Monster of the Day #1625

Updated on September 11, 2017 By Ken Begg 10 Comments

I hope everyone had a great weekend. T-Fest is a week from next Saturday, so I’ll see some of you in Houston/Dallas in less than two weeks.

Mike Ploog was, except for Gene Colan, probably Marvel’s big horror artist. He was sort of their Bernie Wrightson, I guess. Ploog worked on Werewolf By Night and the earliest Ghost Rider books, although tragically he never got to draw a team-up with the two. (There was a one-off “Legion of Monsters” in one of the anthology books–Marvel Premiere, maybe?–featuring GR, Werewolf by Night, Morbius the Living Vampire and Man-Thing. It wasn’t very good, and it was drawn by Frank Robbins, who has never been a favorite of mine. Man, if Ploog drew that it would have been great. Except for the story.)

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  • Beckoning Chasm

    Ploog was a very interesting artist–I remember buying Marvel’s comic of The Shadow (the old pulp magazine hero) because Ploog was the artist. He was also a storyboard artist for John Carpenter’s version of “The Thing” and you can definitely see his influence in the film.

  • sandra

    Even the gargoyles look ferocious.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Speaking of comics, it appears Len Wein died yesterday.

  • Gamera977

    Just saw the passing of Jerry Pournelle too…

    Most of what I read by him was his co-written stories with Larry Niven. I really need to look up more of his work.

  • Gamera977

    Doesn’t look like the most secure footing there for Werewolf.

  • Ericb

    Which makes me think … If a werewolf fell off the Empire State building would it die? I mean, it’s not a silver bullet.

  • Rock Baker

    That depends entirely upon who is telling the story.

  • Eric Hinkle

    The main thing I remember about Werewolf by Night right now is how the Marvel writers keep messing with the poor character. Every single time he finds a solution to his problem, the very next story yanks it away and has him slaughter his supporting cast from the prior book for “drama”.

    I understand, this is a /horror/ character, but man does that ever get tired.

  • Gamera977

    BTW watched ‘Jaws: The Revenge’ over the weekend and dang Ken wasn’t kidding about it being totally awful. I mean I was missing the endless water-skiing sequences from ‘3D’ as compared to the horrible drama bits about characters I really didn’t care about in this film. I had to make jokes about Lance Guest looking for an alien arcade game that would get him out of the movie to get me though some points.
    Thanks again Ken for the reviews of these movies- your pain was worth it, at least I think. I read each of your reviews after watching the movie and well you caught a lot of stuff that slipped by me. I did find the alternate endings mentioned for ‘J:TR’ interesting. The version Netflix showed the shark speared by the bow-sprint, bleeding copiously, cut to the boat with the bow ripped off sinking and then to the airport. No explosion, no Jake escape, just cut to the end.

  • The Rev.

    It’s interesting to me that the “alternate” ending is actually right in line with the book’s ending (impaled shark, sinking boat, Jake dead), whereas the one we got…well, we all know about that one, for better and for worse.