Number 2527: Ride the gargoyle

Wallace Wood was good at fantasy stories, as “Flight into Fear” shows. A teenager, Johnny, who has lost the use of his legs is transported to another world by riding a gargoyle that has come to life. Johnny then helps the people there get rid of a bad king. The best thing about fantasy is absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely, can happen. Wood used a series of events, which are more like a dream (or nightmare), rather than try to explain the reasons why such other-worldly happenings occur.

Like other stories Wood did during this time there are echos of Lord of the Rings. All comic books are one form of fantasy or another. The seven page story was produced for a Marvel title, Tower of Shadows #5 (1971), and of course Marvel and DC comics are fantasy factories.

There is also the self portrait of the artist, with a whimsical, but telling, look at his studio as a medieval dungeon. Wood conjured up fantasy, humor, science fiction, all parts of his signature — and life's — work. But from interviews he gave over the years he griped that drawing comic books was a path to poverty, and bad habits. Showing himself with a cigarette was telling. His unhealthy lifestyle had no fantasy way out for him except tragedy when, ten years from the time he was drawing this he took his own life.

Number 2497: The Ghost Beast

Marvel Comics had a title called Tower of Shadows which began  in 1969. It published some reprints and some original stories, and lasted 9 issues before becoming Creatures on the Loose. I remember buying the comic with its original title, because some of them had stories by Wallace Wood. I’ve still got them.

The story, “The Ghost Beast,” appeared in Tower of Shadows #6, from 1970. Something I noticed about Wood’s storytelling is that in this period his stories were economical (i.e., short), all fantasies. Wood, along with most all of the artists working for Marvel in the early '70s, is deceased. It’s not Tower of Shadows I collected, but Wood.

Number 2454: Wallace Wood’s “Sanctuary”

Wallace Wood has been a favorite artist for this blog, because he is a favorite of a lot of comic book fans. Including this story today, I have posted 46 stories by him. The man died almost 40 years ago, and yet his artwork is still thrilling fans, including cynical old me. In 1970 Wood did some stories for Marvel Comics’ Tower of Shadows. He wrote and drew them, along with his assistants. I enjoy the imagination of his sword and sorcery stories. Wood, besides being an artist who could do dynamic work from scripts of other writers, was a natural storyteller on his own.

“Sanctuary” appeared in Tower of Shadows #8 (1970).

Number 468


Touched and retouched


I knew when I bought Tower of Shadows #1 off the stands in the summer of 1969 that something was wrong. The lead story by Steranko was great, but the story credited to Johnny Craig — THE Johnny Craig of EC fame, Vault Of Horror, Crime SuspenStories, Extra! — just didn't look like Johnny Craig. As I found out from reading this, it was and it wasn't:

The following year [1969], when Marvel launched two "ghost" comics, some there felt they'd found a place to better utilize the skills of Johnny Craig. He wrote and drew a story for Tower of Shadows #1 but, again, Stan did not feel the result looked like a Marvel comic. As with Craig's one DC job, the work was retouched so thoroughly — in this case, by John Romita — that no trace of the original artist's style remained. --Mark Evanier, POVonline, September 20, 2001.

It was obvious looking at the artwork that it'd been retouched by Romita, but there are traces of Craig in the writing, which was probably also heavily edited by Stan Lee. On page two, a couple of panels show the main character upset because "Janie" is expecting a baby, now of all times, when a dozen creditors are hounding him. An unwanted pregnancy and need for money, that's a story in and of itself, but after those panels it drops into nothingness. It has nothing to do with the story itself, about a man exposing phony mediums. Craig was too careful a plotter and writer to create a situation and then let it languish, so I suspect there might have been something edited out. I'm not even sure why what was left in remained, since it added nothing to the plot.

What is Craig are the panels in the rain. I go back to the EC Comics. A man in an overcoat with his collar up, wearing a fedora, leather gloves folded down at the wrist, a gun in his hand, waiting in the rain. Craig could really draw noir scenes like that, and that's the closest part of "From Beyond the Brink" to the Johnny Craig I knew from EC Comics. Some artists flourished under the Marvel style, others didn't. Sadly, Johnny Craig was one of those whose artwork probably belonged more to a time and a place that, in the Marvel era, had past.