Werewolf by Night somehow manages to straddle being an utter debacle on every possible level while simultaneously being perfectly in sync. Writer Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin have reached simpatico like Moench gave in to Perlin’s art and just started describing it in the narrative instead of trying to make it fit the pre-existing story he had in mind. Only once does Moench slip—when Perlin thought they were making just eighteen Lissa Russell into an old woman.
Also, Perlin doesn’t draw the Haitian mystic lady as a Black woman, but instead as some vaguely—well, actually, vaguely European in a particularly problematic way too—white hag. But Moench’s dialogue is… well, he embraces doing his version of an old Haitian lady’s dialect. It’s cringy even for a comic from 1975.
But the silly main plot, which has Wolfman Jack fighting “weredemon” Lissa, it’s kind of great. It’s not good. Moench throws out a bunch of established continuity, like the werewolf knowing Lissa’s his sister, so her being even smellier as a weredemon would probably help. And the narration—Jack, fully narrating the werewolf fight he’s observing first-hand but, you know, not because he’s narrating the panel action—has this repeated dream device. Jack remembers all the times he and Lissa wrestled when they were kids, which doesn’t sound like the siblings at all. The one time Moench finds some real emotion, he ignores it, and the rest of the time, there’s some weird patriarchal shit going on too.
At least Jack doesn’t think about how he wishes she’d have married his forty-five-year-old bestie Buck Cowan instead of turning into a werewolf like him.
Oh, the demon thing… Old Scratch hisself cursed the Russell family with lycanthropy, so the weredemon should be the standard.
Doesn’t matter. Something about the way Moench writes that narration of Perlin’s mostly bad but still somehow vibrant and active panels just works. Maybe Moench’s dismissal of canon? Though Jack being a shitty misogynist about psychic ex-love interest Topaz (he doesn’t dig her now she’s not as mystically powerful because he’s a twerp) sucks.
It might just be symbiosis—and Lissa’s extremely long birthday subplot having such a bullshit conclusion—but I do wonder if the book’s finally found the formula.
It’s a successful comic—you get your two bits worth—but it’s not a good one.
Maybe Moench just paced it well. It’s definitely not worth going back to figure out its (almost infinitely asterisked) success.
Well. Writer Marv Wolfman reveals a lot this issue; it’s almost entirely nonsense, but there’s a lot of it. There are conclusions (of sorts) to Taj’s Indian sojourn and Frank Drake’s South American capitalist exploitation. Taj can’t stop the villagers from breaking in to kill his vampire son; Frank discovers he’s surrounded by worker zombies who move to kill him after he says hello to one of them. Not sure what they’d have done if he had ignored them.
I’ve been wondering why Werewolf never does an issue in-between Jack’s werewolf nights—so, you know, the majority of his life—and Doug Moench “delivers” here, complete with entirely unsuitable hard-boiled narration for surfer bro Jack. After last issue’s second-night cliffhanger, they all had an uneventful third night. Then they didn’t talk for a week, just moped around, presumably because neither Jack nor Buck wanted to console Topaz, whose soul is in peril.
The “Taj in India” C plot has been running seven issues, so half a year, and it’s just now getting to him staking his vampire son. The cover shows Taj thrilled to do it and the wife begging him to stop; the interior’s the opposite; the entire point of Taj going home was to stake the kid before the villagers do it. And to slap his wife around for being… a woman, basically.
There are numerous things to talk about this issue, but the teaser for next issue muscles them all out. Next issue is Lissa’s eighteenth birthday, an event the series has been promising for twenty issues and three years. I’m not taking the teaser as a promise, especially when writer Doug Moench is so comfortable retconning.
I love how writer Marv Wolfman makes sure Dracula’s racist towards Blade to in-virtue signal, except van Helsing and his daughter were racist towards Blade too. And hero Frank Drake is constantly racist towards Taj. It’s an unfortunate trivia note to an otherwise solid fill-in issue. Or at least, the Tomb of Dracula version of a fill-in. It’s the same team; it’s just nothing to do with the main story.
Giant-Size Werewolf #3 might be artist Don Perlin’s best… oh, wait. He just penciled. Sal Trapani inked. Perlin was penciling and inking over in regular Werewolf by Night at this point. Okay, never mind. I mean, it’s okay art—especially for Perlin—but it’s nowhere near as impressive with someone else helping out. Especially since my biggest compliment was Perlin doing a nod to Mike Ploog’s Topaz every sixth panel. The other five panels aren’t good (people’s noses change shape, or their eyes move up and down on their heads between panels in the same scene). But there seems to be an attempt at a Ploog nod.
I can’t believe how well writer Marv Wolfman ends up doing with this issue. It very much should not work, yet it ends up working (in no small part due to Gene Colan and Tom Palmer’s superb artwork; it’s one of their best issues). But the story… wow wee. Dracula starts the issue attacking a random babysitter, and after the splash page, Colan goes with the vampire bat attacking from above, which was a visual trope for the first few issues of Tomb. Colan dropped it almost noticeably, and it’s only one panel here; not as much terrifying the victims, I guess.
