salicrup had a long history of writing licensed comics for Marvel. He had not written a lot of the in-continuity stuff for Marvel, but he’d done a lot of the really fun, goofy, oddball titles like Kool-Aid Man. If you look up the books

BACK ISSUE BEATS: THE RECORD OF 1991!

oubtedly, The surprise star of 1991 is, und mer came for Nightcat. This mysterious per after winning on the scene out of the blue g contest LMR’s wildly publicized singin earlier in the year!

Nightcat didn’t take long to drop her selftitled first album and prove, while she’s clearly looking to top the pop market, that she can handle multiple genres of music. le, hip-hop, Nightcat, with hints of freesty ord. The rec ce and rock, is definitely a dan Found album’s sole ballad, “I Finally the standout Someone,” is quite possibly single “#1 track, but it’s obvious with the t Nightcat, tha House Rule” rising the charts ke fellow whoever she is, plans to overta Madonna. artists like Janet Jackson and performance ut d-o sol And after her latest rs while ude where she battled stage intr far! singing, Nightcat is sure to go

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 75

that he wrote, you’ll see some really quirky, offbeat titles. It seemed fun project to do. Now that I think about it, we basically had to make only natural that he’d be hired as the writer of Nightcat. And if he got up her world from scratch and then turn her into a superhero!” too busy to do something, he would ask me or someone else to come Besides Cowan and cover artist Joe Jusko, another well-known artist in and co-write with him. Me being a young, up-and-coming writer, contributed to Nightcat. Barry Dutter reveals, “One of the first things that was done by Marvel [for the project] was, they hired Jim of course I jumped at the chance to write anything for Marvel!

Lee to create her costume. A sketch by Jim Lee, the first This seemed like a fun project. We went out to lunch with drawing ever done of Nightcat! I used to have it, and it’s Bob [Budiansky] one day, and he told us what he wanted buried somewhere in my thousands of pages of Marvel the comic to be about, and we sort of all co-plotted stuff. It’s so cool, and I really liked it, that’s why I kept that first story together at lunch, as I recall. We decided a Xerox of it. And then, when it came time to do her to make it as much like Die Hard as possible, the lone combatant climbing to the top floors of a mountainous comic, even Nightcat herself was like, ‘Well, we should building and have to fight terrorists along the way. get Jim Lee to draw the comic, too!’ ” At the time he But this one had more hair-pulling!” was making billions of dollars every month drawing For added marketability and hype, Stan Lee, involved X-Men for Marvel, so we had to kind of explain to her that he’s too busy to draw her Nightcat comic book.” with the concept from the start, would be brought in as scripter. Dutter notes, “Stan Lee was living on the West Yes, even the actress herself would get involved with Coast at the time, so his involvement was very limited the process. “Jackie was a sweetheart,” Dutter reveals.

“She came to the office one day and we did sort of a in Nightcat. Jim and I wrote the plot, and Stan would spontaneous photo shoot. I still have all the photos of script it—that was the plan all along.”

Rounding out the creative team was popular artist © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons.

Jackie’s visit to the Marvel Bullpen. I worked in the Conan Denys Cowan (Power Man and Iron Fist, The Question, Deathlok), who the Barbarian office at the time, and there was a big sword there, so we relates how he became involved: “I was working at Marvel at the time, could hand the sword to Jackie, and she was pretending to stand over a and I think Bob Budiansky asked me if I would be interested. It was a Marvel staffer as if she had conquered him somehow. I thanked her, and I said, ‘Jackie, you’re a really good sport,’ and she thought I was saying that she was soccer or baseball, that she was a ‘sport.’ She said, [in accent] The Life of a Performer ‘You’re saying I’m a sport?!?’ I was, like, ‘No, I meant… a sport.’ How do you explain that to someone? I don’t know. [laughs]” Nightcat encounters multiple foes in her pursuit Bob Budiansky recalls his experience with the actress. “Jacqueline of criminal mastermind Amanda Gideon—even came across as a very pleasant and very naive person,” he says.

“She seemed happy to have the opportunity to become famous, ninjas disguised as backup dancers! but she also appeared to lack any control of her career. She seemed to be under the complete control of her manager.”

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. When the comic book finally hit stands in April of 1991, Stan “The Man” Lee went on various television programs with Nightcat to promote the material, but the buzz quickly faded. Budiansky recounts, “I don’t believe Nightcat met expectations. Her record didn’t sell and the book didn’t sell. I’m sure if Marvel had sold enough books to turn a profit and Nighcat’s career showed more promise, Marvel would have continued publishing more Nightcat books.”

Don Kessler reminisces with BACK ISSUE, “The publicity was phenomenal! Jackie was on a television show with Stan called Into the Night with Rick Dees. It was an ABC nationally syndicated show at midnight. She was on Dance Party USA, in Star magazine, she was just about everywhere.” We had everyone behind Jackie to create this entity called ‘Nightcat.’ I think we were ahead of our time, we really were.”

But that would be the end of the ’Cat’s prowling nights—though the heroine almost had a brighter future, as Barry Dutter elaborates.

“Jim [Salicrup], he loves promoting things, and he loves getting behind whatever he’s working on. He believes in it 100%, he really wants it to do well, and he really wanted Nightcat to be part of the Marvel Universe. He actually hired me to write a fill-in issue of the Todd McFarlane Spider-Man series starring Nightcat! I figured a good bad guy would be Mysterio, because he’s into special effects and all ‘Hollywood,’ so I was paid to write the story. It was the only time in my life I was ever paid to write a Spider-Man story… though Jim did reject it. It was heartbreaking. It was one of those things where, ‘Hey! Go do a Spider-Man story!’ ‘Yay!’ ‘But it didn’t work out, we’re not going to publish it.’ ‘Boo!’ ” Nightcat would make one final appearance in Marvel Year In Review 1991 and would never see publication again. That doesn’t mean this would-be shining star has been forgotten by fans or those who enjoy (obscure) pop-music records. It’s to those individuals that this article is sincerely dedicated.

STEVEN WILBER is a storyteller on canvas and educator in the classroom, based in Boston, and is continually inspired by his growing 30-plus-year collection of comic books.

76 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

The Shadow in a 1975 illo by Michael W. Kaluta. Copied for us by Jerry Boyd. The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast.

HE KNOWS THE SHADOW

I would like to thank you for the cover story of The Shadow (issue #89).

This character from the pulps is very underestimated as to its influence in comics, let alone in the history of Batman. I was glad to see that Mr. [Philip] Schweier included that the first Batman story was taken from a Shadow story.

One of the things I would like to add is that The Shadow, under Send your comments to: Mr. Walter Gibson, was a shadow in many ways. If you truly read Email: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) the pulps, even Kent Allard may have even been another identity.

Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief • BACK ISSUE The Shadow was also a character that could be in an adventure, espionage, 118 Edgewood Ave. NE * Concord, NC 28025 sci-fi, a “mission impossible,” thriller, mystery, etc…. so versatile was Find BACK ISSUE on the character and the storytelling. The Shadow was so secretive that even, for a while, his agents did not know of each other.

Also, he was not Batman. As you read the third pulp, Eyes of The Shadow, The Shadow took over Lamont Cranston’s home as he needed it and then stole his identity as he sent Cranston to Europe— giving him no choice—and stole his identity and connections. The Shadow did not get permission—he blatantly stole Cranston’s identity! These subtle aspects to the character are very underestimated.

COLLECT ’EM ALL The laughter is also an issue, as Walt had said in an interview Allow me this shout-out for one-time BACK ISSUE contributor Christopher (www.the shadowsanctum.com) that The Shadow had three different Irving, whose transmedia company, The Drawn Word, is responsible laughs. His laughter was not a gimmick… it was part of the character. some of the coolest comics-related stuff that will ever stoke your inner With this concept, The Shadow’s sanity can be debated. He was fan-flame… including several series of trading cards, including brilliant and chose what cases to get involved in. The argument Michael Allred’s Madman Comin’ Atcha 3D cards, the Four Color could be made that he was a zealot or fanatic. In my opinion, the comics history set (which includes classic characters and a growing laughter aspect to character is hard to depict in the comics compared number of Bronze Age characters), the Amazing Heroes set (a tie-in to the written word. I cannot help but wonder if this is one of the to the retro-hero action-figure line), and the Graphic NYC card set, reasons that the character did not have near the comic-book success photo portraits of comics creators by photographer Seth Kusher. he should have. The lore and legend of The Shadow is just as important Check out www.thedrawnword.com for more info! as the story. Besides the DC Comics series The Shadow Strikes (loved it), these issues have not been conveyed well in the comics.

The Shadow and his agents are very complex, and it comes down to a complex dynamic between the agents and the mission as much as The Shadow himself that make the story. Remember, The Shadow expected unwavering loyalty. It is almost as if he looked for intelligence from his agents, but also some sort of fractured personality flaw in order to for them to see him as “master.” Walt was great about this.

These are just some of the aspects of the character that are missing in the comics, but Walt especially always made it a point to cover some aspect of these issues in his stories.

Sanctum Press is doing an excellent job in reprinting these pulps, with interludes to where the story came from and the times in which it was written. A wonderful time capsule.

It was awesome to have Anthony Tollin’s input, as he knew Walt. It was interesting, his take on the Chaykin debate. I thought Andy Helfer had the right idea in bringing it to the present day using the same concepts as setting up a network of agents, but it went a bit too far with the robot issues….

The only discretion I have with the article is that The Shadow did begin on the radio, introducing stories. Street & Smith wanted to copyright the character, so they decided to do a pulp magazine to secure it. Walt had to add an Oriental aspect, as the cover was already in-house and depicted an Oriental man that Walt somehow had to fit into the story. I am sure Mr. Tollin will agree; if not, I greatly look forward to his corrections!

Being, most likely, the only one who remembers The Super Cops, they were a big deal in the ’70s. I had read The Super Cops—I still own a copy of the book and the comic—and I had heard that Mr. Greenberg was in jail and I tried to look up info on this and could not find anything. I was thinking that there was a sequel here that someone would follow up on but alas, no. I would like to thank Mr. [Dewey] Cassell for his excellent research, as I have been wondering about this topic for a few years!

You have done an excellent job of covering Batman, but you have never covered the ’90s, an extremely important era for Batman, as Alan Grant, Doug Moench, and Chuck Dixon did excellent work on the character. Marv Wolfman, Alan Grant, and then Chuck did a great job fleshing out the Tim Drake character, let alone outstanding work on Nightwing, Robin, and Birds of Prey. Denny O’Neil and the gang are still with us, and this area needs to be documented. Just a thought…

– Bill Broomall We’re inching toward more coverage of Batman’s ’90s stories, Bill. We did a cover-featured Tim Drake article and an Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle Pro2Pro interview in BI #22 and have touched on a little of this era, and will continue to do so, beginning with BI #97’s look at the Dixon/McDaniel Nightwing series.

Creatures of the Night Issue • BACK ISSUE • 77

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r.

AN ADAPTABLE MAGAZINE

I have been looking for that old Avengers novel for quite some time.

After that less-than-glowing review, I’m kind of glad I haven’t found it yet. Of course, now I have to try and track down the Challengers of the Unknown novel. I’m pretty sure I was aware of it before, but now there is a cover and all to stick in my mind. Just one more thing BACK ISSUE has sent me in search of.

The only thing I have to add to that is to mention book #9 in the Marvel Pocket Book Series. It was titled The Marvel Superheroes and featured four short stories, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Avengers, and the Hulk. The reason I mention it is that two of the stories were adapted into actual comics: “This Evil Undying” by Jim Shooter was adapted by David Michelinie for Avengers #201 and 202, while the Hulk story, “Museum Piece” by Len Wein, was adapted by Len himself for The Incredible Hulk #197 and 198.

I was a little disappointed to hear about the reasons for the ending of the Helfer/Baker Shadow series. I was always led to believe that the licensor had shut the series down for its slightly irreverent portrayal. I always found the series so entertaining and hoped there was a lost issue out there that would someday see publication to wrap up the story. I guess everything doesn’t get to be wrapped up in a nice fancy bow.

Sometimes things just end.

I never really got into Tarzan, so the Korak article was interesting from a historical sense only. I was happy to see the reference to Bomba, though, because I remember seeing the cover to issue #6 of that series in DC ads and it was and remains one of my favorite covers ever. With a giant figure (which I for years thought was Dr. Light!) holding a glowing sphere with Bomba on it, it is just a masterpiece of light and shadow, by Frank Springer, I believe [actually, it was Jack Sparling—ed.]. Just another fond memory an issue has brought me. And yes, I have a copy of Bomba #6.

2001: A Space Odyssey is such a landmark in science-fiction films, and so much has been said about it. Kirby was, of course, the perfect creator to match the scope of imagination of Kubrick and Clarke!

The hit-or-miss career of science fiction is always a puzzle, especially when you factor in the realization that even though they were critically acclaimed, even EC’s titles did not sell phenomenally well. Just one of those publishing puzzles, I guess. Maybe at that time science fiction was a little too cerebral for the target age group, and older people did not read comics. Just another answer lost to the mists of time.

– Brian Martin

MARVEL MOVIE COMICS YOU DIDN’T SEE

Many thanks for BACK ISSUE #89 and its great coverage of Bronze Age Adaptations, a subject that brings back memories of a very different comics (and media) landscape than exists today. Of particular interest to me was Stephan Friedt’s excellent “Marvel At the Movies,” to which I would like to offer an addendum of factoids, lost projects— and a possible omission. Most of this information I remember from short news blurbs in ’70s fanzines (particularly The Comics Reader and Steranko’s Mediascene), so I’d greatly appreciate any further info on these projects.

1. The second issue of Marvel Movie Premiere was to be an adaptation of Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise.

2. In 1978, Marvel announced an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with Gene Colan attached as artist, to be published as a Marvel Super Special.

3. A Marvel comic-book adaptation of Ken Russell’s film of the Who’s Tommy was planned for late 1975. This is a project that actually saw print—albeit as a photo-and-text filmbook, and not as a comics adaptation. The book was edited by the late, great Archie Goodwin, with text written by John Warner, and may be one of the most obscure publications in Marvel’s history.

As a longtime fan of Archie Goodwin, Ken Russell, and the Who, I am especially interested in how this book came about.

Also, regarding Kirby’s 2001 book, I remember reading somewhere (possibly The Jack Kirby Collector?) that Marvel first acquired the adaptation rights to Kubrick’s film as part of a package deal with MGM when they (Marvel) bought the rights to The Wizard of Oz in 1975. Would be interested to learn if this is true, and what other films, if any, Marvel had access to through this deal.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Philip Schweier for his excellent, definitive “Shedding Light on The Shadow.” A suggestion: the complete history of The Shadow in Comics (including a history of the Street & Smith comics of the ’40s, along with an expanded version of this article) would make an awesome TwoMorrows book!

– Joe Fiacco Philip’s Shadow article was certainly one of the issue’s hits. And thanks for these movie-comics tidbits, Joe. You’ve actually provided potential subjects for future “Greatest Stories Never Told” articles.

While some of these projects may never have gotten past the talking stage, we’ll poke around and if we discover anything we can share, you bet we will!

IRVING FORBUSH, MEET… FRED SCUTTLE?

The new issue of BACK ISSUE [#89] hit the UK today and it’s a fantastic lineup. I can’t wait to really get sucked in.

Many of the screen adaptations featured crossed the Atlantic as Marvel UK Annuals (and, occasionally, either in their own titles or as part of an anthology… such as Battlestar Galactica in Star Heroes or Star Trek in Future Tense) or books or one-shots from other publishers

78 • BACK ISSUE • Creatures of the Night Issue

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Despite never having worked on a Marvel Movie Adaptation, BI #89’s “Marvel At the Movies” jogged more memories than anything else in the issue: Meteor (Marvel Super Special #14, 1979): Frank Miller’s penciled cover gave the kid on cover left a Superman T-shirt, based on Frank’s love for the 1978 film. Oddly, this never made it to the printed cover.

Frank didn’t care for the painted treatment of his drawing. After it was returned to him he looked at it for a moment, then snapped it in half and stashed it in a trash basket on Madison Avenue.

Xanadu (MSS #17, 1980): I was in the Marvel offices when the staffers returned from a showing of the film. When I asked Louise Jones (later Simonson) how the film was, she smiled dryly, shook her head, and replied: ”Xanadon’t.”

For Your Eyes Only (MSS #19, 1981): Frank Miller was originally scheduled to pencil this one, but had to give it up when a constant series of delays pushed the project ‘way outside his window of opportunity.

Return of the Jedi (MSS #27, 1983): Despite its listed release date of 5/31/83, the Marvel adaptation of ROTJ was actually on sale at at least some newsstands several days before the movie premiered.

It may have been a rumor that whoever was Marvel publisher in those days was awakened one morning by an angry phone call from George Lucas, looking for an explanation, but I can state unequivocally that I watched as Marv Wolfman sold his comp copy to an avid fan for 20 dollars, producing an 800% return that Donald Trump would envy.

– Mike W. Barr

© Robert Stigwood Organization

BOX OFFICE BARR

I asked around and learned that, as crazy as the idea sounds, there were plans for Marvel to do a Benny Hill comic magazine (like Crazy).

The project went no further than a “pilot” issue. Unfortunately, contractual restrictions prohibit the involved parties from sharing details or artwork, all these years later. If that changes, we’ll do a “Greatest Stories Never Told” feature on this.

WANTED: HUGGY BEAR!

First of all, if not for the signature I wouldn’t have guessed Kaluta for the cover artist of BACK ISSUE #89. I reckon there’s more than a hint of Wrightson’s helping hand in there…

Vision and Scarlet Witch TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows. All Rights Reserved.

“Pictures to Prose”’ was interesting as a brief overview of an offshoot of comics I’ve never seen documented before. I’m only sorry there wasn’t more of it—more repros of those great painted covers and more opinion on the contents, e.g.: which of those ’70s Marvel novels are actually worth seeking out to read? I can remember (unsuccessfully) trying to convince my school library to order Mayhem in Manhattan back in 1980.

I’m not sure why, but I’d assumed it was a novelization of the Spider-Man TV pilot which got a theatrical release over here in England—my first-ever trip to the cinema in 1978!

The Shadow piece was a great, in-depth job. What a beautiful piece of art by Edd Cartier (“Confronting the Witch”), an artist I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of.

I also really enjoyed the detailed look at Worlds Unknown.

I’m lucky enough to have most issues, and I welcomed this good look at a fairly obscure ’70s Marvel title. Have you ever done a similar piece on its almost-twin title, Supernatural Thrillers? As an aside, with articles on short run titles such as this, and 2001 elsewhere in the ish, I’d really like to see a complete cover gallery— if not punctuating the text, then a gallery page at the end of the article. What do you reckon?

The Super Cops was another ’70s obscurity… exactly what I enjoy reading about. That Frank Thorne page you showed could have been a Starsky & Hutch adaptation with a few art alterations! I loved that show, but did no one ever get the license to adapt it in comics form? Not even Charlton?

All in all, a fab issue of BI— it made me scurry off to the Internet to look up Edd Cartier, The Super Cops, and even made me want to watch that so-so Shadow movie again, proof that your writers did their jobs well and whetted my appetite to find out more!

– Steve Smith

© Spelling Goldberg.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

(The Black Hole was published here as a one-off magazine by IPC, complete with a photo of Prince Charles attending the royal premiere), so this issue has real nostalgia value.

I did notice, in the Marvel movie adaptations, a couple of omissions (unless, of course, they are buried in the text or covered in another article which I’ve missed this far): Robocop – Marvel published a black-and-white, done-in-one adaptation of the movie in 1987.

It was subsequently reissued, now in color, in the “bookshelf” format to coincide with the sequel (and Marvel’s adaptation thereof) in 1990. Here in the UK, the British Bullpen published their own 1987 edition of the magazine and later serialized it in the first three issues of The Punisher weekly in 1989.

The Starlogged blog has the covers of the UK serialized reprints here: starlogged.blogspot. co.uk/2013/08/1989-punisherweekly-marvel-uk.html Elvira: Mistress of the Dark – Marvel adapted the NBC/New World horror comedy in another 1988 black-and-white one-shot and promoted it with a Marvel Age article. It’s worth noting that New World owned Marvel at the time, so this was an example (along with the House II adaptation and TV tie-ins Sledge Hammer! and Once A Hero/Captain Justice) of corporate cooperation, synergy, and cross-promotion between the different parts of the business.

Starlogged has the Marvel Age piece here: starlogged.blogspot. co.uk/2012/01/elvia-in-funny-pages.html Your Battlestar Galactica piece doesn’t seem to mention the contemporary British strips that appeared in the two UK Annuals and the pages of Look-In weekly. Presumably both fell outside its remit, but I thought they were worth mentioning. The first chapter of the year-long Look-In strip, launched in October ’79, is here on Starlogged: starlogged.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/1979-battlestar-galactica-in-look-in.html Along similar lines—and possibly a future BI article—I’ve read in 1970s fanzines that Marvel NY came close to licensing a title based on British comedian Benny Hill. I think Larry Hama may have been attached to the project. As I live just a few miles downriver from the former Thames TV studios at Teddington where The Benny Hill Show was made (Teddington Studios, on the banks of the Thames, are currently being demolished to make way for luxury apartments), I wonder how far the proposal actually progressed, how Marvel thought they might adapt the saucy sketch show for comics, whether any work was actually completed, and why the project was abandoned.

– Jon Carpenter

Steve, we’re eventually going to run an article exploring and reviewing those Marvel novels of the ’70s. And we’ve yet to cover Supernatural Thrillers in its entirety, although its most enduring feature, the Living Mummy, appeared in BI #92.

Curiously, no US publisher produced a Starsky & Hutch comic back in the ’70s—it would have been a good fit for the “DC TV Comic” line. The closest thing I could find were three Starsky & Hutch Annuals published in your own Great Britain in 1978–1980 by Stafford Pemberton (see sample above).

Next issue: Go behind the scenes of Marvel’s celebrated ’80s anthology series, MARVEL FANFARE, featuring an exclusive chat with Editori-Al himself, AL MILGROM. Includes commentary and/or art by ARTHUR ADAMS, JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, STEVE ENGLEHART, MICHAEL GOLDEN, ROGER McKENZIE, FRANK MILLER, DOUG MOENCH, ANN NOCENTI, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARSHALL ROGERS, PAUL SMITH, KEN STEACY, CHARLES VESS, and many more! Re-presenting the back cover art of Marvel Fanfare #58

by SANDY PLUNKETT, recolored by GLENN WHITMORE. Don’t ask—just BI it! See you in sixty!

Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor-in-chief

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THEME PARK ISSUE! ERIK JONES’ custom LEGO version of Cinderella Castle, STÉPHANE DELY’s Disneyland Paris Sleeping Beauty Castle, and JOHN RUDY’s brick-built versions of your favorite theme park rides! Plus: Step-by step “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd’s DIY Fan Art, Minifigure Customization with JARED K. BURKS, MINDSTORMS robotics lessons and more!

40 years after the debut of Marvel’s STAR WARS #1, its writer/editor ROY THOMAS tells RICHARD ARNDT the story behind that landmark comic, plus interviews with artists HOWARD CHAYKIN, RICK HOBERG, and BILL WRAY. Also: GEORGE BRENNER, creator of The Clock—”Jazz in Comics” by MICHAEL T. GILBERT—the finale of BILL SCHELLY’s salute to G.B. LOVE—FCA—and more! CHAYKIN cover.

DOUG MOENCH in the 1970s at Warren and Marvel (Master of Kung Fu, Planet of the Apes, Deathlok, Werewolf by Night, Morbius, Moon Knight, Ka-Zar, Weirdworld)!

Art by BUSCEMA, GULACY, PLOOG, BUCKLER, ZECK, DAY, PERLIN, & HEATH! MICHAEL T. GILBERT on EC’s oddball “variant covers”—FCA—and a neverpublished Golden Age super-hero story by MARV LEVY! Cover by PAUL GULACY!

Giant-size Fawcett Collectors of America special with Golden/Silver Age writer OTTO BINDER’s personal script records and illos from his greatest series! Intros by P.C. HAMERLINCK and BILL SCHELLY, art by BECK, SIMON & KIRBY, SWAN, SCHAFFENBERGER, AVISON, BORING, MOONEY, PLASTINO, and others! Plus MICHAEL T. GILBERT in Mr. Monster’s Comic Crypt, and an unpublished C.C. BECK cover!

Relive JOE PETRILAK’s All-Time Classic NY Comic Book Convention—the greatest Golden & Silver Age con ever assembled!

Panels, art and photos featuring INFANTINO, KUBERT, 3 SCHWARTZES, NODELL, HASEN, GIELLA, CUIDERA, BOLTINOFF, BUSCEMA, AYERS, SINNOTT, [MARIE] SEVERIN, GOULART, THOMAS, and a host of others!

Plus FCA, GILBERT, SCHELLY, and RUSS RAINBOLT’s amazing 60-foot comics mural!

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DRAW! #33

“Marvel Fanfare Issue!” Behind the scenes of the ‘80s anthology series with AL MILGROM, interviews and art by ARTHUR ADAMS, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, STEVE ENGLEHART, MICHAEL GOLDEN, ROGER McKENZIE, FRANK MILLER, DOUG MOENCH, ANN NOCENTI, GEORGE PÉREZ, MARSHALL ROGERS, PAUL SMITH, KEN STEACY, CHARLES VESS, and more! Cover by SANDY PLUNKETT and GLENN WHITMORE.

“Bird People!” Hawkman in the Bronze Age, JIM STARLIN’s Superman/Hawkgirl team-up, TIM TRUMAN’s Hawkworld, Hawk and Dove, Penguin history, Blue Falcon & Dynomutt, Condorman, and CHUCK DIXON and SCOTT McDANIEL’s Nightwing. With GERRY CONWAY, STEVE ENGLEHART, GREG GULER, RICHARD HOWELL, TONY ISABELLA, KARL KESEL, ROB LIEFELD, DENNY O’NEIL, and others! Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ.

“DC in the ‘80s!” From the experimental to the fan faves: Behind-the-scenes looks at SECRET ORIGINS, ACTION COMICS WEEKLY, DC CHALLENGE, THRILLER, ELECTRIC WARRIOR, and SUN DEVILS. Featuring JIM BAIKIE, MARK EVANIER, DAN JURGENS, DOUG MOENCH, MARTIN PASKO, TREVOR VON EEDEN, and others!

Featuring a mind-numbing Nightwing cover

by ROMEO TANGHAL!

“BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES’ 25th ANNIVERSARY!” Looks back at the influential cartoon series. Plus: episode guide, Harley Quinn history, DC’s Batman Adventures and Animated Universe comic books, and tribute to artist MIKE PAROBECK. Featuring KEVIN ALTIERI, RICK BURCHETT, PAUL DINI, GERARD JONES, MARTIN PASKO, DAN RIBA, TY TEMPLETON, BRUCE TIMM, and others! BRUCE TIMM cover!

Interview and demo by Electra: Assassin and Stray Toasters superstar BILL SIENKIEWICZ, a look at THE WATTS ATELIER OF THE ARTS (one of the best training grounds for students to gain the skills they need to get the jobs they want), JERRY ORDWAY shows the Ord-Way of drawing, JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the latest art supplies, and BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY take you to Comic Art Bootcamp.

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Comprehensive KELLEY JONES interview, from early years as Marvel inker to presentday greatness at DC depicting BATMAN, DEADMAN, and SWAMP THING (chockful of rarely-seen artwork)! Plus WILL MURRAY examines the nefarious legacy of Batman co-creator BOB KANE in an investigation into tragic ghosts and rapacious greed. We also look at RAINA TELGEMEIER and her magnificent army of devotees, and more!

Celebrating 30 years of artist’s artist MARK SCHULTZ, creator of the CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS franchise, with a featurelength, career-spanning interview conducted in Mark’s Pennsylvanian home, examining the early years of struggle, success with Kitchen Sink Press, and hitting it big with a Saturday morning cartoon series. Includes rarely-seen art and fascinating photos from Mark’s amazing and award-winning career.

A look at 75 years of Archie Comics’ characters and titles, from Archie and his pals ‘n gals to the mighty MLJ heroes of yesteryear and today’s “Dark Circle”! Also: Careerspanning interviews with The Fox’s DEAN HASPIEL and Kevin Keller’s cartoonist DAN PARENT, who both jam on our exclusive cover depicting a face-off between humor and heroes. Plus our usual features, including the hilarious FRED HEMBECK!

KIRBY: ALPHA! Looks at the beginnings of Kirby’s greatest concepts, and how he looked back in time and to the future for the origins of ideas like DEVIL DINOSAUR, FOREVER PEOPLE, 2001, ETERNALS, KAMANDI, OMAC, and more! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 WonderCon Kirby Tribute Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more!

Cover inked by MIKE ROYER!

KIRBY: OMEGA! Looks at endings, deaths, and Anti-Life in the Kirbyverse, including poignant losses and passings from such series as NEW GODS, KAMANDI, FANTASTIC FOUR, LOSERS, THOR, DEMON and others! Plus: A rare Kirby interview, the 2016 Silicon Valley Comic-Con Kirby Panel, MARK EVANIER, unpublished pencil art galleries, and more! Cover inked by WALTER SIMONSON!

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