Marvel Comics Presents #54-59
1990
Len Kaminski (writer)
Jim Fry (artist)
Back in 2000 Marvel launched its Ultimates universe, rebooting their classic heroes for the twenty-first century. At the time, I sent them (unsolicited, of course) a five or ten page proposal pitching my idea for re-booting Werewolf by Night for the Ultimates universe. I knew it was extremely unlikely that they would hire a total unknown and unpublished writer, but I figured, what the hell? Plus, I figured I had a better shot by asking for a rather obscure, third-tier character rather than saying, “Hey, I’d like write an Avengers story.”
Along with a handful of Marvel horror titles like Tomb of Dracula (starting Blade the Vampire Hunter) and Ghost Rider, Werewolf by Night was a comic Marvel launched in ‘72 following the liberalization of the Comics Code which allowed the return of horror books. Werewolf was a bit of a dud right from the start. The writers didn’t seem to know what to do with it, and the titular werewolf got his ass kicked every single issue. He didn’t seem to be a very powerful or intimidating wolf-man, and again and again his butt was saved only by dues ex machina. The book was mercifully canceled after 43 issues.
So my pitch to Marvel was as follows (among other things): (1) In the original, Jack Russell inherits the werewolf curse on his eighteenth birthday. In my version, I propose making him younger, a high school freshman, and then you have his school friends as a supporting cast and all the high school drama you want. (2) In the character’s Marvel origin, he inherited the curse from his father (rather than being bitten) and his father received the curse directly from the Darkhold (Marvel’s equivalent of the Lovecraftian Necronomicon, a primordial grimoire written by an evil elder god), so I reasoned that this would make Jack a “true lychan,” potentially much more powerful than most werewolves. This would provide an incentive for other Alphas to hunt him down to either force him to join their packs or die. (3) Jack would be the owner and guardian of the Darkhold which would provide the MacGuffin for bad guys to try and take it from him and act as a “beacon” for dark forces.
I have no way of knowing what happened to my five or ten page pitch after I mailed it to Marvel. For all I know, it somehow made its way to the hands of Jeff Davis, the producer for MTV’s 2011 Teen Wolf… but it’s more likely just a coincidence that Teen Wolf used many of the same ideas I had back in 2000 – like synchronicity in the collective unconscious, man.
But the question is: why did I care about this obscure and generally not very well written character at all? The answer lies in a forgotten B-story called “Children of the Beast” that ran in Marvel Comics Presents when I was fifteen. It was a little story I fell in love with at the time. Vampires will always be more popular among the general public, but this story turned me into a life-long werewolf guy. I re-read it a handful of times in the early ‘90’s, but I hadn’t looked at it since, and I was curious if it was really as good as I remembered it.
It was.
I mean it wasn’t Watchmen or anything, but it was the best werewolf story that had yet been done in a comic book (excepting maybe the one Alan Moore did in Swamp Thing), and it did help create a new paradigm for werewolves. This story came out two years before Whitewolf released Werewolf, the Apocalypse, and it predicted a lot of the ideas they used in that game world. (I don’t know if they read it or if it was just more of that synchronicity, man.)
The story features some fantastically creepy art by Jim Fry – somewhat reminiscent of the work of Bill Sienkiewicz. Fry’s werewolves look great! They are based more on 1980’s The Howling (with the wolf heads and lupine legs – pictured above) than the classic Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman, and the punk/biker werewolves in this story prefigure the look of Whitewolf’s garu.
Kaminski’s writing preserved the smart-alecky, first person, past tense narration of the 1970’s series. I must admit that the snarky, ironic voice didn’t quit work as well for me at age 39 as it did for me at 15. It’s still funny in places, but, today, it comes across as a little too deliberately “hip.” It actually works best when the irony is less intentional, as when Jack is reflecting on how his life has been one long train wreck since he inherited the curse but his line, “It was all a bloody mess,” overlaps into the previous scene in which Layla, an Alpha werewolf, rips the throat out of a man and leaves him to bleed out. (In comics, such overlaps are often called “Alan Moore transitions” after the British author who used them so extensively and expertly in Batman: the Killing Joke and Watchmen. Kaminski is clearly a fan of Moore and makes use of a couple of other Moore-like tricks – like when Jack, having been fatally stabbed says, “This was it, the end of the road,” as he stumbles, bleeding out of the woods onto a road in front of a stop sign.)
“Children of the Beast” opens with a surreal nightmare dream-sequence which prefigures (in not very subtle symbolism) the main elements in the story to unfold. It’s maybe a bit heavy handed, but for a horror comic it does the job, and contains some great visuals.
Part 2 turns Lovecraftian, with Jack using a necromantic spell to summon up the ghost of his father for an interview. Jack’s late father explains that lycanthropy was originally a gift from the gods. Over time it became a curse as man “fell out of harmony with their primal selves.” We’ve turned our back on the beast and opted for the zoo. By connecting the werewolf to a force of nature, to the planet (again, two years before Whitewolf got there), Kaminski was giving us a “pagan” werewolf to replace the one of traditional Christian dualism. Thematically, this story is all anti-dualism. Instead of angels and devils, superego and id, Jekyll and Hyde, Jack is advised to regain balance through atonement (at-one-ment) with the beast. He has to embrace the animal. He needs to sail though a day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.
Jack picked up his necromantic spell from an occult shop in LA. There’s an Easter egg cameo appearance in the shop by writer Alan Moore and his DC creation John Constantine seen browsing among the shelves. Another Easter egg crops up when the shop owner tells werewolf hunter Silver Dagger that Jack is living out on Landon Rd. One of the milestone werewolf movies is 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf starting a young Michael Landon, which loosely inspired the 1985 movie Teen Wolf which loosely inspired the 2011 MTV series by that name.
Silver Dagger and his hunters prefigure perfectly the Argents and the other hunters in MTV’s Teen Wolf – but here they have a disturbingly religious mission. Dagger is introduced in the narration with one of Jack’s better snarks: “His name was Isaiah Curwen. He’d come to kill me, and he’d definitely been drinking too much coffee.” When Silver Dagger walks among the peep shows and XXX book stores on the “vial streets” of “decadent” LA it’s a scene and a mood right out of The Howling and Taxi Driver. Dagger’s unsettling dementia is akin to Travis Bickel. “For it was the Lord Himself,” Isaiah Curwin explains, “who spoke to me, and entrusted me with my holy mission – that deviants such as this must be expunged from the body of mankind.” It’s the language of purity. “Deviants.” “Expunged from the body.” (In part 3, it’s played for a touch of comedy with a little Dr. Strangelove reference; after being bitten by Jack, Dagger says, “I had to protect my precious bodily fluids from its disease.”) Dagger is the archetype of what we get when puritanical religion crosses the schizoid boundary into crazed, sadistic brutality. He’s the comic book embodiment of every hyper-religious nut-job who abuses their children, kills their neighbor, or straps a bomb to themselves because that’s what God told them to do.
Isaiah Curwin is an Old Testament-style prophet and zealot. His world is a strict dualism and God is completely on his side against the “evil ones” (as is always the case among dualists). Dagger’s dichotomist worldview contrasts with Jack’s dawning realization: “Curwen wanted me dead because I didn’t fit his particular definition of normal… Maybe my father was right, that werewolves aren’t the only men with vicious inner demons to contend with. Maybe ours are just out in the open, where we can’t hide them from ourselves with comfortable rationalizations for what they make us do. Glib excuses like religion and politics.”
Dagger nearly kills him, but Jack is rescued by a pack of punk/biker werewolves. This story is one of the first places to have werewolves operate in packs, led by an Alpha. They turn out to be his “children,” the bikers he tore through way back in 1972’s Werewolf by Night #6. They take him to a drive-in theatre (and playing on the screen is, of course, the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman). You don’t have to be 15 to pick up on the raw sex appeal of the gang of biker wolves. Layla, the pack’s Alpha, seems to be inspired by The Howling’s hot nympho-wolf Marsha. One particularly sexy panel shows Layla dancing provocatively on the roof of a car at the drive-in with two of her beta males on all four at her feet howling. “I watched with horrified fascination at their primal abandon,” Jake tells us. “I ached to leap in – to tear my clothes… I thought I was being so fine and noble. But now I realize I was just being repressed.” This calls back to Jack’s first transformation in part 1 which he describes in a subtly sexual language and it positions Jack as being dangerously close to Silver Dagger and his repressive, puritanical views.
Jack’s transformation in part 4 is a fantastic 18-panel grid that intercuts the rising moon, the shifting werewolves (some of which appear to be in sexual clinches), and the terrified humans. However, once the transformed biker wolves start slaughtering the humans at the drive-in, Jack finally has his key insight: “Animals don’t kill for pleasure. They don’t torture or revel in slaughter. These were human traits.”
Going the full C.G. Jung, Jack crawls into the cave of his psyche and finally integrates with his shadow which he had pushed away and repressed. Jack chooses a path between the biker-wolves and Silver Dagger, rejecting both of their worldviews and finding a healthy middle-way. It’s a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis movement. It’s also archetypal: Jack goes into a literal cave in the ground, dies, and then rises again transformed spiritually and vastly more powerful than before…
Finally we get to see the butt-kicking werewolf we’ve been denied for the character’s entire history until now. The re-born Jack rips through Dagger’s hunters like the proverbial hot knife, and when he closes in on Isaiah Curwin it’s still one of my favorite exchanges of dialogue in comics:
Jack: “I’m sick of your hatred and intolerance. Anything you don’t understand you fear. And what you fear you destroy.”
Dagger: “God have mercy!”
Jack: “Mercy Dagger? Look around. This is your God’s work! Madness and death!! Your God has no mercy!”
But there comes still one last bit of superlative writing. At the very end, Jack, setting out on his new mission to find and help his other “children,” recalls the two lessons he’s learned – the first being the one Dagger couldn’t grasp, the second being the downfall of Layla’s pack: “We are all children of the beast. Savagery is our heritage, blood and madness our birthright. But that doesn’t mean we can’t – or shouldn’t – change.”
Thoughtful Mirth 