Artist Jim Aparo’s dramatic cover for Phantom Stranger #23 depicts a scene that unmistakably calls back to Gaston Leroux’s 1909-10 novel Phantom of the Opera, or one of its several film adaptations; meanwhile, a blurb at the top plugs the opening installment of a new back-up series, “Frankenstein”.  A prospective buyer eyeing this one in the spinner rack back in November, 1972, might well have wondered:  didn’t the comic’s publisher, DC Comics, know that Halloween was last month?  Why were they releasing this kind of Double Creature Feature now, after the spooky season had already passed?

On the other hand, this was the latest issue of Phantom Stranger — and “spooky” was what this comic book title was all about, not just in October, but all year long.  So I suspect most fans probably didn’t think twice about the double dose of classic horror stars, half a century ago; in any event, I’m pretty sure I didn’t, either when I first eyed the cover, or when, after buying the book and taking it home, I finally turned to the first page… 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame?  Um, better forget what I said earlier about a Double Creature Feature, and make that a Triple…

As regular readers of this blog may recall, in the issue immediately preceding this one the Phantom Stranger had become reacquainted with the blind psychic Cassandra Craft (whom he’d first met in issue #17), when the sinister society of sorcerers called the Dark Circle had kidnapped her to use against him.  But though the end of that adventure had seen Cassandra transition from calling our nameless hero “friend” to addressing him as “darling”, PS is clearly still holding his “feelings” at one remove, unwilling to acknowledge (let alone act on) the depth of his affections for Cass… even in Paris.

OK, maybe I’m being too hard on the guy; after all, it’s not like he doesn’t have important work to do, what with the Dark Circle trying to take over the world and all.  So I suppose we can cut him a break for leaving the lovely Ms. Craft alone in their hotel room while he steps out into the Paris evening in search of intel…

Alas, Marcel hasn’t heard the barest whisper about any Dark Circle, and so the Stranger departs his old friend’s shop no wiser than when he entered… though before he does, he magically repairs the “confounded contraption” Marcel has been struggling with, a kind gesture the latter man discovers only after his visitor has gone.

Has the Phantom Stranger been drawn to the Paris Opera house by some mystical premonition?  Or is he there because Cass’ sixth sense picked up on some weird vibes?  One or both of those options would seem to be likely, though Wein doesn’t tell us either way.  As we’ll see on the following page, Cassandra is indeed in attendance; but for all we know, she and PS just decided to have a nice evening out while they waited for the Dark Circle to show its hand.  Nevertheless, whatever the circumstances that led to this moment, it’s on, now, baby.

But by the time the Phantom Stranger finds secure footing on the rooftop, poor Marcel’s murderer has vanished.  The next scene reveals just where “Quasimodo” has gone…

This is Tannarak’s fourth go-round in Phantom Stranger, his having previously shown up in issues #10, #11, and #17 (the latter occasion being where he previously met Cassandra Craft, naturally).  In all three of those appearances, he’d died at the end (or at least had certainly seemed to) — which is sort of fitting, in a way, given that the guy’s whole thing is his neverending quest for immortality.  (I mean really, just based on the evidence, doesn’t it seem like he must already be most of the way there?)  Anyway, you can understand why PS is hardly surprised to find that Tannarak has once again survived their latest encounter…

While preparing to write this post, I wondered whether Len Wein had based the “Pillar of Souls” on anything; no, I didn’t believe that it was an actual sculpture owned by the Louvre, for reasons that’ll be clear by the end of the story, but I still figured that Wein might have picked up the unusual and memorable phrase from somewhere other than his own head.  But the only other “Pillars of Soul” that Google seems to know are a spirit-imprisoning sculpture that appears in the horror films Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) and Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), and a 2021 song by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo de Augustine clearly inspired by said artifact.  So it would seem that not only does Mr. Wein deserve full credit for coming up with the Pillar of Souls as both phrase and concept, but also that one or more of the filmmakers involved in the Hellraiser franchise — maybe even its creator, noted horror author/artist/director Clive Barker — are likely to have been Phantom Stranger readers back in the day.

Given this story’s Paris setting, and its callbacks to French literary sources, I’ve wondered if Jim Aparo’s gorgeous airship design might owe something to some earlier artist’s illustrations for a Jules Verne novel (Robur the Conqueror, perhaps); my very limited research hasn’t turned up much of anything thus far, however.

Recognize the house in the painting in the second panel above?  No?  Well, I wish I could tell you more about it, but I’m afraid that’s a secret.

I’m inclined to think that Tannarak is laying the “old chum/pal” bit on a little thick here, considering that he and the Phantom Stranger have had only three previous encounters — all relatively brief, and all occurring within the past twenty-six months of real-world time, besides.  But, whatever; after all, Tannarak is the closest thing PS has to an arch-foe at this point, with the exception of one other character who will in fact be appearing in the very next… nahh, no spoilers.

The two unlikely allies pursue their quarry into the airship’s cabin, where “Quasimodo”‘s lackeys put up little resistance.  Tannarak seizes his former comrade’s magic staff, which causes the latter man to lose his balance; he falls from the airship, but manages to grab onto the stature still hanging below…

So much for Quasi, as well as for the OG Pillar of Souls…

“Not the end!”  No, indeed; rather, for the conclusion to the Phantom Stranger’s crusade against the Dark Circle, you’ll have to come back in two months’ time, when we’ll rejoin our intrepid little threesome of supernatural adventurers as they depart the City of Lights for another of the world’s most colorful metropolises, Rio de Janeiro.  (And forget about the calendar saying it’s January — we’re going to Carnival, people.)

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Of course, the phrase “not the end” may easily be applied to PS #23 as a whole, as well as to its lead story; after all, we’re sixteen pages into the book, and we’ve yet to meet anyone that might answer to the name “Frankenstein”.  But, naturally, that’s about to change.

“The Spawn of Frankenstein” is something of an outlier for DC Comics circa late 1972, or so at least it seems to me.  While the publisher’s arch-rival, Marvel Comics, had responded to the 1971 relaxation of the Comic Code Authority’s rules regarding the depiction of horror by launching one new monster-starring series after another, DC had pretty much gone on in the same manner as before, continuing to focus their horror-related energies on the “mystery” anthologies (House of Mystery, Witching Hour, Unexpected, etc.) that had been good sellers for them since the late 1960s.  It’s true that their single supernaturally-oriented title featuring a continuing character (Phantom Stranger, what else?) had been joined by a couple of others in recent months (The Demon and Swamp Thing); but other than a very occasional one-off appearance by a vampire or a werewolf in one of the aforementioned anthologies, the “classic” monsters would by and large remain absent from the pages of DC’s comics — that is, until PS #23, and its introduction of a new version of the Frankenstein Monster.

In a remarkable coincidence, this first installment of “Spawn of Frankenstein” reached newsstands on November 7th — exactly two weeks after Marvel had debuted their new Frankenstein title.  And the synchronicity didn’t stop there, as the opening scene of DC’s new strip, showing the Monster being recovered from Arctic ice, closely echoed the corresponding scene in Marvel’s book — the main difference being that the two scenes were set seventy-four years apart…

Editor Joe Orlando’s creative team for the new feature was composed of writer Marv Wolfman and artist Mike Kaluta — two talents whose most visible efforts of late had been for DC’s line of books based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with Wolfman scripting “John Carter of Mars” (first for Tarzan and then for Weird Worlds) and Kaluta drawing “Carson of Venus” (for Korak, Son of Tarzan).  Ironically, within one month of the debut of “Spawn of Frankenstein” Wolfman would begin writing a series based on the other classic monster of 19th century English literature, as he took over the scripting duties for Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula — a gig that would end up lasting some six years longer than “Frankenstein”, though it’s doubtful anyone could have guessed that at the time.

We don’t learn the surname of the would-be successor to Victor Frankenstein in this installment, but the next issue will clue us in that it’s Adams.  Giving the character the same first name as the Monster’s creator, along with a last name that evokes the moniker of the Bible’s First Man, is perhaps a bit too on the nose — though I suppose it beats calling him Joe Smith, or whatever.

With Rachael Adams’ phone call to “Terry Thirteen… the Ghost Breaker“, we regular readers of Phantom Stranger learn that, on one level, “The Spawn of Frankenstein” isn’t a new series at all — rather, it’s an overhaul of the existing “Dr. 13” strip that’s been running semi-regularly in the back of this title since issue #12.  Evidently, while Joe Orlando was quite keen to make a major change in Phantom Stranger‘s backup slot– according to an article by John Wells in Alter Ego #41 (Oct., 2004), the editor had two Dr. 13 stories in hand, complete and ready to go, that he chose to consign to inventory in order to launch “Frankenstein” — he still wasn’t quite ready to kick Terry and his wife Marie all the way to the curb.  After all, both Thirteens had been part of the revived “Phantom Stranger” feature since its tryout in Showcase #80, back in 1968, and might by now be considered part of its essential fabric, at least by some.

In 1972, Michael Kaluta’s visualization of the Monster hewed more closely to the descriptions given in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel than had most others before it, in any medium — or at least those that had appeared since James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein had cemented the Boris Karloff version in the popular imagination.  For that, we evidently owe thanks to Kaluta’s good friend and fellow artist (and lifelong Frankenstein enthusiast), Bernie Wrightson.

As Wrightson explained to Roy Thomas in an interview for Alter Ego #41:

When Mike got that job, I remember he called me and said, “What does the Monster look like?”…  And I described the Monster for him, and he drew it exactly the way I described it, which is why Michael’s Monster looks like mine.

Twelve years later, Kaluta himself offered further details in an interview with Jon B. Cooke for Comic Book Creator #13 (Fall, 2016):

I said, “Wrightson, I’m doing this ‘Spawn of Frankenstein’ thing.”  “Yeah?”  I asked, “Where are the stitches? Like where on the body are the stitches, if there are any stitches?”  He said, “Oh, there’s stitches all over Karloff’s.  That’s in the movie, but he wasn’t made out of body parts stitched together like in the movies.  He’s put in a vat and boiled out and it’s just skin.  It just stretches over the framework so he looks weirdly desiccated.”  I went, “Thanks,” and I drew that…

As we discussed in last week’s post about Marvel’s Frankenstein #1, Shelley is less than specific in her novel about the tools and methods Victor Frankenstein uses to animate his creation.  But ever since the 1931 movie, “electricity” has been part of the process in most popular treatments of the theme (though not, it should be noted, in Marvel’s adaptation of the novel).

“He doesn’t have mind enough!”  Sigh… it’s not the first time Terry has leapt to firm conclusions from scant evidence — and it probably won’t be the last, either…

And so, a new story of the Monster (aka the Spawn) of Frankenstein begins, with Dr. 13 taking the “Lt. Gerard” role to the Monster’s “Richard Kimble” in a take obviously beholden to The Fugitive (and through it, of course, to Les Miserables).  So, maybe not so new, after all — still, it’s a time-tested as well as a time-worn premise on which to build an episodic narrative; and even if Wolfman’s storyline still needs to prove itself, Kaluta’s splendid artwork rewards one’s attention all on its own.  Where will things go from here?  I hope you’ll return in January for our look at the saga’s next chapter, in Phantom Stranger #24.