That's the cover to Werewolf By Night #36, one of the scariest comics I read as a kid.
Once in a while, an uncle of ours would drop off these huge brown paper grocery bags full of comics. He got them from a co-worker at the steel mill whose son had supposedly outgrown them. It maybe only happened two or three times, but my brother and I still vividly recall the rush of pouring through the bags to see what treasures were contained therein. It was a total crapshoot as to what we got, as these were books chosen by some other kid. There were lots of cool superhero titles, but there was also good stuff we would have never picked up on our own, like
Our Army at War and
Weird Western Tales. Then there were the books that our mom probably wouldn't have let us buy, like
Tomb of Dracula and
Werewolf By Night.
So
Werewolf by Night #36 fell into my lap utterly by random. I hadn't read the issues that preceded it, so I didn't really know what was going on beyond the fact that Jack Russel and his friends were trapped inside a haunted house. Except it wasn't your typical haunted house like you'd find in
Scooby-Doo or
Caspar. This was a house of pure evil, and it was trying its very best to drive the heroes insane. Being dropped into the middle of things just added to the nightmarish feel of the story. The comic is full of images of sadism, death, betrayal, and demonic possession. But the one panel that really resonated with me was this one:
I still remember hanging out at my grade school library the next day, just fixating on the creepiness of the final two pages of the comic, wondering what happens next. I wouldn't get a chance to read the issues that followed until a decade later, so that cliffhanger haunted me for years.
Looking back, the story is an obvious riff on
The Legend of Hell House, the 1973 film version of Richard Matheson's 1971 novel,
Hell House (which was itself a take on Shirley Jackson's classic
The Haunting of Hill House). Even the name of the villain, Belaric Marcosa, is a variation on that of Matheson's specter, Emeric Belasco. Writer Doug Monech doesn't put much of his own spin on things beyond dropping a werewolf into the mix, but he doesn't really need to; Matheson and Jackson have already done all the heavy lifting.
It probably doesn't hold up well today, but the Marcosa House "epic" is a fond childhood memory. For some reason, I get more nostalgic at Halloween than I do at Christmas, so it's been on my mind these last couple of weeks. I really want to go into further detail about the story and what I like about it, but I don't want to ruin things for anyone who hasn't read it yet.
The entire run of
Werewolf By Night is available in Essential format, but I'm sharing the issues comprising the Marcosa House story in color here today.
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I'm also dropping the complete run of
Vampire Tales into your trick or treat bag. While the Satana tales made it into one of the
Essential Marvel Horror trades, the rest of the series has yet to be collected. Expect the usual mix of new stories and Atlas/Timely reprints.
