Werewolf by Night was born because Stan Lee stood up to the Comics
Code Authority.
Created in 1954 to curb the excesses
of horror comics, the code banned sadism, lust, excessive bloodshed, disrespect
for authority, sympathy for criminals, physically exaggerated females,
werewolves, vampires, zombies and drugs.
Lee challenged the latter
prohibition because he was determined to do an anti-drug story in Amazing
Spider-Man (May 1971). His widely praised effort led to a loosening of the
code’s restrictions that permitted Marvel to introduce Spidey’s foe Morbius the
Living Vampire and to publish titles like Tomb
of Dracula and Werewolf by Night.
Written by Roy and Jean Thomas and
Gerry Conway, the cheekily named Jack Russell was introduced in Marvel Spotlight 2 (Feb. 1972). The
basic Jekyll and Hyde/Wolf Man plot structure is one Marvel had been using
since its second title, The Incredible
Hulk, in 1962.
“The Marvel formula of creating a
troubled life to make the character more interesting applied here to Jack; his
mother had married an overbearing, manipulative man and neither Jack nor his
younger sister Lissa cared much about him,” noted the Marvel Monsters blog. “Jack had never known his true father but
didn’t learn of the curse over him until his mother explained it to him on her
deathbed after the family’s driver tried to bump her off in a rigged car wreck.”
The Werewolf was a more vicious
but less powerful protagonist than the Hulk, caught in a tragic situation
familiar to viewers of the old Universal horror movies on TV. What was special
was Mike Ploog’s beautifully fluid, cartoony-but-unsilly artwork.
Some artists are a perpetual
pleasure to the eye, and Ploog is one of them.
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