HYPNOGORIA 70 - A Tribute to Len Wein

In this episode, we mark the passing of another great talent, comics legend Len Wein, a man who penned classics runs on Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, the Phantom Stranger, the Justice League and Batman, and also created Swamp Thing and Wolverine! 

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HYPNOGORIA 54 - A Tribute to Bernie Wrightson

In this special episode, Mr Jim Moon pays tribute to one of the all time great artists in horror, Mr Bernie Wrightson - creator of Swamp Thing, illustrator of Frankenstein, star of  horror comics from Warren and DC, and collaborator with Stephen King.


DIRECT DOWNLOAD -  A Tribute to Bernie Wrightson

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HYPNOGORIA HOME DOMAIN - Full archive, RSS feed and other useful links

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HYPNOGORIA on STITCHER

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HORROR WE? HOW'S BAYOU?

Rewind to the early '70s, a time when hair was long, music funky and the width of bell-bottoms still expanding. However in the optimistic first years of this new decade, a plague fell upon the land. No, not the swarms of earnest singer-songwriters clogging up the record shops, something far worse! For now the swamplands and bayous of America were becoming distinctly unsafe, with sightings of foetid, unwholesome shaggy creatures proliferating rapidly! And no, this wasn't just scruffy hippies getting back to nature, this was a  plague of bog-monsters! 

Well, at least that was the impression you got if you were reading the horror comics back then. Seriously though, there must have been something in the air - other than the scent of thai sticks that is - for out of the blue, swamp critters were THE thing in horror titles in the early '70s. And over the years, there's been much debate about how this started and which came first, and hence I'm donning my best Roy Raymond outfit, and paddling down the time stream to the murky glades of the bayous to dredge up the muck-encrusted truth!

Apparently appearing last on the scene at the beginning of 1974, was a hideous beast with his own title - Marvel's own entry into the mossy monster menagerie, The Man-Thing!

Now Man-Thing had originally been a human scientist, Ted Sallis, who was working to recreate the legendary Super-Soldier serum - the lost formula that had transformed puny Steve Richards into Captain America. However a terrorist group were after Sallis's research, and having discovered his secret lab in the heart of the Everglades, the scientist is injured and only just escapes the nefarious villains. He injects himself with the only sample of his version of the serum to help combat his wounds but unfortunately while fleeing the scene crashes his car into the swamp. And hence the world believes Sallis is dead and gone. However the effects of the serum, coupled with mystic forces in the swamp do actually save him... But also transforming him into a mute unthinking mass of moss and slime - the Man-Thing.

Man-Thing is a somewhat unusual character, as he operates on pure instinct - he literally has no intellect whatsoever.  And aside from now being almost indestructible in his vegetable form, he has a curious other ability - all those who know fear burn at his touch. The 1974 Man-Thing comic was helmed by the legendary Steve Gerber, who took the character through a host of wild adventures, having him fight monsters worse than himself but also encountering all manner of high strangeness such wizards and bizarre incursions from other dimensions. 

It was a classic run of issues, with Gerber crafting highly atmospheric and memorable tales. However over the years many have thought that Man-Thing is merely a Marvel knock-off of another horror character,. For their arch rivals DC have a muck-monster of their own. And thanks to a spell of being scripted by the legendary Alan Moore, this bog-beast is somewhat more famous than his Marvel-ous counterpart. We are talking of course about Swamp Thing.

Created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, Swamp Thing launched in November 1972. And like Marvel's bog-beast, this moss-covered monstrosity was once a man too. The first issue told of how scientist Alec Holland was working in a secret lab hidden in the Louisiana swamps on a bio-restorative formula when weirdly enough some nefarious villains attempt to steal his research. Caught in an explosion from a bomb planted by these unscrupulous folks, a burning Holland plunges into the filthy waters of the swamp, and is believed to have perished. But thanks to the formula and, as later we'd discover, mystic forces, he too rises again, becoming Swamp Thing. However unlike Sallis, Holland retained his intelligence and would later learn he was been resurrected as a plant elemental who serves as Nature's guardian.

Now all of this sounds suspiciously similar to Ted Sallis's sorry tale I'm sure you'll agree. So then, was Swampy the original muck monster? Well, no, for this is an area of comics history with roots as tangled as a banyan tree! You see, before the 1974 solo title, Man-Thing had been appearing in the pages of another comic, and an anthology title, Adventure Into Fear!

Appearing in Issue #10 - a month BEFORE Swamp Thing #1 hit the stands - Man-Thing had surfaced in a ten page tale written by Gerry Conway. Man-Thing proved to be very popular with readers and became a regular feature, with Gerber taking over scripting duties for his second appearance. Furthermore as his popularity grew, so did the size of his strip, eventually expanding to take up most of the book which naturally lead to securing his own title by 1974. 

So then, that makes Man-Thing the original haunter of the  swamps? Well, no -  for like Man-Thing, the Swamp Thing has previously surfaced in a DC anthology title before getting his own comic. Yes, this pair have parallel origins both ON and OFF the page. For in Jine 1971, in Issue #92 of House of Secrets, Wein and Wrightson had told a tale called 'Swamp Thing'.

Now this little tale has marked differences to the later comic - it's set at the turn of the century, rather than in the present day, and rather than being plunged into the swamps thanks to industrial espionage, our tragic hero - here named Alex Olsen - is the victim of a jealous rival. However this twisted Gothic tale proved to be such a hit that DC were soon asking Wein and Wrightson to develop a contemporary, more heroic version of the character to star in his own book. And many years later, in 1980s during the celebrated Alan Moore years, it would be revealed that every age has had its own Swamp Thing, reprinting the House of Secrets tale as the first hint that Alec Holland wasn't the first monster to walk the swamps.

However a month before Alex Olsen became a muck-encrusted mockery of a man, Marvel had published Savage Tales #1 in May 1971. Now this wasn't a technically a comic and didn't even bear the Marvel name - and for good reason.

 Back in the 1950's there had been a huge moral panic over comic books which had resulted in the formation of the Comics Code Authority which laid down rules as to what comics could and couldn't show and vetted every issue. And aside for from generally toning down the violence and sex in comics, the Comics Code largely made horror titles untenable with strictures outlawing the likes of vampires, werewolves and ghouls outright. Now publishers were free not to sign up to this, but a book without the Comics Code seal (as can be seen in the upper right corner of all the covers above)  wouldn't get picked up by distributors.

However by the end of the '60s the Code was been revised and was becoming more flexible, allowing Marvel and DC the freedom to publish horror titles once again. However there were still limits on what could be shown, and to get around this an independent publisher Warren exploited a loop hole in the rules. For if your comic was printed in the larger magazine format and the strips were in black and white, then technically it was no longer a comicbook as defined by the Code and therefore outside its jurisdiction.

And so Warren launched Creepy and Eerie as horror magazines, and the more adult content proved to be a hit with readers. And other publishers such as Skywald and Stanley Publications were also soon releasing similar horror comic magazines such as Nightmare and Ghoul Tales. Hence Marvel formed Curtis Magazines to launch its own range of Code-free comics, with Savage Tales being the second attempt to break into this new market. The lead strip in Savage Tales was a Conan story but it also contained a tale scripted by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway entitled 'The Origin of the Man-Thing'.

And despite being cancelled after just one issue, there were plans for Man-Thing to be a regular feature in the new magazine. Indeed a second story had even been scripted, and woulod eventually see print a year or so later in Astonishing Tales #12 in June 1972. However interestingly this time the hulking swamp monster was written by Gerry Conway's room-mate, one Len Wein... Yes, the same Len Wein who created Swamp Thing!

Now then it would appear, if we are judging by cover dates alone, that it's DC ripping of Marvel. However thanks to the complexities of comics production and the fuzzy memories of all involved, no one - not even Gerry Conway and Len Wein - are certain who invented what first. And at the time, there was no legal action brought - however that wasn't down the vagaries of memory, or a lack of evidence over which of the pair first mooted the concepts, or even the fact that despite having kissing cousin origins the Swamp Thing and Man-Thing books took their characters in different directions.

No, the real reason that there was no litigation can be found in a Skywald magazine. For in the second issue of Psycho - which appeared  in March 1971 before either House of Secrets or Savage Tales - another muck monster reared it's ugly head!

Meet Jim Roberts... Jim was a handsome fella until his cropduster crashed into a vat of experimental chemicals and  at a secret military base and the combinations of fire, nerve gas and pesticides transformed him into a monster! And as the Heap, a sentient mass of earth-matter, he would enjoy many adventures in the pages of Skywald's magazine, and even made a short-lived foray into regular four colour comics in late 1971 with his own solo title.

However this character, written by Charles McNaughton and drawn by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, actually predated both Man-Thing and Swamp Thing not by mere months but by whole decades! For this was but a rebooted version of the Heap, who had had a long life in comics, first appearing in Air Fighters Comics #3 way back in December 1942!

Air Fighters Comics was an anthology title starring the young flying ace Airboy  and featuring other aviator heroes in back-up strips. One such character was Skywolf and a tale in Vol. 1 #3 brought the world the first incarnation of the Heap. Here's his origin -

The transformed Baron Emmelman proved to be a big hit with readers and soon returned, eventually getting his own strip in Airboy Comics Vol. 3, #9  in October 1946. The Heap's adventures would run until 1953, ironically outlasting his parent character Skywolf. Over the years, we'd learn that his transformation was aided by mystic forces - the powers of the earth goddess Ceres - and his look would change; morphing from a white shaggy creature, through dull grays and browns to green and gaining a root-like nose.

And this is the real reason why Marvel weren't suing DC over the similarities between Man-Thing and Swamp Thing. As Roy Thomas recalled in 2002 when Stan Lee first came up with the seed idea for Man-Thing - "The creature itself sounds a lot like the Heap, but neither of us mentioned that character at the time..." And with good reason I suspect - for much like Man-Thing, the Heap was semi-mindless and the two creatures are startlingly, if not litigiously, similar looking! Here's the mature design of the Heap - judge for yourselves...

...It's the carroty nose that does it, isn't it! But equally clearly, looking at his origin Swamp Thing owes a debt to the Heap too.

And there we perhaps have an explanation of not one, not two, but three muck monsters stalking the pages of the horror comics of the early '70s. As the Comics Code relaxed, it was only natural that creators were looking back to the past, and just as many companies resurrected classic terrors such as Dracula and Frankenstein in the pages of their comics, and titles in the vein of the old EC shockers returned to the newsstands, it was perhaps inevitable that attention would turn to one of the great monster characters born in the Golden Age of comics.

Unbeknownst to the writers and artists at the time, with the Heap they had created a new archetypal monster and the success of the '70s swamp critters which homaged it, form a vital part of horror comics history with a long and lasting legacy.

However the Heap itself, despite being the original muck monster of the comics world, was actually owed a heavy debt to an earlier work. In the fable SF pulp magazine Unknown, tin August 1940, legendary writer Theodore Sturgeon published a tale entitled 'It!' which told of a mossy plant monster that turns out to be a transformed man. And this story hailed as one of the best ever printed in Unknown is the great grandfather of all the swamp monsters we've discussed here.

Interestingly Sturgeon's seminal tale was adapted from comics by Marvel in Supernatural Thrillers #1 in 1972 by Roy Thomas and Tony Isabella. And apparently launching an It! series following on from the adaptation was discussed, but highly ironically, ultimately the idea was discarded as it was thought the character was too similar to Man-Thing...

BONUS MATERIAL!

The excellent Jesse Willis of the SFFaudio Podcast has just alerted to the fact that Sturgeon's tale and brood of bog-beasts also inspired a radio play from CBS Radio Mystery Theatre - The Creature from the Swamp in March 1974.

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE CREATURE FROM THE SWAMP

DOCTOR WHO 5.6 - Vampires In Venice

Our regrets señor, there will be spoilers... if you are lucky

Right than, to take the bull by the horns – or rather the fish by the gills - Vampires of Venice unfortunately failed to scale the heights of the last two episodes. No real surprise there of course; after all the Weeping Angels epic was always going to be a tough act to follow, if not night impossible to top. However it does make this episode a little hard to judge as after such an accomplished story, you can’t help feeling, and admittedly probably unfairly, that there’s a drop in the quality of the show.

Now that’s not to say Vampires in Venice was bad per se; this wasn’t a horrible episode by any means. However I’m not sure exactly how good it actually was, and I am aware my judgement may be a little harsher than many of you, as I was coming to this outing a mere 48 hours after watching the preceding two storming episodes in a single sitting.

So then what were the highlights? Well from a cosmetic point of view, the episode looked fantastic and great credit must be given to the production team who did an amazing job in recreating Venice. While I was watching I was stunned to see what appeared to be lots of location work shot in the City of Masks itself – but the following edition of Doctor Who Confidential revealed that only a handful of wide shots were actually filmed there, with the bulk of the shoot taking place in Trogir in Croatia, an architectural stunt double founded by Venetians.

In addition to expertly handling a fiddly location shoot, new to Who director Jonny Campbell kept everything galloping along at a rip-roaring pace. And in general, Toby Whithouse hit all the right marks story-wise, delivering a tale that paid homage classic Hammer vampire flicks – the girls’ school being a favourite trope in the later, saucier outings from that legendary studios vampire oeuvre – and at the same time giving the monsters a typically Doctor Who sci-fi twist. And although I do have some niggles with his scripting but let’s stay focused on the positive for the moment…

Now it’s widely assumed that the introduction of a bit of romance in the TARDIS was a big part of the resurrected Who finding a new audience. However by Series 2 for some, and definitely by Series 3 for most, it was clear that they didn’t really need all that doe eyed mushiness to keep the viewers hooked. When Big Russell had initially rebooted Doctor Who, the whole romance between the Doctor and Rose was daring and different, but as the seasons progressed and new Who had won itself a healthy viewership and created a new generation of fans, it was rapidly became an albatross around the show’s neck.

Hence when Donna Noble returned for full-time companion duties in Series 4, it was good to find the whole companion fancying the Doctor business had been left in the drawer for a change, and the show was moving on. Donna felt like a return to the companion relationships of old but you never got the feeling she was the Tenth Doctor’s best friend in the same way you did in the relationships between Jamie and the Second Doctor or the Fourth and Sarah Jane.

However Amy Pond, with all the intriguing implications of her first meeting the Doctor in childhood, has been looking to hit that ‘best friend’ mark dead on. And there even a touch of the Seventh Doctor and Ace in the way that Matt Smith is sort of mentoring her in the do’s and don’ts of adventuring through space and time – a good example is the way he occasionally addresses her as ‘Pond’ in a playful mock teacher fashion.

So then at the end of Flesh and Stone, although I approved of the much more forthright approach Amy took to dealing with her feelings for the Doctor – the polar opposite to the Mills & Boon mooning of Rose and Martha in fact – a distant Cloister Bell began to ring in the depths of my addled brain. And when I saw the teaser for this week’s episode with Rory making a return appearance, I was immediately reminded of Rose bringing Mickey on board the TARDIS in Series 2 and that whole awkward implied love triangle malarkey. And so, the thought ‘Oh no, not again...’ plummeted through what I laughingly call a mind like a bowl of gravitationally challenged petunias.

But as it turned out, and seemingly continuing the mess-about-with-audience-expectations theme we talked about last time, in Vampires in Venice Rory and Amy’s relationship was put firmly back on track. Indeed, judging from the trail for next week’s adventure Amy’s Choice, it would seem that the companion/Doctor romance angle has well and truly been put to bed. Big relief all round … in Moff we trust, eh?

Equally, aside from not re-treading tired, old ground, on a character level I was pleased to see Amy and Rory click again. Basically because, although I enjoyed watching Rose as a companion I ended up not actually liking her that much as a person; I could never quite shake the feeling that the way she treated poor old Mickey, her Mum and even the Doctor showed her up as a bit of a selfish little cow to be frank. And I’d didn’t want to end up with the same mixed feelings about Amy, who so far has proved herself to be a smarter and more interestingly complicated character than Rose ever was.

However, in truth I probably could have lived with them going down the romancing the Doctor route as basically the writing and tone of this revamped series is far tighter, with better dynamics and well crafted plotting replacing empty bombast and cheap melodramatics. But the echoes of Rose and Mickey also bring me to my major niggle with Whithouse’s script – basically it’s run-of-the-mill to the point of unoriginality.

As we’ve already discussed, we’ve been over the emotional territory of the episode before, but unfortunately we’ve seen ever everything else before too. For example, the whole deal with what the Fish From Space were actually up in. Now the Saturnynians’ plot to re-colonise the Earth is a very old trope in Doctor Who - indeed it’s one of the top three reasons for aliens invading in the series – and I’m not knocking the episode for using it. But where I do have a problem in the way it was presented – for me them getting to Earth through the Cracks was far too close to the Gelth getting trapped on earth by the Time War in The Unquiet Dead.

And their plot to readjust the local environment to suit their species’ needs by pumping tons of cloudy crap into the atmosphere was far too obviously a crib from Series 4’s Sontaran double bill. Also while I enjoyed the fun and games of them appearing as vampires, allowing some neat explanations of classic undead traits like not appearing in mirrors, the use of perception filters felt a little too much like Whithouse trying to make his story fit into the Moffat style by merely robbing some technobabble instead of picking up on the tonal and structural changes the new production has ushered in.

Furthermore even the reveal of the true nature of the vampires is a steal too! Now, I know what you’re thinking – “He’s lost it! There is no way on God’s green earth that anyone else has shown the ultimate reality behind the vampire as a giant sodding fish monster!”

However readers familiar with the work of the Wizard of Northampton will know exactly what I’m talking about...



Way back in the mid 1980’s, DC had scooped up a promising British comics writer from 2000 AD and turned him loose on one of their struggling titles. That comic was The Saga of the Swamp Thing, the writer, bearded guru Alan Moore, and his run on that book pretty much invented Vertigo, ‘Suggested for mature readers’ titles, and dragged comics out of the fields of kiddie-fodder.

Now being a writer who enjoys reinterpreting myths and putting fresh spins on old characters, it was only a matter of time before Moore had the Swamp Thing encounter vampires. Earlier in the comic’s run, Swampie had met the undead before, in Marty Pasko’s “A Town Has Turned To Blood” (see Issue #3, oh fervid one!). That tale ended with our muck-encrusted hero destroying a nearby dam and flooding the vampire-infested town of Rosewater with deadly running water.

Now Moore’s two part story was a sequel to this earlier tale. In “Still Waters” and “Fish Story”(Saga of the Swamp Thing #38 and #39, fact fans), Moore posited that some of the vampires had survived and remerged when the water ceased to flow. These bloodsuckers further discovered that not only they could live underwater – the undead don’t need air – but also could breed and produce a purer vampire which just happened to look like this… (click to enlarge)

And if the similarity between Moore’s new, improved vampires and the Saturnynians are just a coincidence; I’ll eat my copy of Van Helsing's Compendium of Vampires & Other Perilous Creatures!

Now in all fairness, Vampires in Venice only robs a new look for its monsters, and you could theorise that this slice of Who provides an explanation why Moore’s vampires reveal their pure-bred form to be scaly aquatic horrors…

But it does reinforce my feelings that this is episode is trading far too heavily in borrowed elements for its own good. Now in his other outing to the world of the monstrous, his BBC 3 series Being Human, Toby Whithouse has shown he can bring a good deal of original thinking and fresh concepts to the vampire mythos. And although the two shows are written for vastly different audiences, I hope think he could have brought some of that series’ narrative flair to this episode. And harder edged story telling he demonstrates he is capable of with Being Human wouldn’t have gone amiss either.

Again I’ll stress that overall what he did deliver was fast and fun, but at the same time I can’t help feeling he could have produced something better. All this recycling of ideas that have been used recently before in Who smacks of writer unsure of himself and playing it too safe. And this scriptwrting by seemingly re-arranging a shopping list of familiar elements feels far more in keeping with the Russell T Davies era than the Moffat new broom. Indeed the episode did feel like it would be more at home in the RTD days than any other story this season so far.

Similarly it also suffered from a slight return to the vices of seasons past. For the first time this series, I felt that Murray Gold’s score was getting a shade out of hand and blaring over the dialogue at a couple of points. Secondly, the pace of the story veered close to the run and gabble routine of days gone by; with the episode feeling like it had too much to cram in for its own good. And finally, I felt the show slightly over reached in the special effects department – despite some seamless CGI in blending wide shots of Venice with the foreground of Trogir, some one went berserk at the episode’s finale with an overly busy and consequently very fake looking stormy sky.

Now you may say that latter point is a matter of taste and you’d be right – some will be a lot more forgiving of the patently added in post skies. But the real trouble is not how tolerant you are of obvious CGI but that the mad roiling thunderheads didn’t match up with the lighting of some of the street scenes and consequently made something of a nonsense of Amy reflecting sunlight to slay the Mummy’s Boy vampire shrimp.

Now all these things are just small points I know, but lapses like this made the episode feel far looser than what we have been used in this season so far. And I will concede that perhaps I’m being too picky. However I can’t seem to shake the feeling that this episode was too much of a romp. Now there’s nothing wrong with fast’n’fun run-around ever now and then, however considering the subject matter, the atmospheric location and the emotional meat of the story, I do think that Whithouse sold all of the above short with a cookie cutter adventure. Instead of taking his cues from the frothy old tat of RTD’s house style, he really needed to think his way deeper into the story and bring some of the darkness and emotional weight of Being Human to Vampires in Venice.

There are touches of it, such as when Rory confronts the Doctor and tell him that he is dangerous because he inspires his companions to impress him, but not nearly enough of it to give the story some real dramatic impact. Generally though I get the impression that Whithouse is so worried about getting the Doctor Who style wrong, he’s not got took many creative risks with his script. And I’m not having pop at him because I think he’s weak writer, in fact the opposite is true, I think he’s actually a very capable writer who with a more confidence; when he feels more at home in the Who universe could deliver some real classics.

Again I will reiterate, I didn’t hate this episode by any means; it was pretty and it was fun. And maybe I am being overly critical, but I suspect anyone is into Being Human will have similar concerns. From watching that series, we know Toby Whithouse could delivered deeper and darker than just knockabout fun. And if he had, we would have had an episode that could have given Moffat’s two-parter a run for its money…