Another Friday, another favorite. This week it’s Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing #4.
Swamp Thing #9 was my introduction to Bernie Wrightson. That issue really didn’t do it for me though. If I recall it was a story about aliens. Just not my cup of tea. It was years later that I went back and collected all ten issues of Swamp Thing that Bernie drew. (Amazing isn’t it that he only drew ten issues (11 if you count House of Secrets #92)? At that time I was really just picking them up for the stunning artwork. Having read #9 years earlier I wasn’t all that interested in reading them. With artwork like this, did it really matter what they were about?
Compare the quality of a book like Swamp Thing #4 to other books that were on the stands that same month. There’s no comparison.
But then I flipped through the pages of #4 and saw…
A werewolf story! THAT’S more like it! Growing up, one of the things I most looked forward to were Saturday afternoons. Saturday morning cartoons were ok, but in the afternoon our local television station played what they liked to call “Creature Double Feature”. Back-to-back old time monster movies! It was joyous! Godzilla, King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein…you name it. Loved them all. I especially liked werewolf movies. They were almost always horrible, but I liked the idea of werewolves. It’s just too bad there are so few good werewolf movies.
Page 4 to Swamp Thing #4. It has everything a classic monster tale should have. Deep shadows, misty fog…so much wonderful atmosphere!
This comic was what a werewolf movie should be like! I must have read and re-read this comic dozens of times.
Bernie’s entire 10 issue run can be had in handy trade paperback form here.
Aug05
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