Showing posts with label Universal Studios. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universal Studios. Show all posts

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Captain's Library: SON OF FRANKENSTEIN!

Most aficionados are familiar with the 1960s Dell comics that adapted the Universal Monsters...
...but many don't know that only one comic adaptation was produced during the first run of the films in the 1940s!
This fumetti/photonovel version of Son of Frankenstein (1939) appeared in DC Comics' Movie Comics #1 (1939).
(Another adaptation from this comic series, The Phantom Creeps, appeared on this blog HERE.)

Using photographs was certainly one way around the problem of getting an exact likeness of the actors!
The design/compositing/additional art was done by Jack Adler, a production artist/illustrator who rose thru the ranks and eventually became DC Comics' Production Manager/Vice President of Production, innovating a number of printing techniques that became standard comics practices.
The writer of the adaptation is unknown.

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Thursday, October 13, 2011

Captain's Library: THE MUMMY Conclusion

As is wont to happen in movies, you open an ancient Egyptian tomb, and a curse is invoked, usually involving a reanimated mummy who wreaks havoc.
And that's about as much as this "adaptation" by Don Segall and Jack Sparling has in common with the 1931 Boris Karloff flick.
The entire plotline involving love across the ages (along with Imhotep himself) has been jettisoned.
Another mummy, Ahmed, with a totally-different motivation, has been substituted in this story...
Nope, he won't.
Unlike other Universal Monsters, there was no sequel comic series for The Mummy.
Which may have been for the best, as I don't think even the sometimes-demented mindset of the Swinging 60s could've made a mummy/superhero or mummy/spy comic work...

Much MORE monster mayhem to come!

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Captain's Library: THE MUMMY Part 1

Another Silver Age Universal Monsters movie adaptation...
...that takes considerable liberties with the story!
Adapted by Don Segal (who also did the Dell Comics Frankenstein adaptation) with art by Jack Sparling.
Be here tomorrow as we go even further from the original movie's plot!

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Captain's Library: FRANKENSTEIN Conclusion

Dr Frankenstein reanimated a body composed of parts from various recently-dead men.
Unfortunately, the brain used in the Monster was not normal, but that of a criminal.
The Monster escapes, and accidentally causes the deaths of a young boy and girl.
The enraged townspeople burn the doctor's castle and laboratory to the ground, but Frankenstein, his aide Fritz, and the Monster escape thru a secret tunnel and make their way to the docks, where they board a ship to America...
While Dell did publish Frankenstein #2-4 in 1966, it went even further from the concept of the novel and book, making the Monster into a superhero (I'm not kidding!)
You'll be seeing him over at Hero & Heroine Histories™ during our October salute to Frankenstein  in the comics.
The adaptation we've just presented was written by Don Segall, penciled and inked by Bob Jenney (who did a number of movie adaptations for Dell, including The Mummy and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians).
Next: 
Van Helsing enlists martial arts masters to battle vampires as we present the never-reprinted comic adaptation of the final Hammer Dracula movie...