Marvel Classics: Werewolf By Night (1972) Review
Source: Marvel.com
With the news of the upcoming TV series on Disney+, I thought it would make sense to take a look back and read this classic Marvel comic and review the original Werewolf By Night (1972). This comic is available on Marvel Unlimited for anyone curious to check it out for themselves.
Werewolf by Night is the story of Jack Russel, a man who turns into a werewolf at night due to his inherited curse of his father’s lycanthropy. Something which seemingly only affects his family around their 18th year of life.
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The story begins with Jack petrified in stone as a werewolf, as he spends the morning after, returning to form as a human and looking for a very familiar tome in Marvel called the Darkhold. Issue #1 sees Jack seeking to get the book back as it was originally his Warlock father's, though in doing so, comes to head with the nefarious Doctor Miles Blackgar.
The Blackgars are sort of the bad guys in issue #1 and their patriarch, much like Victor Frankenstein from monster-based fiction, experimented on several unwilling subjects in the past and turned them into horrifying creatures. Conveniently, the redheaded vixen in the series with the black shades who just so happens to stand in Jack’s way also happens to be Blackdar's daughter. A woman named Gorgon whose eyes can turn people into stone.
Issue #1 sees Jack’s struggle of being a werewolf along with all the monstrosities implied by being cursed. It’s stuff you’ve seen a million times over in other horror fiction and truly, the real issue is simply coming to terms with being a werewolf and stopping the bad people before they harm Jack’s sister, Lisa Russoff, and his good friend and writer, Buck Cowan. That’s actually the entirety of the comic and writer Roy Thomas and artist Mike Ploog had created a fun horror comic highly considered edgy for its time.
SOURCE: MARVEL.COM
Perhaps, the biggest thing that stands out about the original Werewolf by Night had less to do with the quality of the issue as much as it was the symbol behind it, as it was the first major comic work to release in spite of the Comics Code of Authority. The CCA was a powerful regulatory organization that by the 1970s began to loosen its restrictive authority. Much of the CCA’s principles were in fact, founded upon a book that came out in 1954 called Seduction of The Innocent.
Written by acclaimed German Psychologist Frederic Wertham, whose major contributions to Psychology helped overturned segregation statutes in Brown v. The Board of Education, Wertham’s belief that comics were a terrible influence on children would later, overshadow his legacy of being an influential figure on de-segregation, as the CCA would influence the comics industry for nearly 60 years. With much of comics' history most ‘rebellious eras’ these past decades, being in many ways, reactions against and loosening restrictions against the CCA. Wertham’s concerns were pretty strongly anti-gay and included Wertham’s fears of Batman and Robin being gay lovers and that Wonder Woman, was in fact, a bondage-loving Lesbian
It should be noted that the code was a major censorship bureau of publisher self-regulation empowered not by any governmental authority, but rather, by the powers of advertising and the threats of old-fashioned southern book burnings. What the CCA provided was a stamp of approval that deemed a comic ‘safe’ for kids to read. Distributors would rarely hold any comics that did not hold CCA’s seal.
For nearly 20 years the CCA prevented horror-related comics from being published, including stories about vampires, such as Blade, and even, werewolves. Werewolf by Night was a completely reactionary property released in due thanks to the loosening of these restrictions. Relevant to the current MCU, Werewolf by Night #32 would actually serve as the introduction to Moon Knight. This issue could be digitally scanned and read in the QR codes in the original series release from earlier this year.
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SOURCES: MarvelHorrorFandom Wikipedia, The Guardian