What Should Have Happened: Gil Kane's WEREWOLF BY NIGHT!

"You know What Should Have Happened?"

This is a question that I use to torture myself when I consider how events might have gone in the past. Like you imagine what John Carpenter's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON might have been like, had that movie ever been made back in his prime (as rumored). Or you imagine a The Shadow movie directed by Sam Raimi (could happen.) Or you think you came up with, like, the greatest comic book fight ever (Fantastic Four Human Torch vs the 1940s android Human Torch), only to find out it was done a couple years before you were born.


In that vein, "What Should Have Happened?" considers, well, what could have happened if the looking glass had gotten tilted just a little more, if the chicken bones had landed just another way. We might be reading/seeing something more different, more fantastic, than we could imagine.

So in the spirit of All Hallow's Eve, I thought I'd mention the underrated WEREWOLF BY NIGHT comic of the 1970s and what it might have done to become mentioned in the same hallowed breath as TOMB OF DRACULA.

And his name was Gil Kane.

Kane had been a superhero standard for DC Comics throughout the 1960s, pencilling classic runs on THE ATOM and GREEN LANTERN prominently. His dynamic compositions were unrivalled, though Kane certainly had detractors. He leaped onto the Marvel bandwagon at some point in the late 1960s and plugged away at various titles like AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK and CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON.

I never cared much for Kane's artwork. That's a fault in me, folks. I never approached a Kane comic and thought, "Hot damn! Gil Kane!" like I would other artists. Latter years Carmine Infantino and Frank Robbins fell into that category of bringing out my apathy, both as a kid and an adult. But, as with everything, it's basic ignorance that is shown up in the end, and after seeing Infantino's seminal THE FLASH work from the early 1960s, and Frank Robbins' feral renderings of THE SHADOW in the short-lived 1970s venture, I had to stifle any misgivings. So it was with Gil Kane and WEREWOLF BY NIGHT.

The short summation of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT: the series lasted three years, centered on a young teenage dude named Jack Russell (yeah, terrible pun in the name) who has inherited a lycanthropic curse once he hits eighteen years of age. Every phase of the full moon he turns into a ravaging Wolf Man, and the bulk of the series involves him trying to break his curse and save his younger sister before she, in turn, suffers the same curse.

WWBN's art chores were handled by the great Mike Ploog initially, and then workman Don Perlin (above) arrived for the bulk of the series. Doug Moench wrote almost all of the series, but for most of the first issues it was Gerry Conway and Len Wein writing. There were some good stories there, but nobody seemed to get a solid handle on WWBN. Marv Wolfman ("Finally! A Wolfman writes a Werewolf!") came onboard in strong fashion, with the aforementioned Gil Kane for the two-part "Hangman" arc.

Gil Kane only penciled those two issues of WWBN, 11 and 12, with the fantastic splash presented above. The next issue was Kane inked by Don Perlin, who would take over art chores soon. The story concerns the "Werewolf" (okay, I'm going to call him "Wolf Man" because a werewolf is a man who turns into a literal wolf, as in folklore, while a Wolf Man is a wolf/man hybrid created by the movies in the 1940s...which is what WWBN's adventures are about, a Wolf Man) and a masked avenger called "The Hangman" duke it out in Gil Kane-rendered dynamism. The Hangman is a vigilante who not only saves women from being robbed and raped on the city streets, but he kidnaps those victims himself and imprisons them in his secret lair. Why? So he can protect them. This was quite a story, one of the many gems at the beginning (and at the end) of the series.

Aside from Tom Sutton's artwork on another two-parter (and who knows why that association didn't take off...Sutton never seemed to work on anything at Marvel or anywhere else very long, far as I know), Kane brought a new kind of sensibility to his bombastic superhero style: the art of terror and suspense.

Some might say it wasn't a good fit, but I don't know. I see some interesting stuff going on with Kane's Wolf Man.

I know Don Perlin was a solid artist, the kind who, like Don Heck and Sal Buscema, kept churning out the comics on schedule for Marvel in the 1970s.

Not to say Perlin wasn't good, but when compared with the beautiful power of Gene Colan and Tom Palmer's classic TOMB OF DRACULA work (and you see their version of the Wolf Man of WWBN above), WWBN suffered in comparison.

I'll probably say WWBN never acheived the "classic" status due to the art, mostly (though admittedly writer Moench never quite hit on a solid formula for WEREWOLF...the secondary characters didn't have the same life as in his subsequent MASTER OF KUNG FU series. To be honest, WEREWOLF BY NIGHT and Moench's other creation Moon Knight suffered the same lack of interesting subplots, which TOMB OF DRACULA scribe Marv Wolfman excelled at). Still in all, WWBN is a solid read, even if Perlin's art looks mechanical at times. It's still good, but not as good as some of the other stuff of that era that critics hold up as pure gold.

So I was thinking about Gil Kane and what might have happened, had Kane been the artist of WWBN beginning with issue 11. He certainly did some covers for the book, reproduced here. All I keep thinking is how Kane's work looked at that time, how the art had a sensual richness to it that would prevade Kane's work the rest of his career. Couple that with Kane's obvious desire to "break free" of superhero comics (with his dabbling in Richard Stark-esque hard crime stuff with his "Savage" stories for independent publishers), and I just wonder if an opportunity was missed.

I wonder if Gil Kane might have produced one of the best comics of the 1970s in those years. Who knows?

But there's something, something savage and watchful, hiding in those covers. Something that will attack, and tear, and rip, if given the chance. I mean, something is there.

Isn't there?