Len Wein (1948–2017)

These stories are gorgeous. George Perez has always done amazing work, but this stands as above average even for him. And it's a good thing that the book looks so spectacular, because it is horribly overwritten. The plot is fine, but the amount of words packed into these pages, particularly the first two issues, before Len Wein comes on board as scripter, is absurd. It bogs the book down and threatens to drown the artwork.

For the last forty years, I go time travelling every half-decade or so. I chose this edition to review, but I'm actually re-reading the 10-issue Wein/Wrightson run collected in four issues that were released from the summer of 1977 to Feb of 1980.

In 1977, my family had literally uprooted our lives and moved three hours away to a very small town where I knew absolutely no one beside my immediate family. I was a shy, introverted 15-year-old kid who'd been bullied for the past four or five show more years and didn't make friends easily. My escape was reading. I read everything.

And that summer, as I waited for my mother to get something done in town, I grew bored and asked if I could get a dollar to grab a snack or something. I walked across the street to the variety store, a charming place with wooden plank floors and that wonderful small town smell of fresh bakery products, paperback books and...comics.

I checked out the spinner rack--remember those? --and I don't remember anything other than the comic I eventually picked up, which was the first collection. Sixty cents bought me 48 pages, a collection of issues 1 and 2 of the original Swamp Thing saga.

I went back to where I was waiting for my mother and sat down, opened the glossy cover and began reading a comic that would, over the next twenty minutes or so, blow my mind. Len Wein's wonderful words...yes, a little overwritten, a little overly earnest, but setting the perfect tone for Wrightson's murky--shall we say swampy? --images. I finished the issue, then immediately turned back to the front and re-read it, slower this time, savouring each image, rolling each word over and around on my tongue.

And over the next three years, I picked up the next three collections, wrapping the entire Wrightson run.

Are these stories a little corny? Hell yes. Do they rely on a ridiculous amount of coincidence? God, yes. But are they magical? My God, yes.

Each story, whether treading the gothic path of Frankenstein or werewolves or mad scientists, or slipping closer to the science fiction of aliens and clockmakers who fashion humans from mechanics, or dipping a toe into Lovecraftian horror, or even bringing Batman--the best looking Batman this side of Neal Adams, by the way--into the story, Wein ensures that each story is infused with a melancholy humanity, solidly backed up by Wrightson's moody, empathetic line work.

Every five years or so, I pull out those four collections and think, yeah, I'm too old for this now. I won't enjoy them this time. And every time, for a couple of glorious hours, I'm that fifteen-year-old kid, sitting in a strange store in a strange new town, discovering an entirely new world in the wonderful smelling pages of a 60-cent comic book.

Magic. show less

Ah, Marvel comics in the 1970s. Big dumb fun.

I picked this up because it had the very first Thor comic I ever read, back when each visit to the spinner rack offered up more and more enticements for a stupid kid with an extra quarter in his pocket. (If you must know, it was The Mighty Thor #242, "When the Servitor Commands!", released September 9, 1975, just a few short days before my 13th birthday).

Thor, for whatever reason, has always held a special place for me. Maybe it was the hammer. show more Maybe it was the Shakespearean speech. Maybe it was Volstagg. I don't know, but I do know that, coming back almost fifty years later to these stories again, unlike a lot of other stuff from that time, I still enjoy the hell out of these.

A big part of that is the art by John Buscema, especially when Joe Sinnott is inking his pencils. Len Wein, while never a shocking talent, could show flashes of brilliance (such as his Swamp Thing work for DC), and here, he's obviously having a lot of fun, though, seriously count how many times Thor's all "yea, verily, I doth go forth to smite yon wretchedly evil villain" and Jane's all, "I'm coming with you, darling (and yes, there's a crap-ton of darlings in there)" and Thor says no, and Jane reminds him of the fact that she's sharing her body with Sif, and Thor relents.

Like, every couple of issues!

Overall though, while none of these stories are groundbreaking, they were enough to capture the mind of that almost-13-year-old, and they're still good enough to make this 60-year-old smile. show less

The House of Secrets begins with a fairly lengthy (for this kind of comic, anyway) origin story for the House of Secrets itself. "Don't Move It!" (written by Mike Friedrich, art by Jerry Grandenetti and George Roussos) tells this whole tale of a house in Kentucky, built by one Senator Sandsfield with his bare hands entirely from materials found in Kentucky, who swore no one who wasn't of "pure Kentucky stock" would ever live in it. Quite what this means, I don't know, but when our story show more opens, the House's new owner is trying to transport it over state lines. (Presumably into Tennessee, as no river is mentioned, and I believe Kentucky's southern border is the only one not determined by a river.) With the House 200 yards from the state line, the owner dies, and the House stays where it is, and some time later, Abel shows up, recruited as caretaker by a mysterious man who turns out to probably be an embodiment of the House itself. How all this squares with the histories of Cain and Abel given in The Sandman, I don't know.

Like in The Witching Hour!, the reader is often a viewpoint character in House of Secrets, coming to visit Abel and hear his stories-- along with Goldie, Abel's friend that no one else sees or hears. In The Sandman, Abel had a pet gargoyle named Goldie, evidently after this invisible friend. The frame stories are fairly fun. They're never quite as complicated as those in The Witching Hour! at its heyday, but they usually run a few pages and feature Abel and Goldie up to something, often investigating the strange House they live in. Cain pops up a lot, and you can see the seeds of their wonderfully macabre relationship in The Sandman, though Cain never murders Abel here.

I liked the reference to a "wandering wolfman" who told Abel one of his stories-- presumably the wolfman's name was Marv. There's even one story where Abel and Goldie wander into the nearby suburbs for some tale-telling, pass through the middle of a tale currently happening, and end up meeting Mordred from The Witching Hour! (In another, all three witches come over for a visit.) Not to mention that at one point, we readers get to enjoy a comic book that Abel himself is reading: "Reggie Rabbit, Heathcliffe Hog, Archibald Aardvark, J. Benson Babboon and Bertram the Dancing Frog" (written by Len Wein, art by Ralph Reese), who end up mocking their own dialogue balloons! House of Secrets is definitely more inventive than the other series in this way, I think. With time, alas, the frames shrink away to just a page or so, and Cain stops appearing.

As in both The Witching Hour! and House of Mystery, there are some good stories here. I particularly enjoyed "Bigger than a Breadbox" (writer unknown, art by Mike Royer and Mike Peppe), where an elderly woman enjoys a postal romance, "The Ballad of Little Joe" (written by Gerard Conway, art by Bill Draut), where aliens mistake a man's beloved puppet for an Earth life-form, "After I Die!" (written by Jack Kirby and Mark Evanier, art by Bill Draut), about a man determined to find out what the dying see, "World for a Witch" (written by Jack Oleck, art by Bill Draut), about a group of orphans whose orphanage-runner escapes her life's misery in a magic picture, and, of course, "Swamp Thing" (written by Len Wein, art by Berni Wrightson), the beginning of that much-famous character.  I also really enjoyed "The Day After Doomsday..." (written by Len Wein, art by Jack Sparling), a recurrent series of two-page shorts about Adam and Gertrude, the last two humans alive after a holocaust (the same as Kamandi's Great Disaster?). They're both kinda hilariously dumb.

Overall, it's another good bunch, and I'm glad The Sandman led me to it, even if the two series don't line up quite precisely. (Well, unless the Dreaming is in southern Kentucky.)

The Houses of Mystery and Secrets: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less