Haunt of Horror #3 (September 1974)
By September of 1974, Doug Moench was the king of the Marvel black and white magazines, writing for seven of them concurrently, and writing the lead features for four out of those seven magazines as well. Moench appeared to have near total creative control over the directions of Dracula Lives, Monsters Unleashed, and Planet of the Apes. And here, with Haunt of Horrors, he's writing nearly all of the content of this sixty page issue (Larry Liebler getting in one 8 page backup, an atom-age reprint occupying another four, and Chris Claremont's transcript of a bunch of folks in the bullpen discussing the Exorcist rounds out the page count).
It really is a shame that this volume won't last beyond issue five, perhaps because it lacks a memorable, instantly recognizable character or monster at its core. Lead feature Gabriel: Devil Hunter is an amazing property, but I doubt too many fans were going to spring 75 cents on an unfamiliar property.
"House of Brimstone"
Script: Doug Moench
Pencils: Billy Graham; Pablo Marcos
Inks: Frank Giacoia; Mike Esposito
Letters: ?
Grade: B-
I LOVE the new introductory caption Gabriel gets at the opening of this issue:
But the story, itself, is far less monumental than the introductory adventure Moench offered us
last time around. Sure, we've got a keen visual battle between light and dark in a possessed home that (you can clearly see) was driven by Moench:
though someone (I suspect Marcos, perhaps due to the language barrier) gets a bit confused and has one of the key battles of this story occur amidst a completely white background, even while Desadia notices in the aftermath that the lights have just turned back on:
Oops.
But there isn't much to this story. An expert on demonic possession's own daughter becomes possessed, and he and Gabriel must fight to save her. Sure, it's dark and over-the-top perverse for a Marvel book at times:
and Gabriel is reminded throughout this adventure that his semi pre-cognitive assistant, Desadia, has foretold that he will fail this time around:
but it doesn't really invite Gabriel to become a better developed character this time around, and the way in which he "fails" by the close is only a semi-satisfactory solution to the building mystery. The expert, old, tired, and aware that the demon is about to try to possess him, kills himself so that the demon cannot succeed. I guess it's a "failure," but it really had nothing directly to do with Gabriel, and he succeeded in warding off the demon as a result of this.
Love the moodiness, love the small amount of shock value Moench offered this time around, but Gabriel was a far more complex, tortured, and fascinating character last time. For a tortured ex-priest, he's too un-conflicted here.
"The Restless Coffin!"
Script: Doug Moench
Pencils: Pat Broderick
Inks: Al Milgrom
Letters: ?
Grade: D-
Possibly the most forgettable script I've ever seen of Moench. A young boy growing up in the country dreams of becoming a famous actor. He goes to see the village witch/fortune teller, and she informs him that he will become tremendously famous in America, but he will die at the height of his fame, and his soul will not be at rest until his body comes back home. So he ignores her and lives the prediction out in the most uncomplicated and uninteresting of ways.
He becomes famous (Moench doesn't even bother to depict how this happens), dies on stage, gets buried, gets unearthed in a flood, found at sea, and then buried again in his homeland, where the grimace that was on his corpse finally vanishes.
This three page story reminds me of high school essays where we had to make that one hundred and fifty word minimum requirement. That's the level of creativity Moench brings to this page-filler.
"Flirting with Mr. D" (text piece)
Script: Doug Moench
Pencils: Billy Graham
Inks: Billy Graham
Letters: typeset
Grade: n/a
Moench writes four pages about Haunt of Horror's new head-liner, Gabriel: Devil Hunter. He seems to come to this with two agendas:
1. Convince us this stuff is so scary that he's actually being haunted while writing it.
2. Make it abundantly clear that he'd never seen The Exorcist prior to creating the character and that, having seen it since, he believes Gabriel: Devil Hunter is better.
Ever since James Warren invited Moench to write
explanations of two of his stories a few years earlier, I've been aware that Moench tends to come off a bit...haughty when he writes about himself, even while trying to be self-depricating. It's weird. I don't have the sense from anything I know about him or have read about him that he has a particularly big ego, but he absolutely comes off that way here.
Fortunately, this piece does provide a few other details that prove useful to this review thread:
1. The original title for the Gabriel: Devil Hunter feature was to be "Blisters of the Soul," but Roy Thomas overrode it.
2. Moench and partner Deb (not sure if they were married yet) were friends with Gerry Conway and his wife and lived near them.
3. According to Moench, he was producing upwards of 36 pages per day while at the Marvel offices. That does not include what he was writing at home.
4. Moench discusses his urinary tract infection at disturbing length and depth. Okay, that's not as much useful as, say, worth noting. Proof, though, that Moench wasn't really beholden to an editor on these books. They were letting him write whatever the heck he wanted to, so long as he gave new properties compelling names. As Moench himself once commented:
"Last Descent to Hell"
Script: Doug Moench
Pencils: Frank Springer
Inks: Frank Springer
Letters: ?
grade: C+
The weirdest installment of the issue, it's likely a leftover from the initial backup story jobs Moench took on
upon first moving to New York. In it, Death is walking through Hell, towards Satan's throne for one final confrontation after years of (apparently) working for the Prince of Darkness. Who knew?
Anyway, Satan discusses the matter with Judas (his right hand man) and draws up a strategy, which is depicted in parallel to Death just calmly walking through hordes of demonic defenders and wiping them all out with his scythe. Springer doesn't do much to make any of this look interesting, but Moench's characterization of Death is compelling enough to keep us interested:
Interesting that no one seems to care that Moench's depiction of Death is at odds with the character Friedrich and Starlin introduced in the pages of Captain Marvel over a year earlier. But, again, Moench seemed to be his own editor here.
Anyway, there is a building tension throughout this story as we await the inevitable final struggle between two beings that, by all rights, should be unstoppable. The Devil's plan is to subject Death to the souls of all the sinners he has collected, presuming that an excess of life will cancel out death (though how is it life if they are in the afterlife?), but things don't quite go as planned:
It's all a bit too much of a stretch for me to find it clever. Too bad, as I was really engaged in the story until the ho-hum climax.
1Vaughn, J.C. "A Writer on the Planet of the Apes." Comic Book Marketplace May 1999: 31 . Print.
