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(The dates for 1975 and 2025 are identical.)
When the Comics Code was amended in the early 70's and the long-standing prohibitions against horror tropes was lifted, the emaciated Code was unable to stop the horde of monsters which shambled forth. Marvel led the way with Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and even a Werewolf by Night. Also there was a revamped Ghost Rider and other variations on the classic themes such as Morbius and Man-Wolf. This tome doesn't capture all of the monsters who escaped to the newsstands but it does a worthy job of getting many of them. Eventually the monster rally subsided but for a time in the early Bronze Age, the monsters were well and truly unleashed.
What Decades - Marvel In The '70s really becomes in many ways is a celebration of the lush artwork of Mike Ploog, a talent who drew comics in the style of Will Eisner, and was an assistant to Eisner for time as well. Ploog's distinctive oily lines gave Marvel's "Monsterverse" a different vibe, a somber somewhat more realistic aspect.
(Neal Adams Cover Art)
(Neal Adams Cover Art)
Gene Colan's work on Tomb of Dracula struck a similar vein and that's what makes the Marvel monsters different than what had come before, a grounded sense of this could really be. The stories didn't happen in fantastic clashes atop the skyscrapers of NYC, but in the back alleys and in the shadows where people had to deal with real death, or at least as close as any comic book story can offer.
Eventually the monster rally subsided but for a time in the early Bronze Age, the monsters were well and truly unleashed.
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Wish I had been old enough to have been getting these then. But, I was too young and reading Donald Duck and Richie Rich! These seem amazingly cool.
ReplyDeleteThey were cool. And thanks to great reprints even whippersnappers like yourself can enjoy them.
DeleteModern Marvel (by which I mean everything since the turn of the century) keeps trying to bring the monsters back into prominence. I could be wrong but I don't think anything has stuck around even half as long as the two champs, TOD and WBN. It may have helped that horror in the movies was undergoing was undergoing a boom in the same era as the Marvel monsters, so that the comics guys had some cross-pollination advantages that moderns don't have. I get the sense that cinematic horror has lost its mojo. I hear about individual independent flicks getting good press but not much that hits the big time with the mass audience.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, it seems that they've attempted to reboot the horror flicks as well, but with very limited success. I thought the attempt to create a Universal "Monsterverse" a few years ago was a good idea, but it fell flat after only a few entries.
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