"The Wail of the Werewolf" from the May 1952 issue of Adventures into the Unknown #31, is one whale of a weird tail, er-- tale, for our latest installment of Werewolf Wednesday. It's fast-paced and fun, and totally unlike any other lycanthropy story you've ever read-- guaranteed! Art Gates delivers some decent art, though his bear-werewolf is more silly than frightening looking, and clearly Betty is drawn quite a few times from probable Hollywood starlet photo reference. But it's the sudden, added mix of dueling supernatural entities in the climax that really makes this one of the more original ACG horror adventures in my book...
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The bear-werewolf (bearwolf?) looks just like the werewolf from the film Big Bad Wolf, who could speak, too (and change at will, including in the middle of the day). However, I don't know if we can call the bearwolf a werewolf at all since there's no indication that he was ever a human.
I love how, in Adventures into the Unknown! every woman is just "Honey" after being introduced. I guess it saved writers on a deadline the trouble of remembering character names.
And that's one of the reasons you'll want to install CO₂ detectors in your house.
But seriously, I Really dig this imaginative reinterpretation of werewolf mechanics. I am certainly boggled by the idea that a person's spirit can be enslaved to the wolfman while their fully conscious body operates independently. I'd like to think there'd be some symptom to losing my soul. There's some pretty heavy metaphysical implications there. But the idea that my own ghost is complicit in my werewolf predation, owing to some viral aspect of hearing that creature's howl, makes good common witch-sense. Animal roars are thought to have evolved to panic and paralyze prey animals in the wild, so this sort of tracks. And it's way less weird than the sign of the pentagram magically appearing on the next victim's palm.
I think the story is cleverly constructed too. I like the radio recording set-up, and the way in which the woman is thrown into the woods alone at night. I think the story should have spun more hay out of the idea that the wolf had been trapped in the wild, owing the that area's lack of population density. So that in bringing it to the city, our protagonists had freed it and doomed the Earth. I mean, all that guy had to do was howl out the window and suddenly he might have never had to go back into the bottle again. It's a perfectly useful metaphor for a pandemic. My version would have been a lot darker, I guess.
I think the creature in this story looks a bit like Richard Corben's werewolf. Plus he's all brawny and swole the way Hollywood likes 'em.
PS, fans of bat-winged vamps shouldn't miss this Adventures into the Unknown cover. It's the cat's pajamas.
So the general base of this story was the tape recorder -- which isn't a bad idea -- and it got spun in twice with both bring out the werebear and bringing out the vengeful rhyming spirits (I guess when you've been a wandering spirit trapped in a cave you need to pass the time.)
That said, this thing just dumps lore and lore after lore on you. That's one chatty wereraccoon!
There's a lot of obvious tracing going on in this one, but last page, panel 1 had the most time spend on it, so much that it looks different than the other art. Pretty sure I've seen it, too.
I love this thing. It's bonkers. It starts with an idea, uses it pretty effectively, but has to create a ton of rules out of whole cloth -- not based on any existing legend -- to make it work. It's the kind of nuts that makes pre-code so fun to read.
ACG's horror comics usually came up with a lot of imaginative spins on the usual witch, vampire or werewolf story. A tape recorder accidentally summoning one though? That's so far out of left field that it works quite well. Love the idea of the spirits of the werewolf's potential victims becoming werewolves themselves to out their own bodies to the werewolf to prey upon them. Betty's evil self as a werewolf though just looks like she's wearing a very silly looking mask as the rest of her body--including her arms and legs, remain human. Love the rhyming spirits, although why they can't simply move through the rock to get out like normal ghost logic is a good question. I do love that panel of Betty's spirit merging back with her after the werewolf is defeated.
A panel or two explaining the legend of Werebear (an evil sorcerer who could turn into werebear at will) would have been helpful towards the flow of this tale. As it stands, it is one of those tales where (Were?) you just go with the crazy/ just enjoy the ride.
The panel of Werespirit on the bottom right panel of page four is memorable to say the least.
"Chatty" is right. He's right up there with a regular adventure story villain, giving away too much.
The ending seems like a tiny "War of the Worlds" tribute, where they narrowly AVOID doing something terrifying with a radio show.
A brief history of early ACG "tales of the supernatural" comics:
The early pre-code ACG comics (1948 to mid-1953) tended to repeat the same basic "gothic romance" plot outline over and over: An attractive young man and young woman got involved with some supernatural evil (traditional vampires, werewolves, etc.) and ultimately defeated the evil. The stories almost always had a happy ending with the love-struck couple planning marriage.
By mid-1953 virtually all of ACG's competing "supernatural" comics publishers were putting out straight horror tales with graphic ghastly violence, very little romance, and shock endings. To stay competitive, ACG ditched the gothic romances and also turned to more graphic horror tales until the Comics Code Authority brought that chapter in comics history to a sudden halt in 1955.
The no-nonsense horror tales were much more entertaining while they lasted.
Boy you guys really came out for this one, glad to see it too! Lots of great comments, --thank you!
UP NEXT: The Devil.
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