Marvel Monsters: January 2009 Archives

Marvel often tried to put two characters together in a series of ads or anthologies that often left me scratching my head.  So let’s celebrate those double feature specials!

Morbius and Lilith.  Kind of makes sense, both vampires, right?  Wrong.  Morbius is a scientifically created vampire, while Lilith was magically created.  OK, I’m a nit-picker.

Brother Voodoo and the Son of Satan?  Competing religions right there!  The Mark of Satan was the original title for Daimon Hellstrom’s series. 

Hey, we’re launching Man-Thing #1, and just because you love monsters so much, you should also buy Ka-Zar #1!  Well, both series have characters running completely naked in the great outdoors.

How about putting Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales along with Doc Doom?  Jungle tales combined with evil dictator conquering tales—peanut butter and jelly!  We just weren’t ready for that jelly.  I just noticed that Zabu’s head is the hyphen in Ka-Zar’s logo.  Too bad Zabu’s head was also the same color as the background!

And then there was Amazing Adventures with the Inhumans and the Black Widow.  That didn’t make sense either; you would think the Inhumans and Doctor Doom would be better off sharing a title!

Amazing Adventures #7 is almost a crime, because you have 2/3 of a great cover ruined by the Widow at the bottom.  What’s more dramatic, some dude with a bionic arm threatening to burn down San Francisco or the lithe Black Widow karate kicking a fat guy?  I think I know which one Neal Adams preferred.  Nuff said.

A while back I mentioned Back Issue #31, a tribute to Steve Gerber.  This contained a nifty illustration by Pablo Marcos, Gerber’s artist on Tales of the Zombie:

These were all of the horror characters that Gerber wrote during his tenure at Marvel.  From left to right: Simon Garth (Zombie), Morbius, the Living Mummy, Lilith, Son of Satan, and of course, Man-Thing.  You can visit Pablo Marcos’s website for more illustrations.  Nuff said.

I recently discovered this cover recreation by Mike Ploog on Romitaman:

It's a recreation of Frankenstein Monster #6, the last issue of the series that Ploog illustrated, before moving over to Man-Thing.  This is a big improvement over the original cover:

Published in 1973, it looks to me like the original cover was penciled by Ploog and retouched/inked by Romita.  My guess would be that Romita wanted to portray that monster as being much more fierce and upset over his captivity.  It just doesn't jibe with the rest of the cover, which is clearly drawn in Ploog's style.

The story inside is pretty decent as well--the Monster has survived 100 years after his creation and discovered Frankenstein's ancestor still lives in the area.  Ploog plotted this tale in addition to providing full pencils and inks.  Pure Ploog!  Nuff said.

Marvel’s house ads in May 1974 trumpeted the arrival of their newest Giant-Size monster comic.  By this time, they dropped the pretense of calling it Giant-Size Monsters or whatever…

Giant-Size Man-Thing!  The greatest comic title of all time!

The cover by Mike Ploog was enough to make any Man-Thing devotee want to buy this comic.  We had never seen Manny fight another swamp creature before.  The Glob was an old character from the Hulk, but he was really a take-off on Hillman’s the Heap character.

The story inside did not disappoint.  There were two slimy slug-fights superbly illustrated by Ploog.  Sadly, this was one of the last Man-Thing stories by Ploog.  He left the title soon afterward to draw the Planet of the Apes series.

Steve Gerber created a really funny set of villains called the Entropists.  “Entropy, Entropy, all winds down!”  The Entropists are the enemies of environmentalists, because they state:  “What we wish is unimportant!  Entropy is the natural way of the universe!  We are born…we expend our life energies…we die.  To prolong the life of a man, or a world, is to defy natural law, to instill false hope.”  The leader of the Entropists, Yagzan, looked remarkably like Richard Nixon!

Dean Mullaney commented on this in the letters page of Giant-Size Man-Thing #2.  Gerber seems to indicate in the letters column that there were targeting another president, but I think this must be a red herring.  Yagzan was Nixon. 

There was a few people who could their letter published in nearly every issue of a title, Dean Mullaney was one of them.  Later, we’d watch Dean rise to become the publisher of Eclipse Comics, where he’d publish a number of things by Steve Gerber, such as Stewart the Rat and Destroyer Duck. Nuff said.

Last month, I wrote about Giant Size Creatures, that introduced Dracula’s daughter, Lilith.  Marvel was determined to expand their line of horror characters with female versions of their famous monsters.  Soon after Lilith appeared, Giant-Size Creatures #1 appeared on the newsstands (which was re-titled Giant-Size Werewolf with issue #2), featuring a female were-creature: Tigra!

The cover was not half-bad, it definitely peaked my interest to see a female werewolf teaming up with Jack Russell to fight a horde of Hydra agents.

This issue was written by Tony Isabella, and drawn by Don Perlin and Vince Colletta. Now I have to say something that almost got me lynched at a con once…Vinnie Colletta is my least favorite inker in the entire world.  Some people love Colletta on Kirby’s Thor, but I do not.  One of the worst art teams that I can think of would have to be Colletta paired with Don Perlin.  I never really cared for Perlin on Werewolf by Night, he killed the book for me after Ploog left the series.  See how they depicted this dramatic scene of Tigra clashing with the Werewolf on a moonlit beach?  This is the best scene in the whole book, true believers!

Tony Isabella certainly took the creation of Tigra seriously.  I was really surprised to discover that Tigra was really Greer Nelson, from Marvel’s short-lived Claws of the Cat series.  Instead of making Greer a woman with a werewolf curse, she joined an underground group of Cat People who saved her life by transforming her into a were-cat.  Unlike Jack Russell, she retained her intelligence and preferred not to change back to human form.

Tigra was awarded a series try-out, starting in Marvel Chillers #3, and her artistic depiction was immensely superior.  Will Meugniot, the artist who would later go on to draw the sexy DNAgents, immediately knocked me out with this splash page.  Meugniot emphasized all of Tigra’s curves, oomphed up that bikini, and gave Tigra some nice cat-bling to go along with it.

The stories in Marvel Chillers #3-7 pushed Tigra firmly into super-hero territory, although the artistic teams shuffled with almost every issue.  Marvel Chillers #4 had a fill-in story by Chris Claremont and Frank Robbins, #5 saw Isabella and Meugniot return, #6 featured a pretty good early job by John Byrne, and #7 finished things off with dynamic cover by Jack Kirby.  Even back in the 70s, Tigra was single-handedly fighting off a Skrull invasion!

Even though Tigra lost her series, she was never forgotten in the Marvel Universe and became more well known that Jack Russell.  Tigra was a founding member of the West Coast Avengers and became a fixture of Marvel’s super-team.  Which leads to the modern era, where Frank Cho doesn’t miss a beat in depicting Tigra as a sex-kitten.  Oh that Frank Cho…exposing the dark underbelly of our Marvel consciousness!

Even though Tigra and Skrull-Pym’s little love-nest got interrupted by an Ultron-invasion, we just learned in Avengers: The Initiative #20 that they hooked up later on.  Tigra confesses to Hellcat that she is pregnant and Skull-Pym was the father!  Perhaps this subplot ends here, with Tigra later saying that she will terminate the pregnancy.  But it is ironic to see Tigra in a scene with Hellcat, since the Greer Nelson started out wearing this costume in the 1970s!  Nuff said.