It's Sunday, so let's get ecclesiastical! Today's monster hunter is the unfortunate Father Sandor, who started his career as a last-minute replacement for Professor Van Helsing and ended it playing second fiddle in his own comic strip.
When shooting began on Dracula: Prince of Darkness - featuring the return of Christopher Lee as the Count - Peter Cushing was not available to reprise his role as Professor Van Helsing due to the illness of his wife, Helen. The filmmakers wisely chose not to recast Van Helsing or replace the character with a pale imitation.
Instead, they created a new character who was the polar opposite of the good professor in everything but his dedication to fighting evil. As portrayed by the great Andrew Keir (easily the best of the cinema Quatermasses), Father Sandor is blunt rather than reserved, a man of faith rather than science, a rugged outdoorsman rather than a scholar. The boisterous, gun-toting monk is the kind of priest who teaches the local youth to box - and gives them a cuff upside the head when they misbehave. In short, he's a hoot.
Sadly, Prince of Darkness was the only film appearance of Father Sandor. I would have loved to have seen him return and can only dream of an on-screen team-up of Sandor and Cushing's Van Helsing. I guess the makers of The House of Hammer magazine felt the same way, for after adapting Dracula: Prince of Darkness in comic form, they gave the cleric his own strip. Father Shandor battles demons and the spiritual descendants of the Puritan zealots from Twins of Evil in an trio of tales illustrated by comics legend John Bolton.
As House of Hammer wound down, Shandor moved over to Warrior magazine and gained an new on-going adversary, the demoness Jaramsheela. Unfortunately, writer Steve Moore appears to have become increasingly more interested in the villain (it couldn't have helped that the comic version of Shandor lacked Keir's gruff charm) and at times she pushed the good Father out of his own strip. In fact, when the ongoing storyline was finally resolved years later (in one of Atomeka Press' A1 anthologies), Jaramsheela was the title character and poor Father Shandor turns up in a mere three panels.
Today's treat is a collection of all of Father Shandor's graphic adventures. If you do not have Comic Book Reader or a similar program that can handle the cbz format, simply renamed the downloaded files to .zip extension and extract the images.
