Picture Perfect Wednesday: Conan the Pin-up!

Here's something to get you ready for the "Conan the Barbarian" movie that's coming to theaters this Friday, August 19: Great drawings of Conan from when Marvel Comics held the comics rights to the character during the 1970s into the 1990s.

By Alfredo Alcala

By John Buscema and Joe Sinnott

By Gil Kane

By John Busema and Ernie Chan

By Alex Toth

And that's when Voltar realized....

... that polygamy might not be such a grand thing after all.

'The Secrets of Sinister House' revealed!

Showcase Presents: The Secrets of Sinister House
(DC Comics, 2010)
Writers: Michael Fleisher, Joe Albano, E. Nelson Bridwell, Sheldon Mayer, Jack Olek, Robert Kanigher, George Kashdan, et.al.
Artists: Tony DeZuniga, Alfredo Alcala, Dick Giordano, Don Heck, Mike Sekowsky, Rico Rival, Alex Nino, et.al.
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

In the early 1970s, DC Comics made numerous attempts to expand their market beyond the superhero titles that have always been the bread-and-butter of the American comic book industry; they'd already been enjoying tremendous success with war titles, so it was reasonable to take a crack at fantasy, horror, sci-fi... and romance.

First published in September of 1971, "The Sinister House of Secret Love" was one of the less successful experiments, be it on a commercial or artistic level. The series began as a vehicle for "book-length" tales of gothic romance that, despite the fact the covers implied a degree of horror content, were so close-hewn to genre standards that one could use them as teaching aids in a class on the subject.

However, it must have quickly been obvious to the editors and business folks at DC Comics that their foray into the gothic romance market was not setting the publishing world on fire. The first four issues have covers with an unadulterated paperback romance novel cover vibe (complete with the standard "women running from houses" motif), but starting with the fourth issue they started making obvious attempts to play up the horror aspect of the gothic romance genre, first redesigning the cover logo so "The Sinister House" was really large and "of Secret Love" was very tiny and describing the story within the covers as a "graphic tale of gothic horror" even though it actually contained fewer overt horror elements than tale in issue #2; and retitling the series "Secrets of the Sinister House" as of issue #5.

But it wasn't enough, so by issue #6 the book-length gothic romance stories were gone and the title morphed into an anthology book, joining the long-running "House of Mystery" and "House of Secrets" horror/thriller anthology titles in DC's line-up. Several of the stories presented still had more of a romance flavor than most of the tales presented in DC Comics' horror anthologies--possibly because some had been commissioned as back-up stories like the one featured in the first issue of the series. However, "Secrets of the Sinister House" didn't catch on the way the other titles had, and by issue #18, it was cancelled.

Thanks to DC Comics' low-cost black-and-white series of "Showcase Presents" reprint books, all the tales presented in this failed experiment can now be enjoyed by modern audiences. It's a book that might appeal for a number of different reasons, although given the shift in direction halfway through, not everything is going to be of interest to everybody.

Fans of the gothic romance genre in particular might want to give the book a read as "The Curse of the MacIntyres" (from issue #1), "To Wed the Devil" (from issue #2) and "The Bride of the Falcon" (from issue #3) and "Death at Castle Dunbar" (from issue #5) are rather decent efforts, both story and artwise.

The second half of the book is of interest to fans of short-format horror comics, as it contains a couple dozen tales of marauding monsters, vicious villains, and poetic justice. As was the case with all of DC Comics' anthology titles, the entertainment value of these short stories varies greatly but the artwork is universally top-notch.

In fact, the only group this entire book will appeal to are lovers of comic books as an art-form as well as an entertainment medium. For the first half of the book, we get to see great artists like Don Heck, Tony DeZuniga, Dick Giordano, and Alex Toth at their finest, and in the case of Heck working in a rare non-superhero environment. The short horror stories with art by Alfredo Alcala, Rico Rival, and other artists from the Philippines are visually gorgeous--even more so in the black-and-white reprint format than in their original presentation--no matter how wretched some of the stories. In fact, with the exception of the art by Tony DeZuniga, just about every story in this book looks better than it did back when it was first presented 40 years ago... and the only reason DeZuniga's work suffers is because a number of panels and layouts were clearly designed with coloring in mind. As a result some seem a bit vacant and sparse in appearance.

"Secrets of the Sinister House" may be an uneven collection, but it's the sort of offbeat material that I hope to see more of in the "Showcase Presents" series. I'd REALLY love a book collecting the myriad of characters that came and went with barely a ripple, such as Nightmaster, Kong the Untamed, Firehair, and Black Orchid. I hope this volume of obscure non-superhero comics sells well enough to encourage DC Comics to bring us more of the same.

Trivia: In reading this book, I realized that "The Secrets of Sinister House" #8 was one of the first comics I ever read. "Paying with Fire" (the story of a boy, awful parents, and a dragon) and "Moonlight Bay" (the tale of a werewolf astronaut) stayed with me in my imagination to this very day. It was great to be reminded of where they came from originally.

The two Man-Thing collections truly are essential

Some twenty years before DC Comics and Warner Bros. tumbled to the idea of marketing comics for mature readers ("mature" here meaning adults, interested in reading about adult subject matters that might be treated in serious literature, not porn), writer Steve Gerber was creating comic book tales that in many ways were more mature than the later material labled as such.

Those adults who discovered Gerber's work loved it. His stories featured three dimensional characters who battled real-world issues and real-world problems in addition to super-villains, demons, and nameless horrors from dimensions that would have scared the heck out of Lovecraft and Howard. His stories dealt timeless social and emotional issues and most of them are as relevant and fresh today as they were when they were penned 35-40 years ago.

Unfortunately, comic book readers don't really WANT to read stories that are truly written for adults, so time and again, Gerber's titles were cancelled... a fate that would follow his comics career right up until the bitter end when his truly excellent books for DC Comics, "Nevada" and "Hard Time" failed to find a large enough audience to warrant their continued publication.

Steve Gerber passed away two years ago, but his work is still here for us to enjoy. Over the past three or so years, Marvel Comics has most of Gerber's best work easily acessesible in the low-cost, massive volumes that are part of their "Essential" series. In fact, his work is easier to read not just because you'll have it collected in one spot, but because the printing quality is better and you'll actually be able to read the text-heavy pages in some of the issues. (It's still on news-print, and the ink is still prone to smearing, but it's still clearer.

It's interesting to me that Gerber wrote horror so well, as he has stated that didn't particularly care for horror stories and that he liked monsters even less. Perhaps his is why his horror stories deal with real horrors more than supernatural ones. bigotry, racism, religious extremism, broken dreams, unrealistic expectations, the ugliest manifestations of addiction, poverty, sexual abuse, censorship, politics, depression, suicide, environmentalism... all of these thing are explored in the "Man-Thing" stories that Gerber wrote, oftentimes explored with such thoughtfulness and presented through such well-done characters that almost feel as if what you're reading is too good to be mere comic books.

Gerber was writing comics that were ahead of their time, and he was writing about timeless subjects. Some of the trappings of the tales are a little dated--such as typical early 1970s hippies and biker-types--but the stories and the characters themselves are as relevant and vital as they now as they were when they were first published. If you enjoy intelligent, well-written horror tales, particularly ones that easily mixes straight-forward social commentary with satire and allegory.




Essential Man-Thing, Vol. 1 (Marvel Comics)
Writers: Steve Gerber, Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas and Tony Isabella
Artists: Mike Ploog, Val Mayerik, John Buscema, Gray Morrow, Frank Chiaramonte, Tom Sutton, et.al.
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

"Essential Man-Thing" Vol. 1 opens with the Man-Thing earliest appearances, chroniclally the events that lead to chemist Ted Sallis being transformed into a mindless creature made of mud and vegetation from a patch of the Everglades. After a couple of adventures that teamed Man-Thing with S.H.E.I.L.D and Marvel's answer to Tarzan, Ka-Zar, against the sinister criminal organization A.I.M, we get the first glimpse of the greatness that is to come.

In a story written by Man-Thing's co-creator Gerry Conway, we learn that Man-Thing has a very strong empathic sense and that he is drawn to emotional and physical pain and misery. We also learn that fear and anger cause him pain and cause him to lash out at the source of that pain, attempting to destroy it with a supernatural ability that causes anything that feels fear to burst into flames when he touches it.(And, as probably goes without saying, most people who come face-to-face with a 7-foot-tall mud-encrusted monster with huge red eyes will fear plenty of fear... so there plenty of people who suffer lethal third-degree burns as a result of an encounter with Man-Thing.)

Although Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway created Man-Thing, it is Steve Gerber who will use the creation to its fullest potential, using Man-Thing's empathic sense to have him drawn to all sorts of situations charged with negative human emotion, thus making him a vehicle for telling stories dealing with topics as diverse as bigotry, jealousy, greed, depression and suicide.


Gerber also added the Kale family, a family of sorcerers living at the edge of the swamp in Citrusville... and in doing so, he set the stage to reveal that Man-Thing and his swamp are guardians of the Nexus of All Realities, thus giving him a free hand to include all sorts of cosmic and extestial elements to his Man-Thing yarns. Finally, he added the character of Richard Rory, a down-on-his-luck Everyman who sort of serves as a stand-in for the reader as the takes unfold; he's a kindhearted, decent and completely normal guy--well, except for having a giant swamp creature as a friend.

The mix of tales in "Essential Man-Thing" Vol. 1 move from small-scale, stories of personal horror to cosmos-spanning, reality-shattering dark fantasy adventures--one often leading to the other and back again--and each is more fascinating than the one before.

There are three main plot threads that run through the book, so, although it's very obvious the 500+ pages were originallty published in chunks of 12 or 22 pages because each presents a finite episode, you'll still feel as if you're reading something that was intended to read as a coherent whole.

The first thread deals with Jennifer Kale's maturation into a sorceress and inheriting her family's duty to help protect the Nexus of All Realities. Jennifer and her extra-dimensional teacher, Dakhim the Enchanter, become the wellspring of all sorts of cosmic nightmares for Man-Thing and those who enter his swamp.

The second thread deals with construction baron and real estate tycoon F.A. Schist (not one of Gerber's most subtley named characters) and his efforts to first drain the swamp to build an airport and later gain revenge upon the Man-Thing for ruining his business. After Schist comes to a very bad and very final end, his family picks up the revenge quest. The Schist storyline is used to explore such diverse topics as environmentalism, bigotry, the dangers of excessive greed, and the self-destructive nature of obsession. Although Schist more often than not comes across as a cartoonish villain, most characters around him are quite three dimensional and even Schist has a few moments of depth.

The third thread deals with Richard Rory's ongoing attempts to make a new life for himself in Citrusville while trying to deal with all the crazy and nightmarish situations he is drawn into. He is a recurring secondary character for most of this book, but his important grows as it wears on, and in Volume 2, he takes center stage for real.

The three story threads weave in and out of each other and the various stand-alone episodes present in the book, giving it a unified feel, a feel that is made stronger by the fact that the final comics story presented in the book harkens back to the very first Man-Thing tale, as it resolves the fate of Ellen Brandt, the woman whose treachery led to Ted Sallis becoming the Man-Thing.

Between the two end pieces and the three running plots, readers are treated some of the most interesting stories Gerber ever wrote, such as "Night of the Laughing Dead", a tale of depression, suicide, and cosmic balance; and the two-part introduction of the Fool-Killer, a tale of religious fanaticism and vigilantism that was written partly as a spoof of the popular Marvel Comics character the Punisher.

And Gerber's Man-Thing stories continue to get better with time, with more greatness following in "Essential Man-Thing" Vol. 2.

It's not just the writing in the book that's so remarkable. We're treated to some great art from Mike Ploog (whose Will Eisner-inspired style lends itself perfectly to the water-logged Everglades swamp where most of the stories take place), Val Mayerik, and John Buscema. There are other minor contributors, but those three gentlemen produce some truly gorgeous pages. (Mayerik's art suffers a little bit due to the lack of colors in this black-and-white reprint volume, but Ploog and Buscema's art shines.)

"Essential Man-Thing" Vol. 1 is a book bursting with true classics of the comics genre. It's a must-own for affeciandos of the genre, or for anyone who loves intelligent, well-written horror tales.




Essential Man-Thing, Vol. 2 (Marvel Comics)
Writers: Steve Gerber, Chris Claremont, Mike Friedrich, Marv Wolfman, J.M. DeMattias and Dickie McKenzie
Artits: Jim Mooney, Don Perlin, Bob Wiacek, John Buscema, John Byrne, Tom Sutton, et. al
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars
"Essential Man-Thing" Vol. 2 picks up where Vol 1 left off, finishing out the first "Man-Thing" series and the rest of the original Man-Thing stories penned by Steve Gerber.

Like the first volume, the tales mix episodic horror with social commentary and satire. The cosmic nature of the stories has mostly been dailed back with storylines about alienation, bigotry and censorship. The mystic Kale family has stepped into the background while hardluck case Richard Rory and some very darkhearted but seemingly-average citizens of Citrusville become the focus of the ongoing storylines. Gerber starts cranking up the cosmic madness in the tales that orginally appeared in "Man-Thing" #20 and #21, but the full scope of the story he was trying to tell, Marvel pulled the plug on the title. However, Gerber made lemonade with the lemons, and the final issue of the series summarized a story that might have spanned three or four issues within a tale that featured Gerber himself as a character and brought the series to a conclusion unlike any other that had previously been seen. Few titles that are cancelled go out on such a high note as "Man-Thing" did.

The Gerber material takes up about half the book,and once it's done, there's a very steep drop in quality.

First off, a bad editorial decision was made to include the team-up between Man-Thing, Captain America and the Thing from "Marvel Two-In-One", as it is a fragment of a much larger storyline and makes little sense on its own when they should have included "Giant-Sized Spider-Man" #5, which detailed Spider-Man's first meeting with Man-Thing and to which the story reprinted from "Marvel Team-Up" #68 is a sequel and makes frequent reference to that previous tale.

Secondly, when Marvel gave Man-Thing another shot at his own title in 1979, with Michael Fleisher and Chris Claremont handling the writing chores, the book was a pale imitation of the first Man-Thing series. Fleisher and Claremont tried to copy Gerber's style, and they failed at every turn, turning in ten issues of suspense comics that are barely above average in quality. To make matters worse, the majority of the issues were illustrated by the team of Don Perlin and Bob Wiacek, competent artists but whose styles are too streamlined and clean to effectively captaure Man-Thing and the vine-choked swamp he dwells in.

Altough not as "essential" as the first volume of "Essential Man-Thing", this book is still well-worth owning for anyone who likes intelligently written horror comics.

(For your information, another Steve Gerber horror milestone was collected two years ago in "Essential Tales of Zombie". I recommend that book as highly as I do the "Essential Man-Thing" volumes. Click here to read that review.)

'Essential Tales of the Zombie' is an accurate title for a fine collection of comics

Essential Tales of the Zombie (Marvel Comics, 2007)
Writers: Steve Gerber, Tony Isabella, Doug Moench, Chris Claremont, et.al.
Artists: Pablo Marcos, Alfredo Alcala, John Buscema, Bill Everett, Gene Colan, et.al.
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

"Essential Tales of the Zombie" is one of an ongoing series of 500-page+ collections of reprinted material from the past 30-40 years of Marvel Comics' output. The material in this book originally appeared in some of Marvel's black-and-white magazines from the mid-Seventies. It presents dozens of tales of voodoo and walking dead, the majority of them taken from the 10-issue run of "Tales of Zombie." Also sprinkled throughout the book are some of the best text features from the magazine, such as reviews of zombie movies and articles about voodoo.

It should be noted that nowhere in "Essential Tales of the Zombie" will you find walking corpses of the flesh-eating, post-Romero kind. The undead here are mostly the result of voodoo curses and similar magics. For me, this classic feel is refreshing in this day and age of rampant splatter and dismemberment.

The most worthwhile material in the book is the ongoing saga of the Zombie from the title. It's the story of Simon Garth, a captain of industry and control freak, who is murdered and reanimated as a zombie. Painfully aware of his condition, yet helpless to do anything about it, he becomes the undead slave of a series of different masters, controlled by the mystical Medallions of Damballah.

The stories of Simon Garth are top-notch, classic horror comics, which is not surprising, given they were penned by Steve Gerber when he was at the height of his creative powers. The manage to present social commentary, tragedy, chills, and poetic justice to the bad guys, often-times within the confines of the same story. The narration may get a bit purple at times, but the power of the stories shine through. Plus, the two-part tale that sees Simon Garth finally gain the peace of the grave is an excellent bit of writing by Gerber's successor on the strip, Tony Isabella. It is a perfect end to the story of a man who was forced onto a journey of discovery and redemption.

Although Bill Everett and John Buscema drew the first three tales featuring the Zombie, the art on the Simon Garth saga is mostly by Pablo Marcos. Alfredo Alcala also handles the art on a couple of the stories. Despite the vast difference in styles between these four artists, the mood remains consistently oppressive, dark, and spooky, and all do a great job capturing the macabre atmosphere of the Louisiana swamps and Haitian back-woods that the Zombie spends most of his time. (Alcala, Buscema, and Everett happen to be three of my favorite artists, and they do fine work here.)


Aside from the stories chronicalling Simon Garth's journey, "Tales of the Zombie" contains two stories with Brother Voodoo (a superhero who, as his name implies, gains his powers from voodoo rites) and a couple dozen short horror stories. The Brother Voodoo stories are... well, they're Brother Voodoo stories. The character always seemed a bit goofy to me, and he's true to from in both stories. (One wraps up the plotline from his "Strange Tales" appearances, and it was nice to finally know how that all ended, but the character still doesn't do much for me.) The shorts are mostly your standard twist-ending sort of tales that have been around in comics since the 50s... the ones that once filled the pages of "Creepy", "House of Mystery" and "Psycho". Althoguh they are all excellently written and illustrated, these run the gamut of quality from ho-hum to masterful.

Rounding out the book is an interesting time capsule of table of contents from each issue of "Tales of the Zombie", selected text pieces about voodoo and the occult, a two-part short story from Doug Moench, and some reviews of movies featuring zombies. The movie reviews were of particular interest to me (big surprise there, eh?) and there were even a few mentioned that I hadn't heard of! These magazine articles made for surprsingly good reading... although I wished a few more of had been included. I would have liked to read the obit of Bill Everett that was mentioned on one of the ToCs.)

"Tales of the Zombie" is an unusual entry in the "Essential" series, but one that lives up to its title. Fans of horror comics won't regret spending money on this one.