I know it’s a point I bring up a lot, but the
influence of the pulp authors on the comics cannot be overstated. Often, pulp
writers and artists could be found writing for comics while on their way up or
on their way out. Gardner Fox gave us The Flash, Hawkman, The Sandman, Starman,
Doctor Fate and dozens of others, Edmond
Hamilton gave us Batwoman, The Batmen of all Nations, Chris KL-99 and a bunch
of canon-fodder Legionnaires, Alfred Bester gave us the Green Lantern oath,
Vandal Savage and some zombie guy, Frank R. Paul drew the iconic cover of Marvel Comics #1, Matt Fox drew some
incredible Atlas horror stories, Virgil Finlay gave us Tommy Tomorrow and Frank
Belknap Long gave us The Living Ghost.
The Living
Ghost??!!
Who, or more
precisely, what is The Living Ghost?
Boy is that a million dollar question. You see, even
Frank Belknap Long and co-creator Fred Guardineer (of DC comics and Lev Gleason
fame, not an artist you’d think would be suited to horror, but just wait) didn’t
seem to know!
Just look at
him: He’s called a ghost, but he has fangs and claws like a vampire, looks like
a zombie (and is that eye supposed to be missing or just blind?) and as we’ll
later see, he has cloven hooves and demonic powers. He also has wolves
celebrating his misdeeds (and no, that’s not just for symbolism) and apparently
likes to steal corpses from graves. It’s every possible monster cliché you can
think of! All he needs to be doing is threatening to pour molten lead on that
woman (or approaching her with a sacrificial knife) and it would be a perfect pulp cover.
Vaguely
defined and cliché as the Ghost himself may have been, the story that
introduced him to the world featured some interesting “firsts”, not the least
of which was that it was featured in ACG’s Adventures
into the Unknown #1, the first ever continuously published horror comic!
Here’s the
atmospheric cover, and a word from the publisher, partly to welcome readers to
the new series, partly to make sure that kids reading this didn’t get too
scared by reassuring them that ghosts did not exist, and partly to reassure
parents that the writers didn’t take it seriously either (not that that would
help in a few years):
Now on to the
story.
The whole
affair began at a railroad switching station, as the operator was suddenly
startled by a ghastly sight:
After killing
the operator, the Ghost switched the wrong tracks, causing a horrific train
wreck:
We’re only a
page and a half in and that’s already quite a body count!
Who could
possibly stand up to a being like the Living Ghost? Well, if you’ve ever
watched any movies featuring synthetic flesh, devil bats, missing guests, men
who could not hang and unfunny slasher parodies, surely you’d know the only
person qualified to investigate something like this (besides superheroes or
occult detectives) are nosy, story-starved reporters! That nosy reporter in
question was Gail Leslie, “The Scoopless Wonder” according to her assistant DA
boyfriend Tony Brand, and yes, their relationship was just as cringe-worthy as
you’d think:
Gail thought
she smelled gunpowder, but Tony assured her it wasn’t a shooting.
That very
night, the Living Ghost committed his second major atrocity. He randomly
attacked a couple in lovers’ lane by flipping their car off a cliff with them
in it:
Somewhat
low-key compared to causing a train wreck, but pretty chilling just the same.
Gail and Tony
investigated the next morning, and Gail again noted the stench of gunpowder in
the air, only this time she wasn’t so sure it was gunpowder, but brimstone:
What an
asshole.
Gail
discovered a hoof-like mark nearby and followed the trail it left, eventually
reaching a cave, only to find herself being watched:
The Ghost
trailed her home and abducted her, also giving us an unintentionally hilarious glimpse of
his dainty little hooves while flying:
When Tony
came to pick her up, he found the name “The Living Ghost” scrawled on the wall
and the Ghost’s face embedded into a shard from a broken mirror. That’s right;
the Ghost is so ugly his image can embed itself in mirrors! (I’m willing to bet
the cops who examined the inside of that flipped car got a similar nasty
shock):
Tony then
went to see Dr. Vandyke, a professor of the occult who had heard of the Living
Ghost and gave us the closest thing we’d get to an explanation of what he is:
Vandyke said
that because Malevo was only part human (based on the story, shouldn’t he not
be human at all?), there was no way to stop him, no way at all…except for an
olive branch that could render him mortal, that Vandyke conveniently happened
to have.
Well, that
was suspenseful.
Meanwhile, back at the cave, Malevo decided not to
kill Gail but to instead make her his queen. In order to impress her, he
decided to demonstrate his power by summoning forth all the evil spirits who
were in his debt. While needless to say that seeing something like that failed
to impress (only terrify) Gail, his display certainly did impress someone: The
reader.
Fred
Guardineer went all out showing the various ghoulies answering Malevo’s call.
Here’s the whole page:
Sure they’re
mostly just skeletons, but that page alone probably made any reader who was
disappointed thus far with this issue feel they had gotten their money’s worth.
I love how it’s mostly silent and Guardineer makes sure to show the same
creatures we saw rising show up in line. Keeping panel-to-panel continuity was
no small feat back then. Definitely the highlight of the story.
Meanwhile,
Tony was passing through and witnessed the parade of monsters heading toward
the cave and followed them. He saw what was going to happen, so he did the
logical thing: He decided to infiltrate them by smearing mud all over himself.
Somehow it worked (I like to think the other ghouls didn’t say anything because
they thought he died very recently
and wanted to be accommodating to the new guy).
When the
monsters arrived at the cave, Gail was so repulsed she gave in to marrying
Malevo, so long as he made the other monsters go away.
However, by
sending all the others back, Tony’s ruse was exposed. A fight ensued, with Tony
eventually robbing Malevo of his powers and trapping him under a huge boulder.
And now for
the craziest part of the story: Rather than just leaving him there, Tony called
the cops on the fiend, who saw to it that the centuries old villain was tried,
convicted and sentenced to death! (Now that would have been a trial to see).
Yes indeed
folks, The Living Ghost was no one-shot anthology story villain, he actually
was intended to become an ongoing feature in Adventures into the Unknown. And I bet all this time you thought I
was covering some non-series horror story just because Long wrote it.
The sequel began with Tony and Gail at a mountain retreat, trying to forget their strange encounter, although if you ask me, constantly referring to him as you know who and making asides to “his ghostly kind’ being gone for good isn’t the way to go about it.
Of course,
Malevo was up to his old tricks, and tried to abduct Gail again that very
night, only to get socked by Tony (You know you’ve fallen on hard times when
you’re older and more powerful than Satan himself but can be knocked off your
feet by a punch from an ordinary man).
Still, Malevo
triumphed and made off with Gail. Tony later decided to investigate rumors of
smoke that smelled of brimstone coming from the same mountain where Gail had
been abducted.
Until that
is, Tony happened to spy a painting of another vaguely-defined
ghost/demon/sorcerer thing; The Dark Phantom, who was Malevo’s greatest enemy.
Tony hit upon
the idea to enlist this being as an ally despite him supposedly being more evil
than Malevo. Vandyke claimed that little was known about the Phantom, only that
he was destined to be destroyed by a human who carried around an ancient symbol
of destiny- - -which Vandyke conveniently happened to have again.
Tony then met
up with a medium named Mavelli, who contacted emissaries of the Phantom’s, who
then took him to their dimension:
The Phantom
was initially hostile, until Tony told him he could lead him to Malevo. The two
flew off together to hunt down their mutual foe.
The most
badass fight of all time ensued, at least, when it comes to fights between skeletons wearing dresses :
The Phantom eventually overpowered Malevo, and
imprisoned him in rock.
However, you don’t get called “dark phantom” because
you’re good with children, and the Phantom then decided to kill Gail for the
fun of it:
However, Tony
pulled out the destiny stone, destroying the Phantom.
Things seemed fine, except, now that the Phantom
was gone, his spells were also undone:
What kind of revenge would Malevo seek on our heroes
next? What one-of-a-kind magical item would Dr. Vandyke coincidentally have
lying around to help Tony?
Sadly, we
never found out. The Living Ghost was never seen again. Apparently it wasn’t
because ACG was averse to running a series, as a truly ridiculous and much
longer-lived series called “Spirit of Frankenstein” soon popped up in its
place.
The two
Living Ghost stories aren’t exactly masterpieces, and I probably wouldn’t be
posting about them if it wasn’t for who wrote them and the significance of
where they debuted. Still, there are some interesting elements to these stories
I find worth exploring.
One is how
Malevo goes about his campaign to conquer the world. He gets off to a good
start with the train wreck, but then goes after some random couple in lovers’
lane! Malevo as a character has no depth, and his design is so overdone it’s
hard to really find him scary, but there are ways to make “embodiments of evil”
like him work, and having him go around committing random murders for the sheer
joy of it, regardless of how long it will take him to achieve his goal, is a
good way of doing it. Dark lords often do not make for scary villains because
the threat they pose is on such a grand scale it’s hard to imagine them coming
after the reader and lurking in the hallway. Malevo though, you can easily
imagine doing that. He’s in it for sheer sadistic pleasure, even though he
could presumably conquer the world easily with the legion of monsters he has at
his disposal, and with the Dark Phantom dead, he would presumably have even
more power over various supernatural beings.
Then there’s
the lovers’ lane sequence itself.
Consider for a moment that this story was published in 1948. Today, stories of couples being killed in lovers’ lanes or stalked by some monstrous figure are a staple of the horror genre, with at least two major urban legends (The Hook and The Boyfriend’s Death) attached to it, each with dozens of variations that someone will insist is the one true version. However, most of the research involved in those two legends pinpoints their origins in the early 1960’s, with possible precursors in 1950’s oral tradition (which has proven impossible to date), long after this story was published. What is interesting about those earliest mentions of the legend is that they were in a true crime context, and not a spooky context. This story does provide a spooky context for the murder, and it is not hard to see the outré character of the Living Ghost morphing into the comparatively believable escaped maniac or hook-handed man in retellings.
Consider for a moment that this story was published in 1948. Today, stories of couples being killed in lovers’ lanes or stalked by some monstrous figure are a staple of the horror genre, with at least two major urban legends (The Hook and The Boyfriend’s Death) attached to it, each with dozens of variations that someone will insist is the one true version. However, most of the research involved in those two legends pinpoints their origins in the early 1960’s, with possible precursors in 1950’s oral tradition (which has proven impossible to date), long after this story was published. What is interesting about those earliest mentions of the legend is that they were in a true crime context, and not a spooky context. This story does provide a spooky context for the murder, and it is not hard to see the outré character of the Living Ghost morphing into the comparatively believable escaped maniac or hook-handed man in retellings.
Of course, a
popular theory is that such “lovers’ lane” legends have their roots in the
Texarkana “Moonlight Murders” of 1946, which eventually inspired the film The Town that Dreaded Sundown (soon to
be remade). Perhaps Long knew about the crimes and was thinking of them when
writing this story, tasteless as that would seem.
Then again,
maybe Long was just remembering 1933’s The
Invisible Man, where not only is a car flipped off a cliff, but a train is
derailed too. Claude Rains’s “Murders of big men, murders of little men, just
to show we make no distinction” would have made an excellent Malevo line.
And finally,
what are we to make of this bizarre quote from Fredric Wertham when referring
to Law against Crime #3 (also
published in 1948)? “The wish to hurt or kill couples in lover’s lane is a not
uncommon perversion”. Maybe he
really had encountered multiple patients who had thoughts of doing so, or maybe
he just got the idea, as he would say about his own patients, from reading too
many comic books. If he did, this may have been one of them.
Getting back
to the story and away from the world of not-quite-true stories, we also have
the enigmatic character of Dr. Vandyke. It’s easy to write him off as a plot
device for Tony to receive magical items from, but where did he get all those
items? Wouldn’t he be a regular target for various cults? How does he know so
much about creatures so obscure they apparently aren’t known in mainstream
folklore? Why does he question the existence of the Dark Phantom although he
knows of Malevo? Then there’s his passive, sometimes cold and unfeeling
attitude, rarely leaving his desk even though he could have easily become part
of the action.
There’s an awful lot in these stories that revolve around Vandyke, but he himself doesn’t appear in them much. One has to wonder if future stories would have repeated the formula of the first two, or if there would be some sort of revelation involving him. He’s one of the more interesting Van Helsing figures in comics, in any case.
There’s an awful lot in these stories that revolve around Vandyke, but he himself doesn’t appear in them much. One has to wonder if future stories would have repeated the formula of the first two, or if there would be some sort of revelation involving him. He’s one of the more interesting Van Helsing figures in comics, in any case.
Also, just
one more time, the “monster rally” sequence is awesome, distractingly cute
though those bats may be.
Compared to other villains and monsters who had their own series during the
40s, The Living Ghost doesn’t quite stand up to The Claw, Madame Satan, The
Black Widow, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein or The Heap. I don’t even know if I
can say he rivals Landor, maker of monsters! Still, he could have done
worse….ACG could have brought him back in the 60’s just to get bopped with a
lollipop by Herbie Popnecker.
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