Werewolf by Night (1972) #4

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It’s a better issue than last time but still far from the Werewolf heights. The issue’s enough to stop the free-falling, though; if only Marvel gets someone who can ink Mike Ploog’s pencils. Frank Bolle does the job here, and, while better than Frank Chiaramonte, he’s still not great. The werewolf at least looks scary, and the faces are better; they’re less Ploog-y, however. The cost of competent inking is apparently the personality.

But there’s also not much personality in the story either. It opens with the werewolf on an abandoned movie backlot, some great white hunter out to get him, then flashbacks back to last issue’s cliffhanger; Wolfman Jack has rescued sister Lissa, who’s unconscious, and is carrying her away to safety. When the werewolf puts her down, she wakes up and realizes it’s Jack. There’s also a bit about her fear she’ll become a werewolf, too; along with the silver bullet vulnerability (this issue might be the first to show it), the family genetics curse is a lot different in the new Werewolf ground situation. Jack’s not just a werewolf; he’s a Satanically cursed soul.

Oddly, the issue has none of that crap in it. Conway gave it up just a month and a half later.

After the werewolf runs off from Lissa, the great white hunter kidnaps her, then waits for the werewolf to change and kidnaps Jack too. He’s been following Jack, having searched him out when he realized there was a werewolf. The hunter’s name is Joshua Kane. Conway writes him like George Kennedy from Cool Hand Luke but rich and evil; it’s so fun to read characters written like actors but not in the desperate hope of casting them in the role. Ah, the seventies.

Anyway.

It’s an all-action issue for at least two-thirds, with Kane hunting Wolfman Jack through this abandoned movie backlot. Mostly they stick to the Old West street and the fantasy castle. The setting seems like a better idea than it plays out, partially because the hunt’s not particularly dramatic. Kane will release Lissa if he can hunt the werewolf; it’s left somewhat unresolved. At one point, there’s a massive exposition dump about Kane tracking Jack, which Conway left out of the villain reveal sequence. Again, though, it’s Marvel-style, so maybe Ploog didn’t pace it right. Or maybe Conway really wanted to do the big dump later on.

Whatever.

Werewolf started something special, quickly fell on its face, and is now picking itself up… maybe.

Werewolf by Night (1972) #3

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Oh, no, is Werewolf by Night going to run off the rails this early? I’m hoping it’s just Gerry Conway burning out on the writing, though the Frank Chiaramonte inks ruin the Mike Ploog pencils too. Actually, the final art’s so de-Plooged, I wonder if he even finished the pencils. There’s occasionally effective art, mostly with the pacing, but it’s never good.

And the final fight sequence is terrible.

The issue opens some months after the previous one, if anyone’s keeping track of continuity, with Jack now living with Buck. It initially seems like Conway’s closing outstanding B-plots quickly; last issue they took the Darkhold to a priest, this issue opens with the priest finishing the translation.

Little does the priest know it’s going to unleash literal Hell.

Priest calls Jack, Jack drives out to see him, forgetting—as usual—it’s the full moon tonight and he changes while driving, crashing the car. By this very early point, things are clearly wrong with both writing and art. The human faces aren’t Ploog-y enough, then the werewolf is… bad. But the writing on the car crash is similarly bad, only without Conway having the excuse Chiaramonte might be inking it wrong.

Things go downhill from there, with Wolfman Jack heading out to the priest’s mission to discover an evil spirit has possessed him. This evil spirit was once a priest himself, and wrote the Darkhold in the Middle Ages. It’s a really, really bad, reductive history for the Darkhold—which gets passed around as a scroll until Jack’s dad gets it in the fifties or whatever, and then binds it. It’s too bad Jack’s dad had that binding hobby, because the Darkhold makes him a werewolf.

Meaning the Russell family werewolf curse is one generation old and is actually demonic possession. Satan himself wants Jack Russell or something.

It’s bad but maybe not spectacularly bad. It’s predictably bad seventies comics. Up until the bull-helmeted Roman spirit soldier from Hell shows up to fight the werewolf.

Alongside that silliness, Jack’s sister, Lissa, has an actually scary arc where she’s trying to get to the priest’s place only the evil spirit has filled the valley with flesh-eating fog. All the human figures are bad, most of the werewolf stuff is bad, but disintegration to skeleton scenes are all good. Too bad they’re not important to the story.

The comic ends on a cliffhanger where they forget how many nights Jack has wolfed out this month. It’s very obviously one, but they say it’s two. Not sure if that gaffe’s Conway or editor Roy Thomas’s fault, but they both have been doing bad work all issue so it’s no surprise.

I knew Werewolf’s art was going to get intolerable eventually (Don Perlin for the win), but I had no idea I’d have to sit through badly inked Ploog. And vapid, pseudo-Christian Satanic panic.

Big sigh.

Werewolf by Night (1972) #2

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Frank Chiaramonte inks the Ploog this issue, resulting in some really good art, but not the sublime standard Ploog’s set doing his own inks. It seems like Chiaramonte takes over a few pages into the comic; after a while, the faces lose that Ploog character. The expressiveness. Or maybe, since it’s eventually just the villain, his henchman, and the werewolf, no one cared about the expressions.

Before that winnowing down, writer Gerry Conway works on his subplots. The Darkhold is the major B-plot, with Jack and his new best friend and roommate Buck Cowan taking it out to a former university professor priest turned labor organizer priest for translation. They also meet up with Terri, who appeared in one panel in the first appearance of Werewolf by Night and had a different hair color. She sort of joins the supporting cast. It’s hard to say because once Jack heads out with the villain, it’s full moon and transformation time, not time for love.

The comic opens with the “third night” of Jack’s transformation cycle, seemingly making the issue an immediate sequel to the last one. Some of the other details fit—Jack having just moved in with Buck, for example—but there’s no mention of the previous issue’s memorable adventures.

Probably because this issue’s villain has similar evil plans, though the last villains’ schemes didn’t involve the werewolf for experimental purposes, they did have a bunch of non-lycanthropic experimenting going on. I think the werewolf fought someone in Marvel Spotlight who wanted to fix themselves through experiments too. Jack just can’t stop running into magically-inclined mad scientists.

But he also fights a shark. The comic opens with the cops, then a mysterious helicopter, chasing the werewolf through the Los Angeles docks and into the ocean. Werewolf goes in the water, shark’s in the water. And even though the werewolf doesn’t want to fight, the shark’s got different ideas.

The chase is good. The shark is eh. There’s another potentially big set-piece at the end of the story, and Ploog rushes it as well. The accompanying narration is more interesting than the shark fight; Conway’s got a peculiar, close first-person angle on it—but it’s neither the werewolf nor Jack narrating. The werewolf doesn’t have the vocabulary, and Jack doesn’t remember all the full moon adventure details. I’m curious if that double-extended narrative distance will ever change.

But for now, I’m just waiting to see what happens with the Darkhold and Terri, but hopefully not forty-something Buck and under-eighteen Lissa (Jack’s sister, who the issue establishes hang out at he and Buck’s pad).

Werewolf by Night (1972) #1

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Werewolf by Night’s got a cliffhanger to resolve at the beginning of its first issue, which is awkward. Especially since writer Gerry Conway’s going to take so many shortcuts. He’s in a race to resolve everything, concluding in a breakneck single-page wrap-up, and he never gets a chance to setup Werewolf as its own book. Nevertheless, there are the vaguest hints; more on those in a bit.

First, the cliffhanger. We last saw Jack Russell, titular Werewolf by Night, turned to stone by a teenage mutant girl whose father had been doing experiments on innocent people trying to find a cure for her. They were going to use dark magic from the Darkhold, a book Jack wants because… some other villain told him about it.

This issue starts with the werewolf still stone and Jack narrating a recap. The gorgon eyes stuff doesn’t work on werewolves who turn back into humans. Just as Jack changes, his new pal Buck Cowan arrives. He’s chartered a seaplane, but before anyone can say, “I hate snakes, Jock,” the duo runs into mutant girl, her now paralyzed father, and their reluctant mutant thug.

It’s an entirely different take on the mutant girl than in the previous issue, which had her as tragically, sympathetically evil. The father surviving his fall is a weird and mostly pointless change. Also, the idea she got her father a new outfit and a wheelchair in the few hours since she’d turned Wolfman Jack into stone…. Conway’s going to end the issue with just as silly of a time twist too. I hope it’s not going to be a regular narrative device.

Since Jack gave the mutant girl his name in the previous installment, she just follows him back to the mainland, where she can threaten his sister, Lissa, and Buck too. Luckily, it’s the second night of the full moon, so Jack can turn and save the day.

But what if being turned to stone somehow cured him of his lycanthropy? Wouldn’t that twist be a heck of a series starter?

Speaking of the series, the hints at what Werewolf might be like when not resolving existing cliffhangers: Jack and Buck hanging out, Lissa too? In the previous installments in Marvel Spotlight, Conway avoided sister Lissa; talked about her a bunch, avoided her. Now she’s finally around. And Buck and Jack have a good enough rapport, with Jack trying to hide the furry alter ego from both his costars.

As before, the draw is the Mike Ploog art. The werewolf stuff is great, the human stuff is good—Jack’s an often shirtless action star now, with absolutely phenomenal hair. Ploog draws great expressions, great movement, but the hair is just out of this world.

The only time the art lags is with the mutant girl and her father plotting. Otherwise, even with brief family drama stuff (Jack and Lissa’s step-father is a complete prick), all the art’s magnificent. Ploog’s art enthralls, page-to-page, panel-to-panel.