“I WANT TO BELIEVE” – THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, PART 5

Back in 1993, being a nerd wasn’t a cool thing, especially not if you were a student at college. Like back in high school, the popular kids had perfect hair and perfect skin, and they knew how to do sports. Sure, once you got into higher education, you could be in a band. Nirvana had released their groundbreaking album “Nevermind” two years earlier, and Pearl Jam and a whole host of other bands were on the cusp of making it big. If you were white and a bit angry for no reason, grunge was the watchword. Even as a geeky guy, being in an alternative band made you look really cool, and you got the girl, in theory. Butch Vig, the producer of Nirvana’s seminal longplayer, a drummer by trade, proved that when he and two of his equally nerdy friends formed their own band two years later and they got a much younger, super-hot redhaired singer from Scotland to be their frontwoman, and did she ever know how to rock fishnets and knee-high boots. Short dresses helped, too. Well, at least on some basic level, you needed to have some grasp of how to play an instrument or how to hold a tune. If you did, well, here was your chance to score. Or you might be one of the art students, kids who had grown up watching Bob Ross and who told themselves that they could do the soft-speaking, real-slow-moving, perm-wearing artist one better by settling for a career that would soon put them behind a counter of their local Wendy’s, keeping with the theme of redheads. If you couldn’t draw a cat, and the theater department wasn’t your forte either, you were screwed, figuratively, only literally not so much. If the beautiful girl who was in your Modern Critical Theory class, since it was mandatory to take that course, came up to you, that was because she wanted you to write her term paper on why the author was dead, and she’d pay you for it, with money. These girls also kicked your ass, figuratively, once you’d made it into the safe haven of a creative writing class. Apparently, the teaching assistant who was saddled with teaching the course while he was typing away at the next important American Novel, he liked gorgeous, long-limbed co-eds as well. Or she might be a woman who had a strikingly similar proclivity, only nobody talked about that, back then. This was the early 1990s, and despite the political correctness, the bluster and posturing, the “we celebrate our diversities” creed and bad stuff being stricken from dictionaries, if you looked at your surroundings and your community, paying lip service was what this was. The same in media. African American actors and actresses were offered roles as comedians or sport heroes or as the “black friend”, and television shows were still mostly segregated. If your lead characters were black, the supporting cast had to be made up of African Americans as well. Well, an upper middle class wish dream like the “The Cosby Show” helped open the door for shows like “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, according to Entertainment Weekly at least. Now, wasn’t that comforting? Luckily, for the former show’s ratings, audiences weren’t as divided. “The Cosby Show” remained a Nielsen powerhouse. When it went off the air 1992, its spin-off, “A Different World”, centered around students at an all-black college, outlasted it by a year. Back in the 1960s, when the push for social equality and integration was at its loudest, Bill Cosby shared equal billing with Robert Culp on “I Spy”, still he was cast as the funny guy (which would be proven ironic many years down the road). If you looked outside the sitcoms of the 1990s, for black actors starring on television, this meant that they were mostly relegated to sitting in the back row. However, judging from the first years of the decade, the 1990s were shaping up as the decade of situation comedies, and their biggest stars turned celebrities, they’d all be white, as exemplified by the immensely popular “Seinfeld”, and the juggernaut that “Friends” would become, a show which started its run during next year’s television season. Except for the outlier that was “Twin Peaks” (another all-white community), and of course “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, which had one black cast member, television had little to offer for an actor of color or the nerds and geeks who liked comic books and science fiction genre fare, only that the former was overrun by jocks as well with the revolution that was Image Comics well underway. Suddenly, superheroes were on steroids that made them look like caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger (with badly drawn feet) and somehow rendered their personalities void at the same time. As for the superheroines, well, they were supermodels in g-strings, of course. And to celebrate this cult of over-accentuated, and thus objectified bodies, there were special swimsuit issues for the heroes now. Though many comic fans do look fondly at this period through the rear-view mirror that makes everything in the past look so much better, those were the dark ages. Traditional superheroes were slaughtered on a grand scale, they were reborn, and they returned. Only now they needed to be grim and gritty, and with gritted teeth, and their costumes came with belts that had pouches that were compartmentalized into even smaller pouches. Still, while all of this was going on, there was one beacon of hope to show the way to those who lacked the light. But this was no superhero, real or imagined, but an organization. The Fox Network, or better known in the days before broadband and the internet or when pay-tv meant that you had a subscription to HBO, as the “coat hanger network” for the little antenna you needed to purchase to receive the signal of one of the affiliates that broadcast their program over the airwaves for free. If you did, you had access to a world that was unlike what the other three networks (and PBS) were giving you outside old reruns that had made it into nightly syndication. A local station that carried Fox, was a station you tuned to if there was any nerd blood pumping through your veins. “Batman: The Animated Series” began to air in 1992, and two years later you could catch reruns of the first season in the afternoon after your classes. Though Fox targeted a younger demographic, nerds and jocks united (in separate dorm rooms) to watch shows like “Beverly Hills 90210” and its semi-dark spinoff “Melrose Place”, and this was the one time you could look at attractive college co-eds without somebody calling you a perv. Fox ruled, and when they bought the rights to the Sunday football games for the 1993-94 season, like actress Heather O’Rourke had done so in “Poltergeist” in 1982 as she was looking at a television screen, they told you that they were here, only that with Fox, there wouldn’t be any static on the TV screen, unless you didn’t have a coat hanger. Then, on September 10, 1993, a diaspora of awkward adolescents with greasy hair, glasses and bad skin and even worse social skills who clung to the lifeboat that was Bruce Timm’s little show that could, they found a new home, and like the hero of the show, which was very white initially, they wanted to believe.

It’s simply a case of “you had to be there”, quite literally, if you want to explain to a young person what “appointment television” was like. Outside of unannounced reruns that would appear now and then in the middle of an ongoing television season, if you didn’t catch an episode of a show (or a made for TV movie) on its air date, and you didn’t happen to own a VHS recorder (not going to explain that one) you missed out. Buying a season on DVD, let alone streaming it at your convenience, that was science fiction punk even die-hard fans of the works of William Gibson couldn’t have imagined in those days. It wasn’t like the networks wouldn’t let you know what was to come. Once the new season kicked off in August, there’d be a parade of announcement trailers telling you about the exciting lineup that was coming to your television screens, but you had to mark that date in your social calendar, you had to be there, only except, when it came to a Friday, which September 10, 1993 very much was, not even many executives at any given network expected you to be at home. If you were romantically interested in somebody, or you were simply going with your sports buddies to a local bar, or you had a keg party in the woods, you scheduled your dates for a Friday. Friday nights were date nights, everybody knew this. Any new show that was put in the 7 to 9pm timeslot (or 8 to 10pm depending on your time zone) on Fridays, it would join similarly ill-fated offerings, including shows that had seen better days, on a Bataan Death March to a swift, merciful cancellation. Executives knew that the only shows that might survive past a first season, or just a handful of episodes, were the genre shows they’d foolishly greenlit themselves or which they had inherited from a prior regime at the network’s scripted programming which had since been ousted. These were the shows that were targeted at young adults who had no entries in their calendars, other than the meeting of their chess club, but certainly, they’d be those viewers who were stranded at home on date nights. This was how “The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.” made it into the Fall lineup of 1993. This hybrid between a western show and elements from science fiction pulps was co-created by Carlton Cuse who would go on to become one of the showrunners on “Lost” more than a decade later, a show that combined a human-interest drama with time travel. But September 2004, when “Lost” premiered on ABC, was different from the television landscape of the early 1990s, time travel or no time travel. A western show was a hard sell by itself, even to genre fans, but adding scifi tropes to the mix and treating the whole thing with humor, at times too much over-the-top humor, not even fan favorite actor Bruce Campbell could prevent the head-scratching that occurred after the first episode had aired on August 27, and that was among nerdy viewers who kinda liked what they’d had witnessed. Interestingly, “Brisco County, Jr.” was a show that made an earnest attempt at presenting a black supporting character who was more than a sidekick to the white hero. Actor Julius Carry had once researched the history of black cowboys for a college paper and he put a lot of what’d learned into the role, making the show’s fictional Lord Bowler an analog to a real-life deputy U.S. Marshal who always got whatever fugitive he was after, but who inevitably had to stare down a mob once the escapee started a ruckus about how a black man, an officer of the law no less, shouldn’t be allowed to slap cuffs on a white man. A noble goal, but a tricky preposition, with the creators aiming for a light-hearted tone, not serious drama or historical accuracy, thus, in the world of Harvard educated lawyer turned bounty hunter of Brisco County, Jr. and his gang of friends, race was never an issue or at least it was never made into a subject. Still, there was room for another character, a foil for the funny and athletic Campbell. Since this show targeted young men who’d be spending this Friday like any other Friday at home, there had to be an effete, glasses-wearing geek, a lawyer like Brisco, a quasi-intellectual Easterner who was ill-equipped to handle the rough West. Who among those benchwarmers in front of the TV sets wouldn’t want to identify with such a wimp, or they could live vicariously through the manly Brisco County who made the women who guest starred swoon, or if the script demanded it, to punch him on his big chin and then swoon. The show did garner a small, loyal fan following of viewers whose calendar did stay empty and who didn’t take offense to this send-up of geeky themes that needed a better venue, but after twenty-seven episodes, not an episode count that was that unusual for a full season, Campbell and Carry rode into the sunset for the last time while Christian Clemenson, the actor who’d played the nerdy loser, lawyer Socrates Poole, had a pony and a career of playing similar geeks, including that time when the patron saint of geek culture and of women, Joss Whedon cast him as a fat demon on his signature show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Or Clemenson played a loser, like on “Veronica Mars” where a Silicon Valley billionaire bribed his character to be a fall guy for murder. In a way, despite the western and science fiction tropes, “Brisco County, Jr.” didn’t feel like a show that was made for the audience it went up getting, the stay-at-home nerds, but all that was about to change two weeks later. On that Sunday, September 12, you had the series premiere of a show that had been announced with an interesting, very surprising promo. You saw an attractive guy talking to an even more attractive woman, and once she’d left the room, the guy turned to the camera to tell you that he had a crush on her, which was understandable and not something his body language didn’t already betray. He also confided in whoever was watching, that she wasn’t all that into him, obviously, since he seemed a bit awkward, geeky even like he wasn’t that comfortable in his own skin and a woman like her was way out of his league. But then ever so briefly, there was a knowing, confident smile as he took off his trendy spectacles and unbuttoned his shirt to reveal the blue leotard he wore beneath, that was adorned with one of the most recognizable symbols in the world, the stylized S that every kid knew stood for Superman. If you were one of those guys who’d grown up reading his comic book adventures, perhaps you were still reading them without telling anyone but some like-minded geeks when you met to hangout in some dingy backroom of a comic shop located at a local strip mall between a store which offered trading cards and a low rent looking beauty parlor with the most unappealing outdoor signage, you had to force yourself to contain a scream. Here was Superman, on television and in live action. Not in your wildest dreams would you have expected to see him on the small screen, not on a network like ABC, not on prime time and not on a Sunday evening. Superman was not only a superhero from a world that only existed with two dimensions and in four colors, but he was uncool. Sure, there was the movie, which was followed by three more films with wildly varying degrees of quality and commercial success, and even further back a much older show on television, but Superman in the loud 1990s, a decade that asked everybody to look their best, that was inconceivable. As it turned out, it was too good to be true. “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” was a romance show, and not a particularly good one. Obviously based on the then recent reboot in comics by John Byrne, fairly early on any nerd with some cred realized that there wouldn’t be any super-villains for Superman to fight, but rather an excruciating amount of time was spent on Clark trying to woo Lois who was not having any of it. But it was the same old story, and this was not Christopher Reeve’s bumbling Clark, but a handsome stud who looked more like a jock than a guy with only one blue suit in his closet, in other words, he shouldn’t have any issues with getting his football into the endzone. This was a show for soccer moms who could ogle the hunky bod of lead actor Dean Cain, and for the dads you had Teri Hatcher in tight-fitting pencils skirts that put the emphasize on her long legs. But still, this was Superman, only that the geeks who sat in their dorm rooms on Friday nights had found something better. That Friday, September 10, they got a hero on TV who had more in common with the Clark Kent from the comic books, at least that version of Superman’s alter-ego that had existed before writer-artist Byrne took a jackhammer to decades of established lore. This hero was not a caricature like Socrates Poole on “Brisco County, Jr.”, the type of character you get when a Hollywood producer asked a writer to put somebody on a show “for the nerds to identity with”, but he was complex, conflicted, and he saw things other people didn’t. Though he was handsome, there was nothing wrong with that, Superman looked like Greek god, and he was intelligent, he was awkward in his interpersonal interaction with a propensity to speak his mind which meant saying the wrong thing. He wasn’t blind to how other people viewed him, he was too perceptive not to notice, but he persisted, not caring one way or the other. His convictions were that strong. Here was a protagonist, not a pathetic sidekick, who was a lot like you if you weren’t that popular, if you were a nerd, or an outsider who had a hard time to understand the social rituals of the people around you, or a bit of all of the above applied to you. Here was someone who you could identify with, and let’s be honest, who you wanted to be, but there was something else, still. Since he was such an oddball, he was not only shunned by his colleagues, but they’d given him a demeaning nickname. Now that struck close to home. He was “Spooky” Mulder.

After the first episode of “The X-Files” had aired on September 10, 1993, somewhat unoriginally simply called “Pilot”, the world was a different one if you belonged to the generation that was designated with the same letter of the alphabet, “Generation X”, and you liked geeky stuff. Only by that time, especially with how the 1990s had begun, in pop culture, there wasn’t much content made for you, or at the very least, reflective of what you liked. “Twin Peaks” had started strong, but then it had quickly imploded on itself, and sure, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was still on, but that show had started in the late 80s, and with how the new season started in 1993, here was machine man Data who suddenly had an evil brother. This version of “Star Trek”, it was as grim and gritty like a comic from Image, only that everyone was afraid that they’d be taken over by A.I. And speaking of comic books, they were immensely popular in the wake of what would become known as “The Image Revolution”. But folks were buying the latest books just for the art, which showed superheroes who looked like soulless automations, beautiful men and women who glided across sleek city streets in gleaming Ferraris and who looked cool. People were told that comics were a smart investment, that collecting a bunch of No. 1s would pay for your college education down the road. Well, they didn’t, and even the most die-hard materialists eventually got very bored with heroes that were nearly impossible to differentiate from the villains in their methods. These were the days when for true nerds who happened to be gen-xers, all the cool things existed in the past. Back when, you had series like “The Twilight Zone” or its darker brother “The Outer Limits”, shows that were scripted by intelligent, thought-provoking writers like Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont and Harlan Ellison. This was this magical time and place where “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” lived, and you needn’t possess a near genius-level intellect to get that the 1990s weren’t that, and maybe that was why Eddie Vedder and his ilk were always on about all that “white boy pain and anger” of suburbia, this blandness that drove kids mad, even the cool ones who lived at Beverly Hills 90210. A single television show didn’t change that, of course it didn’t. What “The X-Files” represented, what the show asked you to do, what it expected you to do, was to look beyond the world around you, to question everything, to deconstruct. For all the shut-ins who didn’t like to leave their dorm rooms except for their classes and the library, or the computer laboratory, unlike their obnoxious roommates who were always ready to take the Beastie Boys at their word, to fight for their right to party, here was a TV show with a message that was equally intoxicating as it was thrilling: “The truth is out there.” Ironically though, series creator Chris Carter had stumbled onto this message by looking at the past and by recalling the formative years of his childhood and his adolescence. Chris Carter was born in California in 1956, and both the time he was born into as well as the places he grew up in, had equal parts in shaping his sensibilities. On the surface, young Chris seemed destined to become one of the jocks that give nerds a hard time in school, in fact, to a certain degree, he was that guy. Chris loved little league baseball and surfing, with the latter being his passion. Once he graduated from California State University with a degree in journalism, he began writing for a surf magazine and he was made an editor in 1984 when he was twenty-eight. He liked his work so much, and the freedom it gave him to go surfing and hang out with surfers whenever he wanted while getting paid for it, that he’d end up staying with Surfing Magazine for thirteen years. But spending time on the beaches on Long Beach was not only about doing physical activities, for Chris and many of the cool kids that rode the waves, it was a profound spiritual experience as well. It was during his time with Surfing Magazine that he discovered that he had a keen interest in making pottery, and more importantly, that the process of creating pottery, of which Chris made “hundreds of thousands of pieces”, was his version of performing deep Zen meditations. It was like catching the perfect wave. Though he might have been motivated in his turn towards Eastern philosophy by the zeitgeist and the surf culture he was very much a part of and which he promoted with his job, the initial spark for this way of thinking was ignited in the days of his childhood when there were actual religions around that weren’t just predicated on the belief that extraterrestrial life existed somewhere out there in the far reaches of space. The aliens, they were here on Earth. People had seen them. They had talked to them and were told that heaven was out there among the stars. You needed to be prepared for the day when Jesus arrived in his flying saucer to invite those of faith to join him. Even in the 1950s, this concept sounded like a stark-raving madness, still, the idea of outlandish beliefs was nothing new to the Golden State. Cults that worshipped obscure religions dated all the way back to the 1920s if not even further, but after the Battle of Los Angeles in 1942 when the biggest city on the West Coast came under attack by either Japanese planes or alien foo fighters (in fact it was neither but a wide-spread mass panic), after the subsequent sightings of unexplainable flying objects and even little gray men in the desert, there were folks who wanted to believe. Not just in these beings from outer space who came as saviors or who wanted to annihilate our society, with Jesus willing to do a bit of both, but believe in a higher calling, a pattern in the universe that made sense whereas in their daily lives down here on this mortal coil, not much made sense. Though some UFO religions proved to have amazingly loyal, utterly devoted followers which gave the respective cults sometimes decades-long staying power, most notably Scientology, founded in 1952 by a former science fiction novelist, and there was a massive renaissance in the 1970s that lasted well into the early 1990s, once the 1950s came to an end, people were more interested in expanding their minds by other means than some technology or a myth handed to us from space. It was the dawn of the counterculture movement, that’s if you were hanging with a young crowd. As for their parents, there had to be something else. Men who were boys when they fought and didn’t die in Normandy and Korea, many of them were the first members of their families to obtain a higher education, and women who got a taste of worklife during the war years, they almost single handedly created a new middle class in America, the economic boom of the post-war days and a period of unprecedented prosperity. Once the dust had settled around this consumer generation, after those first blissful years of new romances, newly found wealth, and the early joys of parenthood, once the appliances in the kitchen of the new model houses in the new suburbia or the two cars in the double garage looked a bit less shiny, people needed something to dull the pain, the emptiness. To take the edge off, there were the standbys, alcohol and Benzedrine. Psychopharmaca were even better. Not to aid with self-perception, but to help you to dull these diffuse desires and needs, and to put you into a blissful state of constant drowsiness, to make you forget that this was not what life was supposed to be. Quite possibly these could have been the folks Chris Carter would have grown up with had he lived in one of the suburbs that were sprawling around the urban centers on the East Coast or the Midwest, however since he spent his childhood on the other coast, and he still lived in California, he was exposed to something else entirely. In 1961, Dick Price and Michael Murphy made a trip to Slates Hot Springs in Big Sur. Both men were graduates of Stanford University and huge fanboys of Aldous Leonard Huxley’s writing, with Price having talked to the writer in person. Since they were separated by a few years, they didn’t meet in Stanford, but a few years later in San Francisco at the suggestion of a professor for Indic studies who thought they’d hit it off and did they ever. Meanwhile, Price was attending Harvard where he continued his studies in psychology, while Murphy was quite literally on a completely different trip. Long before the Beatles hired a guru to show them the path to enlightenment, Murphy traveled to India and lived for seven months in an ashram, and since he was a real smart cookie, he took up a residency there as well, teaching a mixture of Western psychology and Eastern philosophy. Once the two Stanford graduates got to know each other, and they quickly found out that they had a lot in common, especially in regard to psychology and philosophy and their ambition to spread the word, they made the decision to open up their own center for personal growth and humanistic alternative education. However, with the target group they had in mind, their outfit couldn’t be just another private practice in San Francisco, not with the storefronts of the Golden City quickly being taken over by healers who peddled alternative medicine, faith healing and mind-body interventions. They knew they couldn’t start small. Their shingle needed to be an institute, because why not, and it needed to be upscale, magnificent and grand, which brought them to Big Sur, a beautiful, mountainous region nestled between Carmel and San Simeon. The latter city was home to the castle media tycoon William Randolph Hearst had built, another leader with a great vision and perhaps even greater delusions of grandeur. Luckily, as it turned out, Murphy’s family owned a plot of land in Slates Hot Springs, with a huge hotel located on the property, only they weren’t doing much with it. The hotel had fallen into a state of disrepair, and members of a Pentecostal church where squatting in the huge rooms, though on the weekends they were joined by gay men who drove up from Frisco to hang out and take baths in the hot springs nearby. Michael’s grandmother, who had inherited the place from her late husband, didn’t mind these goings-on, quite the contrary. Well-heeled as Vinnie “Bunnie” MacDonald Murphy was, she had steadfastly refused all offers to sell the land, and just in case some big-shot real estate agent might get this idea in his head to do some snooping around, she had a heavily armed, and quite drunk security man on her land to dissuade any individual of such a course of action, only that her man wasn’t any old, gun-toting cowboy but author Hunter S. Thompson, Mr. Gonzo Journalism himself who viewed it as his sacred mission to defend her property to the death.

Impressed by the plot in Big Sur, what it was and the possibilities it may open up for the thing they had in mind, Dick Price still tried his luck with Mrs. MacDonald Murphy. When Dick darkened Bunnie’s door, with new bro Michael in tow, he brought some pretty convincing arguments to the table. There was his own brand of Taoism, which he’d puzzled out during a lengthy stay in hospital, and his movie star looks didn’t hurt in any negotiations either. But Richard Price was no fool. While he strived to kindle a spiritual awakening in others, he knew that this was no ashram led by Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, this was the United States of America and it was a material world, thus, he’d also packed a suitcase full of cash. His old man was a vice-president at Sears, and this being the early 1960s, Sears was the most successful retail business in the world. Not only did Price’s dad not know what to do with his money, he surely was glad that his son had found a calling in spiritualism and potential development he himself may very well stand to gain from, in fact, getting clients like Dick Price’s father was exactly what the two adventurous young men had in mind. With such assets, and some talking to from Murphy’s father, in the end Bunnie did sign a favorable long-term lease which granted her grandson the rights to use her land and the hotel as he pleased. She was also persuaded in her decision-making process when she learned that her guard had nearly died. Only recently, the journalist had walked into the springs in a drunken stupor which was fueled by alcohol and psychedelic drugs alike to study the mating rituals of gay men. He quickly learned that his intended subjects didn’t take too kindly to this. After some prolonged shouting and posturing, Hunter nearly got himself thrown over a cliff in the scuffle that followed. Mrs. MacDonald Murphy was quick to realize that she’d better make sure that there were permanent residents on the estate. If they were the paying type, so much the better. Anyway, the two idealistic men had some serious work cut out for themselves, but as these things often go, they had already come up with a cool sounding name for their venture, together with the signed deed, it was a promising start. Naturally, the land minus the hotel had once belonged to a tribe of Native American people who’d lived and hunted in the area. The Esselen had almost gone extinct, small surprise, but the name of their once mighty tribe would now live on in posterity, only not quite. Price felt that the word Esselen didn’t have the kind of marketing appeal that conjured up an image of a retreat facility that was top-end and classy, and most importantly, was catering exclusively to members of the elite, or at least to those people who dreamt themselves as part of this group in the here and now or with assistance from the lectures and workshops they intended to offer. Thus, he changed it to the easier to pronounce and more important sounding Esalen, and since it was not like Stanford handed out degrees for nothing, they figured the path forward was to set up their newly established Esalen Institute as a non-profit, a move which allowed for them to get paid from the top. With the hotel remodeled, they made sure that word spread quickly that the Esalen Institute wasn’t yet another experimental hippie commune, and that Price and Murphy were no cult leaders. With their connections in Stanford and Harvard, and a scenic location, in a surprisingly short amount of time the duo managed to drum up support for the center in academic circles and among psychologists who had begun to look towards Eastern religions and philosophies to expand their established therapy toolbox. Like that, Esalen was soon able to boast an impressive list of lecturers and teachers in residence to hold seminars that were specifically designed for an affluent clientele. Really, why leave the experimentation in self-discovery and self-growth to the long-haired potheads if you could achieve the same with a very exclusive circle of like-minded, upward mobile adults? Drugs being optional, of course. True to form for the son of a Sears vice-president, Daddy Price had raised no dummy, the path to enlightenment and to real growth, emotional fulfillment and happiness came at a rather outrageous price, but this meant that even more one-percenters wanted in, especially since Price and Murphy let folks know that there were only so many spots available in the groups. Of course, you were welcomed to book a one-on-one session at a premium. But what was money if you stood to become truly enlightened? If you want to get a good inkling of what Esalen was like in its heyday, you can always watch the series finale of “Mad Men”, the one where fatigued ad man Don Draper found salvation in a place that was closely modeled on Esalen, and he went on, in the world of the show, to create the most famous commercial ever, you know, the spot in which enthusiastic, a bit hippie-looking people from all over the world got together on a hilltop to sing “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Of course, these were young people, and they were ethnically diverse. When the spot began to air in 1971, just like that, Bill Backer, the creative director on the Coca-Cola account at McCann Erickson, the originator of the commercial in our universe, had boldly co-opted the hopes and dreams of an entire generation, to take them mainstream, which was exactly what Esalen had been doing for the past decade for an exclusive circle of influencers. Together with a new interest in ufology, spirituality and rebirth for the mass market, after books like “Return to the Stars” and “Gods from Outer Space” by Swiss author Erich von Däniken had become bestsellers, this was a New Age quite literally. If you lived in California, you lit up some scented candles that went well with your chardonnay and a bit of that recreational marijuana, while your teenage son rode the waves at night. Of course, this was happening while in the background the Watergate Hearings were being broadcast on live television all day and in the evenings, an event that spawned a growing “trust no one” mindset which soon created a whole host of barking-mad conspiracy theories of the lunatic fringe. With this perfect storm of societal change going on around him, it’s easy to imagine how fifteen-year-old Chris Carter might stumble onto a film on ABC that depicted a brave reporter’s struggle to convince the authorities of Las Vegas that not only were vampires the real deal, but they existed in this very real metropolis that was all about fakery. There was only one way this made for television movie could have ended in 1972. Once all was said and done, at the end of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, the brave reporter’s reputation was utterly destroyed, he’d lost his girlfriend, and the authorities, they were covering up these supernatural events. This was something the public didn’t need to know. And there you had the seeds for a television show and a lead character who was as informed of what had been going on since the 1940s, like Carter was by virtue of growing up in California. Fox Mulder was like a love child of Esalen attendees, highly intellectual, upper middle class movers and shakers who were the few who wanted to decide and control the greater good of the many. He wanted to believe, at least that was what the poster said that hung on one of the walls in his basement office, a poster that showed a flying saucer. With a treasure trove of cultural stepstones and an iconography that lay in the pit between realism and absurdity, a jock who’d discovered pottery making and Zen, created a TV show which would eventually become a cultural sensation by and of itself. “Pilot” was about alien abductions, of course it was, but more importantly, the series premiere of “The X-Files” spent a lot of time with establishing the two protagonists of the show, who they were and what was up with them, or depending on your point of view, what was wrong with them. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his soon to be colleague Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) were federal agents, albeit with very different career paths. In their world, perhaps like in ours, the FBI machine of the early 1990s was rife with bureaucracy and backstabbing. This was the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Clinton Era. A photo of newly nominated Attorney General Janet Reno hung over the desk of every supervisor, most of whom kicked down to move ahead. The real Janet Reno, the first woman to hold this position, had inherited Ruby Ridge and she immediately gained notoriety with the Waco Siege, a joined operation by the ATF and the Bureau that had turned into a fiery inferno. Though these events were never mentioned in the pilot or the show, Carter and his writers’ room implied a through line between the bizarre rise to fame of cult leader David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and the “I AM” Movement all the way back to the 1930s. The followers of “I AM” Activity, founded by husband-and-wife team Guy Ballard and Edna Anne Wheeler Ballard and widely regarded as the first UFO religion, believe in supernatural beings who are either humans reincarnated or aliens that originated from the great central sun of light. Surprisingly, this precursor to many New Age religions, still boasts around three-hundred local groups today, which means they’ve far outlasted Esalen which once was the epicenter of the counterculture movement, but nearly got shut down in 2007. If this sounded crazy, to Mulder’s colleagues and his superiors at the FBI it surely did, viewers had to be aware of the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego which was heavily invested in promoting the belief that in 1997 an extraterrestrial spacecraft would whisk you away from this island Earth, that was if you were a true believer. Mulder was, hence his “I want to believe” poster, which also explained his nickname “Spooky” and his new partner. Scully, an army brat in her childhood, and an MD by trade, was seen as the ideal candidate by her bosses to collect dirt on the renegade Mulder who had his hand on all the supposedly supernatural cases nobody else wanted to investigate. Her mission came on top of the heavy helping of 1990s sexism she had to endure in a male dominated environment. But what made her perfect for the job, and this character a perfect foil for a man who wanted to believe, a medical doctor like her had to be a skeptic. If there was a perfectly reasonable, scientific explanation to be found for each and every of Mulder’s “X-Files”, Scully was the person to report those findings while she kept tabs on her unsuspecting colleague, further proof that “Spooky” Mulder was a certified kook the Bureau would be well advised to let go. However, the character’s name was a clever inversion, only you had to know a bit about the history of reported UFO sightings. Frank Scully was a revered journalist and columnist for Variety when in 1949, exactly two years after the purported events that’re commonly known the “Roswell UFO Incident”, he was approached by two men who claimed that they were Army scientists. According to the tale they told Scully, on two separate occasions, they’d been involved in the recovery of dead extraterrestrial beings from crashed unidentified flying objects that were disk-shaped. The men, Silas M. Newton and Dr. Gee even supplied their own opinion on how the objects functioned. According to their impressions, the machines had to employ some type of magnetic field for propulsion, albeit the U.S. Army wouldn’t let them study these marvels of advanced technology in detail. Sensing a huge cover-up operation, Scully convinced his editor to let him publish an expose in Variety, though as any reporter would, he shielded his informants, otherwise, with only taking a brief look at those names, his editor might have told him that perhaps he wanted to do a bit more fact checking. Undeterred and motivated by the feedback he got from readers; Scully published a book on the subject a year later. This was around the same time when Guy Hottel, Special Agent in Charge no less, sent a memo up the chain of command at the FBI, that an informant at the U.S. Air Force had come forward to tell him about the three unidentified flying objects that top brass had ordered to be buried in the hot sands of New Mexico in secrecy. Hottel’s bosses were quick to realize that they had one “Spooky” special agent in their midst. He never heard back from them, that was until many decades later the FBI released a statement why it never had bothered to check back with him or to send men to the desert to investigate any such claims. The answer was surprisingly simple. Hottel’s boss in 1950 was convinced that his agent had fallen for a hoax that was circulated by two notorious con artists who sometimes used the names Newton and Gee. For Carter to name his female scientist and chief skeptic after Frank Scully was indeed a fun in-joke that didn’t ruin the character. It’s also noteworthy that in 1952 Mr. Scully was called out by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. He never wrote another book on this subject, though he stayed a believer. As for the pilot of “The X-Files” and Mulder, he was aware that stuff like that was going on, Mulder was highly intelligent and not as gullible as his supervisors thought he was, but he had seen things that you couldn’t explain away easily or by conducting some scientific tests. Right from the start the show gave him a witty, slightly dark sense of humor and a child-like curiosity, but Chris Carter, who wrote the first episode, allowed viewers to see behind the curtain. Fox had set up several walls as a coping mechanism. There was a certain battle fatigue a soldier of the supernatural like he might be wont to display, but he was also plagued with survivor’s guilt. Carter had him confide to his new partner why, and in the context of the pilot, his trust in her felt not misplaced but reasonably motivated. They were investigating alleged abductions of small-town high schoolers by extraterrestrial. He knew aliens were real. He’d known since he was twelve when his sister Samantha got taken. “Spooky” Mulder was still looking for her even now.

“Pilot” was a highly effective and rather creepy start for a series about aliens and the supernatural that was very unusual for the television landscape of 1993, if maybe not so much for the zeitgeist, that was if you liked this type of yarns, and if you were a nerd, in college or otherwise, you most likely did. Jocks on the other hand, they were different. Once you’d become a fan, once you were invested in the show, it was their job to try to spoil it for you. “This is stupid! This show won’t last for more than one season,” they would tell you, because they took their role in life seriously. The show had nine seasons originally. It spawned two movies, a ton of tie-ins and merchandise, and a revival. All of this came about because the show had enough viewers to get going, lonely kids who didn’t have much else to do on Friday nights. But it was also a darn good show, with Carter expanding on Mulder’s and Scully’s respective backstories which was tied into the mythology he was building, while his nerdy writer colleagues told stories around the monster of the week, only that they were no monsters in outward appearance. They were men and women with special abilities, almost as if the Asscended Masters of the “I AM” Movement truly walked here on Earth and among us. Once the show began to garner a fiercely loyal audience, viewers that had no means of communicating with each other outside their own little circles in the pre-social media days, the jocks changed their tactic. “So, you believe in that stuff?” they would ask, the type of question you could only reply to with an expression of complete sadness, which didn’t last very long once you recalled that they were bullies. And if their world was really this small, who were you to take them by the hand and to show them that there was a vast expanse of exciting things beyond their myopic view. You could have pointed out to them that it’s called fiction for a reason or you could have asked them “do you have to believe in real love to be able to enjoy a soap opera?” What about wrestling matches? But not only did you know better than to engage, but why waste your time or theirs? There were also the lingering ghosts of the past when on one occasion your dad or maybe an uncle had spotted you with a Superman comic when you were already outside the age, they deemed appropriate for such trivial material. There was always the same inevitable question. “You know that Superman is not real, right?” What were you supposed to answer? Every kid knows that Superman isn’t real. But then again, perhaps the adults who asked these silly questions or the jocks who wondered aloud if you believed that aliens and beings with supernatural abilities were real, simply didn’t know that the U.S. Army wanted to believe, or how else could you explain all this stuff they were up to well into the early 1990s? You had to wonder if the top brass of the military defense leadership in the country watched “The X-Files”, only they took it for real. In a way, the Army’s involvement with space and extrasensory powers began innocently enough, almost as if these adults were acting like children, if this term is applicable at all where the Military-Industrial-Complex is concerned. In the 1950s, all three branches of the defense department had full responsibility for the U.S. space program that was still in its infancy, only that the launch of Sputnik into Earth’s orbit had worked as a shock to the system. In 1959, the Army asked one of their think tanks to develop what ultimately was called “Project Horizon”, the plan for a permanent American research base on the Moon that offered room for eight residents at the same time, all with Iron Man like suits. While it can be safely assumed that these suits would have made life a bit difficult, you had to factor in that the lower gravity of the Moon would set this off, at least this was how the guys from the think tank figured it. This explains why, when asked by the Army to come up with some new weapons, you might need to defend the base from those Soviets or some unfriendly aliens, they came up with “Davy Crockett Nuclear Gun”, basically a bazooka for the atomic age, and why there was a budget set aside for a big ray cannon to be installed on the base, one that would have made Emperor Ming lose all the hair in his pencil mustache with envy. While all of that sounded cool, it felt a bit like somebody was taking a science fiction pulp story by Leigh Brackett or Otto Binder a bit too literally, that was till the project was shut down because of ballooning cost, with many of the science fiction turned reality gadgets still stuck in the development pipeline. But if that sounded crazy, there was this. Between 1953 and 1973 the government spent four million dollars to fund one hundred programs and studies that looked into the beneficial effects of LSD and Psilocybin mushrooms, all perfectly legal during those years, with the CIA examining the use of psychedelics during interrogations. Of course, you had Price and Murphy’s idol Huxley who wrote “The Doors of Perception” (1954) under the influence of mescaline. However, many studies didn’t exactly go according to plan. It turned out that it was really tricky to conduct scientific research on subjects that were tripping out of their minds.  Still, if you did want to give those idiot college jocks an answer when they asked you if you really believed in aliens, spaceships and folks who could cause terrible things to happen with but a mere thought, simply for the fact that you happened to like a fictional TV show that was about some such, it would have been the smart play to mention the “Stargate Project”, that was if you had the inside scoop on this top secret U.S. Army research unit, yet with some hindsight we know exactly what was going on at a military installation at Fort Meade, Maryland. From 1991, when the code name “Stargate Project” was chosen, the unit’s primary task was to conduct scientific studies of parapsychological phenomena, like a test subject’s alleged psychic capability for remote viewing, which if real, would prove invaluable for many militaristic purposes. Remote viewing meant that an individual had the ability to observe what was happening in faraway locations without the aid of any device or the need to leave your room. That way, these men and woman could serve as the perfect spies. Clearly, you had to have the right experts to verify such bold claims. Luckily the U.S. military machine had a long-standing liaison with a contractor in the civilian sector who was located in California, of course. The Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, which was part of Price and Murphy’s alma mater, had a number of physicists and psychologist to support their government in their quest for people who could use their out-of-body experiences to look behind any curtain the U.S. Army told them to look behind. But there was more. Some of these subjects claimed that on some occasions, they’d even experienced precognition, meaning that they knew what was about to happen. However, strangely, they were unable to see that “Stargate Project” would soon be shut down, nor were they aware of the irony that came with it. Once a CIA report concluded that at no times the findings of the project had been helpful to their cause, not only was the project terminated but the government declassified all results in 1995 to stop any rumors of a cover-up from spreading any further. According to this data, there was no proof to support the claim that there were any such gifted individuals in the U.S. or on this planet. The ironic point entered into the equation when you considered that it was none other than the CIA who’d started the whole thing. You see, “Stargate Project” was just a new name and a fresh coat of paint that was slapped onto a number of similar projects that had begun as early as 1972. In fact, “Stargate Project” was a last-ditch effort to consolidate these various research efforts and the questionable results they had yielded at one point or another over a span of two decades under one roof that came with a scifi sounding moniker. In a way, this attempt mirrored what DC Comics had tried in the mid-1980s when they asked writer-artist John Byrne to re-brand Superman, their most popular character who’d long since fallen out of favor. In 1972, the CIA and a contractor from the private sector, the Stanford Research Institute, kicked off the first of many such projects that were code-named with cryptic sounding acronyms respectively. Obviously, the Stanford guys wanted in on this, especially after the Central Intelligence Agency had approved the funding. Even though the idea hadn’t originated with them, some SRI’s scientist viewed this project and this study as an off-shoot of what Dick Price and Michael Murphy had been able to achieve when they’d established Esalen ten years earlier. If not their kind of moolah was to be made, the CIA wasn’t known for printing money like a vice-president of Sears and his ilk, at least here was the opportunity to steal some of the duo’s thunder. Apparently, these men weren’t clairvoyant themselves, or they could have foreseen that more money was on the horizon very quickly. Once the Department of Defense got word of the first, rather promising results from the earliest test groups, they wanted to join the party, and with the funds they petitioned the Nixon Administration and Congress for, they were able to buy their way in, because of course they were. All of this had started two years earlier in 1970 when the American intelligence community was alarmed by reports that came from their paid informants who operated deep in the heart of Moscow and who had ties to the Kremlin. According to these sources, the Soviet Union was spending 60 million rubles on psychotronic research per year, which wasn’t only an absurd amount of money, but in consequence, this left the United States defenseless in the mind wars that were sure to come. The CIA knew the USA needed their own army of psychic warriors since there were whispered rumors that scientists in the U.S.S.R. had been successful in identifying test subjects who were able to display mind powers such as telepathy and psychokinesis. If this seems implausible and rather out there, you want to remember that this was the time of the cold war. Even if the Central Intelligence Agency considered the reports they received as part of an elaborate hoax, or worse, a targeted campaign of disinformation orchestrated by the Russians, could they ignore them just off-hand? What if the outlandish claims were true and the Soviets had men and women who were able to read your mind or to move or destroy objects at will with their thoughts? Could you really risk that? After the surprise and shock that was Sputnik, surely you couldn’t. What’s more, any reporting they got from behind the Iron Curtain, even if only based on secondary or tertiary sources who weren’t always reliable, gave them reasons enough to justify the spending of government funds on the research of parapsychological abilities and similar phenomena. Clearly, this put a lot of pressure on the scientists at the SRI to deliver results and to find their first paranormal superman. In 1973, chief researches Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, who were physicists and parapsychologists at Stanford, got their man, and this young Israeli, he was the complete package. He was charismatic and handsome, and he had the power.

Though Uri Geller was born in Tel Aviv in 1946, he was the man who fell to Earth or at the very least, he was one of the fabled Asscended Masters who Mr. and Mrs. Ballard made their followers believe in. A veteran of the 1967 Six-Day War, he began to perform what he claimed were paranormal feats in front of crowds at military bases, theaters and nightclubs. To the astonishment of everybody, he displayed a wide array of psychic abilities, such as psychokinesis and telepathy. During his performances, he’d ask a seemingly random member of the audience to draw a picture without revealing it to him. After some dramatic hemming and hawing, Geller told everybody in attendance what could be seen in the image. As if this wasn’t enough to enlist gasps from the men and women who had just witnessed this obvious act of mental power, Uri was also adept at dowsing, meaning when presented with several tiny closed canisters, without fail he’d find the one that contained water, a talent that might become handy when you live in a country that is surrounded by a desert. But his most famous trick was that he could pick up an ordinary spoon and just by touching it ever so gently, it would bend under the psychic energy Geller focused on this particular spot. As for his secret origin, every child knows that a superhero needs such a thing, in 1971, Geller revealed under hypnosis that he was sent to Earth by extraterrestrials from their spaceship which was conveniently located 53,000 light years from our planet. Parapsychologist Andrija Puharich became aware of Geller and he figured that his powers shouldn’t remain exclusive to the State of Israel, not if the world offered a bigger stage. After claiming to have witnessed how the man, who at one time had worked as a male model, teleported his dog through the walls of his house (with no harm coming to the beloved canine), Puharich was instrumental in bringing Geller to the United States. If he really was sent here by aliens, a claim Geller later recanted, saying that his powers were cause by beings that weren’t of this Earth, for the guys at Stanford he was heaven sent in any case. Geller soon received an invitation from Targ and Puthoff. And lo, even in a cold, unappealing lab at SRI, the man from Israel knew how to woo his audience, and the Department of Defense, they swallowed their report on Geller and his fantastic abilities hook, line and sinker. However, much to the dismay of the two scientists and Uri Geller, Air Force psychologist Lt. Col. Austin W. Kibler wasn’t that impressed when he got his hands on the Geller X-File. The lieutenant colonel held considerable sway in the DOD since he was the Director of Behavioral Research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which had been set up by none other than President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to Sputnik making it into orbit. Kibler was keenly aware that Targ and Puthoff had a certain reputation. Like poor old Frank Scully back in the day, they wanted to believe. Knowing he could trust no one at Stanford, who could really say what the guys in California might be smoking, psychologist Kibler asked a colleague named Ray Hyman to take a closer look. Hyman, a respected professor at the University of Oregon, blew right past Geller’s well-practiced stage magic and misdirections, and his report, which Kibler happily forwarded to his bosses in the DOD, caused an immediate shut-down of any further studies on Geller. Suddenly out of a contract and money where their work for the government was concerned, the duo quickly hit on an ingenious plan on how to raise the funds they needed to continue their research. While other members of the SRI were allowed to carry on with their testing of other subjects, the two physicists de facto became Uri’s stage managers by organizing a massive publicity tour in America to promote the psychic wunderkind Geller. Doing this, the two men were fully aware that Kibler and Hyman wouldn’t be able to clue the public in on the fact that Geller had been exposed as a total fraud. Any research by the U.S. government into the paranormal was top secret. Even Hyman was barred from divulging a single word about what he’d learned in regard to these clandestine goings-on that were financed by the American taxpayers. Considering that neither Targ nor Puthoff had any prior experiences with managing a stage performer who was a glorified master of the paranormal arts, they did a fantastic job. However, like with many things, timing was everything. Like Pentecostal preachers, rainmakers and other miracle worker know that the time to pitch your tent was during a draught, Geller’s two handlers unleashed their man to the Californian tonight show circuit right in a cultural sweet spot when the teachings of self-discovery and spiritual growth that were floated at Esalen had hit the mainstream, and Erich von Däniken’s pseudo-scientific theories were at the height of their popularity. What helped their cause was the fact that Geller didn’t look like any dodgy sideshow performer, but that instead he had the looks of a slightly older David Cassidy which made the man from Israel perfect for an audience of wine moms and dads whose thoughts were preoccupied with figuring out a good strategy how to get into the panties of that new, mini-skirted co-worker at their workplace. Only to the kids who were into science fiction and horror stories and who read comic books, Geller was nothing special. These kids, they knew that Superman wasn’t real. Even if you were a teenager like Chris Carter was at that time, especially if you were a rebellious teen and surfing was still the only thing that mattered to you, you were a bit blasé about this dog and pony show that was Uri Geller. There is some irony to be found in this chasm between most adults and other wholly unimaginative people who take everything they see or read about very literally, and the nerds who know that these were just well-told stories intended to entertain you. One only needed to be aware of Fritz Leiber’s seminal novel “Conjure Wife” (1943). In this supernatural horror story, Leiber’s first published book, readers were introduced to Norman Saylor, a young sociology professor, and his wife Tansy. When Norman does a bit of snooping among his wife’s private items to learn more about the person he’s married to (always a bad idea), he discovers that not only is she heavily involved in witchcraft, but that Tansy believes herself to be a witch. Confronted by her husband, his breach of trust is never even mentioned, this being the 1940s, she tells him that he needn’t worry. She’s one of the good gals, and all of her trinkets, charms and potions have a singular goal, namely, to protect him from the spells of the other witches. You see, in this world, most women practiced magic, it was even an open secret among those with the power. Saylor, a man who’d studied folklore, myths and superstitions during his academic training, he isn’t buying what she’s selling. His stance vis-à-vis the occult is best summed up by what occurs in the opening scene and the climactic final scene in “Burn, Witch, Burn” (1962), the second adaptation of the novel. Confidently, Saylor starts us off with the words: “I do not believe.” He even goes a step further when he proudly proclaims, “four words necessary to destroy the power of the supernatural.” This parallels the book where Norman has a similar reaction when he discovers his wife’s weird little hobby (to him, this is what it is). He demands that Tansy must destroy all her supposedly supernatural paraphernalia. She does so very reluctantly, sensing that he’ll be in trouble. Alas, so it comes to pass. Without her spells protecting him, Saylor’s life, his very existence, is turned upside down. The climax of the film, which was written by two masters of the horror genre, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, finds Norman literally backed into a corner. In utter terror and desperate to escape the stone eagle that has been brought to life by evil witchcraft, he makes it into his classroom, which is a feat in and of itself, considering how impossibly tight the pants of actor Peter Wyngarde were. His words, “I do not believe”, which had started these events, were still visible on the chalkboard, only now, as he presses against a wall, he inadvertently erases the word “not” from the sentence. Saylor, named Taylor for the adaptation, had become a believer in the end. Leiber’s book did go a different route, granted, his climax might have turned out a bit underwhelming in a movie, but it works great in prose and strangely, it would be very effective in in a comic book. Interestingly, his climax doesn’t close the book, but it sets the stage for the third act by turning the dial to eleven. Not to spoil one of the best twists in horror fiction, suffice to say what Fritz Leiber did, what he really achieved, was to genuinely scare the readers, that is if you were one of those readers who were able to appreciate what this was, a well-crafted horror tale with an unexpected, thought-provoking reveal that was like a well-concealed trap. Without you noticing, you had walked into a new, entirely unexpected province of terror. Or you could take things a bit literally and accuse the writer of sexism and misogyny like modern reviewers tend to do who object to the idea of women being portrayed as witches, thereby missing the point of the book completely. The witches, they weren’t real. However, if there was a reader who took the narrative as what it was intended to be, a piece of fiction which was created by a novice author who made use of some clever allegories, albeit at times a bit heavy-handed, this reader’s name had to be Al Feldstein, or if Feldstein had never read the novel, reportedly he wasn’t much of a reader, still the spirit of the book, especially the nature of its twist, it percolated enough into the zeitgeist for the artist turned writer-editor of a line of failed comic titles to come up with a new genre in 1949. Horror comics became all the rage during the next years with kids. EC Comics and its main writer Feldstein, they led the charge, only that their titles worked a lot like “Conjure Wife”. Sure, there were the horror aspects, but Feldstein and his highly skilled artists asked the kids who read these four-colored, cheaply produced manifestos, to look deeper. In essence, these were morality tales that told you some brutal truths about the world, that was if you could see beyond the ghouls and zombies and scheming men and women who wanted to murder each other. Whereas adults may have helpfully pointed out that the ghouls, the zombies and the other monsters, they weren’t real, kids knew all that. With these children, one glance at the horror hostess who appeared on the tiny, globe-shaped screens of the television sets in the living rooms of the new model suburban homes they lived in, already told them that this black-clad, pale woman wasn’t a real vampire, that not even her hair was real, or years later, that this guy, Uri Geller, was no superman.

Because many adults believed that children were destined to become axe murderers if they read comics which depicted heinous criminal acts, they aimed to end such publications in 1954. But the kids, they’d already begun to switch their attention to a different medium that offered movies in a similar vein, thus attracting many young eyeballs. However, what if you didn’t just broadcast any old horror film that had made its way to the local stations that were hungry for content, but instead you had a clever marketer? A charismatic individual who, with a wink to the audience and clever fourth wall breaking, told viewers a bit about this crummy picture that would follow this announcement. Such a guy might even make fun of the film as he let you in on a secret, that this was a stinker, but since the viewers were in on the joke, they could laugh with the host about this featured presentation. One of the most ingenious ideas writer Feldstein had back in the days when he turned boys and girls on to reading horror comics, making some baby boomers life-long horror fans, was the inclusion of three hosts who would henceforth narrate all the horror yarns in any EC horror title. Even before there was a single comic solely dedicated to horror, Feldstein introduced the first of these three hosts in a crime title that would soon be converted into the book EC would remain famous for, even after this new horror trend came to an abrupt end in 1954. But during the four years prior, Tales from the Crypt, their flagship series, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror would become synonymous with the finest horror stories being told in comics. And Feldstein and his colleague Johnny Craig unleashed the hosts. Freakish in appearance, the so-called Ghoulunatics offered their own insights as they made bad puns that either made up the story title or offered an ironic comment on how the respective story had concluded. While the subject matters and the images of the stories were gruesome, these horrific-looking, somewhat deranged-sounding presenters gave Feldstein and Craig ample opportunities to introduce some much-needed levity into the proceedings. As it turned out, it was the right ingredient. Horror and humor created a potent mix which many kids simply couldn’t resist. Soon, other publishers imitated the EC formula, and having a host as a narrator for a horror story pretty much became a staple, and then a cliché. Only on television this was a new thing. When producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr. saw model and bit-part actress Maila Nurmi during a masquerade ball, he realized that the statuesque woman might be perfect for the role of hostess for a bunch of D-grade horror flicks the local Los Angeles station KABC-TV had just acquired the broadcast rights for. How else to sell these clunkers if not with a healthy dose of sex appeal? When TV producer Stromberg met Maila Nurmi, she was made up as Morticia Addams, with her skin painted white and her body sheathed into a dress like it was a dagger, while her blonde hair was covered by wig of black hair. Since Nurmi hailed from Finland, or at least her parents did, she had very high cheekbones which gave her pretty, chalk-white features a look that you might see on a deceased person, or an undead one if you believed in some such. This was a bit ironic of course, since at twenty-five, Nurmi bore a striking resemblance to actress and goddess of the silent era Greta Garbo. However, the years in Hollywood hadn’t been kind to her, and her face was not what interested the type of model photographers and casting directors that invited her. Nurmi was aware of this, and she knew how to make the most of her extremely small waist and her ample bust. In other words, she’d be a knockout with boys that were about to hit puberty. Now past thirty, the actress knew that her chances for a big Hollywood career had vanished with the first rays of sunshine after one more night of hard drinking, and she quickly warmed up to the idea of parading, or rather gliding, down a dimly-lit, fog shrouded corridor towards the camera or respectively, lounging on a sofa next to a huge, fake spider and a skull in a dress that was a bit too tight and too low-cut, but if her cleavage kept her in steady work, she had her Scandinavian heritage to thank for that. That is not to say that Nurmi wasn’t ready to make the most of her close-up. The actress vastly improved her cosplay with the help of some inspiration she drew from the evil queen in Disney’s “Snow White”, and her performance was informed by the character Dragon Lady from the newspaper strip “Terry and the Pirates”, who artist-writer Milton Caniff drew a lot like Nurmi looked, only ten years earlier and of Asian descent. Still with the way Nurmi modeled herself and with the toneless, slightly raspy voice she employed, even Disney’s Nine Old Men, who weren’t that old back then, took an upright position in front of their television screens. They made Nurmi’s character Vampira the model for the evil witch Maleficent. Vampira first appeared in a preview called “Dig Me Later, Vampira”, a proof of concept which aired on April 30, 1954. “The Vampira Show” began to air the following night at 11:00 p.m. With a timeslot like that, it was eventually moved up by half an hour, Stromberg and the powers that be at the ABC affiliate in LA obviously had some older kids in mind, their teenage brothers, and especially their dads, since Vampire soon donned black fishnets, a pair of high heeled shoes and she started to smoke, rather seductively one might add. Nurmi explained later that by making the character “campier and sexier” they were able to differentiate her from Charles Addams’ creation, hence avoiding any possible lawsuits for plagiarism. Still, when compared to the flat-chested Morticia Addams from the popular newspaper strips, there was no mistaking Vampira for her. However, right around the same time Nurmi made herself known to television audiences, albeit just in one market, Johnny Craig, who was now the editor of The Vault of Horror at EC Comics, on top of being a writer-artist, decided to add another horror host to the mix, a female like the Old Witch who hosted The Haunt of Fear, only that she wouldn’t look anything like her, not with the way the artist knew how to draw alluring women, something he’d definitely picked up from his role model, legendary cartoonist Will Eisner. Drusilla made her debut in Vault of Horror No. 37, which was cover-dated June-July 1954, a date that suggests that the artist-editor was putting the issue together right around the time if not even a bit earlier than late April. Comics are usually dated ahead in a ploy to keep them longer on the shelves. If Craig wasn’t aware of Vampira, there were some striking similarities. The beautiful, raven-haired host appeared to be mute like Morticia Addams in the newspaper strips, and like Vampira, she wore a clingy, black dress. With the latter she also shared the same body type in that she was statuesque, with a tiny waist and a voluptuous chest. However, with her third cameo (of which there were four with The Vault of Horror and EC’s other horror titles getting cancelled in the wake of the just established Comics Code that put a stop to any material that was deemed too outrageous), the influence of Nurmi’s Vampira on Johnny’s two-dimensional character was impossible to ignore. In what’s arguable the most iconic shot he drew of Drusilla, for the splash page that introduced the tale “Deadly Beloved” (a masterful Southern Gothic horror story by Craig and new writer Carl Wessler), the gorgeous, very goth-looking host can be seen as she’s standing upright and very straight against the wall of some dungeon-like structure. With her ample chest, accentuated by the plunging neckline of her black dress and the locket of her necklace, shoved forward, and her eyes looking directly at the readers, not only did she command your attention, making you forget that the Vault-Keeper, the book’s main host, was also in the image, but she’d become a sister to Vampira with the way she and Nurmi’s character dominated whatever else was in the frame. Craig’s Drusilla had the misfortune that comic books, at least this type of books, were going away. Once you removed the element that had made them interesting for the baby boomers in the first place, their eyeballs were fixed towards the new medium of television. Comics would never see the sales numbers they’d achieved in 1952, but for Nurmi this represented the time in the spotlight she’d been waiting for so long, and she was ready to suck every single drop of blood out of her fame. She ran for Night Mayor of Los Angeles and KABC-TV had her drive around in a 1932 Packard with the top lowered and Nurmi in full costume holding a black parasol. When her show got cancelled in 1955, she was allowed to take the character to rival KHJ-TV which broadcast CBS in the area. In 1954, Vampira had been all the rage, with Nurmi signing a huge number of autographs while she talked to her (fake) pet spider Rollo, but her fame soon receded once the novelty factor wore off, which explains why her original show got axed so quickly and why there weren’t any issues with her pitching her tent elsewhere. Nurmi had started a trend that, in a cruel twist of fate, only became one after other local stations caught on, only that by then Vampira was already half forgotten. As of 1957, a parade of bit-part actors appeared on the television screens in similar makeup, like Zacherly and Tarantula Ghoul, and the idea to have a local host present whatever horror stinker a station wanted to peddle to fill the airtime lasted well into the 1980s. Still, Manila Nurmi had a bit of a career in B-movies, and in 1959 she brought Vampira and her impressive cleavage to what is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made, Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space”. Albeit there was something else. In the days of scrounging for walk-ons in better films, Nurmi had befriended fellow actor James Dean. After Dean’s shocking death in a car accident in 1955, Nurmi ensured that she would be invited to radio programs to discuss her threadbare connection to the late movie star at great length. However, in a book published in 1962, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper claimed to have spoken with Dean about Nurmi and her sudden fame, noting that Dean was interested in the supernatural. She wrote that the actor was curious to find out if his friend believed she was in league “with satanic forces”, if perhaps witchcraft had played a part in her rise to cult stardom, an idea writer Ira Levin would put to great use in his potboiler “Rosemary’s Baby” (1967) some thirteen years later. According to Hopper, a deeply disappointed Dean had confided in her that there were many graves that were less shallow than the Scandinavian actress. By the time Hopper’s memoir saw print, Nurmi had long since left a city that’d taken all her dreams, her youth and her beauty prematurely. She was selling linoleum flooring by now.

However, the ghouls, the zombies and the monsters, they wouldn’t be kept down this easily or for long. In 1964, a small publisher of mainly horror-fantasy and science fiction film magazines had an inspiration. If he packaged horror comics in the same manner, as magazines, he’d be able to get away with content which was far more lurid and suggestive than anything you could possibly put into a regular comic book due to the heavy restrictions the Comics Code placed on these four-colored pamphlets. Contrary to the widely available comic books, he planned on offering cheaper black and white interior pages. But if his publications came with attractive, hand-painted covers, especially if such covers were made to look like movie posters and harkened back to the covers of the old pulp magazines which expressed a proclivity for misogyny and in-your-face violence, even brutality, he’d still be able to up-marketed his periodicals. The thing was this wasn’t a new idea. Carl Wessler, a late arrival at EC back in the day, had tried to get an EC revival in a similar vein off the ground, but his target audience of young kids was glued to the TV sets and his efforts yielded only one issue. In essence, this was also what had kept MAD afloat, the last publication that had remained at EC Comics, but the satire magazine attracted a slightly older audience. Still, when Jim Warren of Warren Publishing began to put out Creepy in the same year, and a year later its sister periodical Eerie, timing was on his side. After 1954 many comic publishers were either defunct or had to switch to blander product, moves that had left most comic book creatives stranded. To make ends meet, some went into other industries, like advertising, or they resigned to providing dull work to even duller publications. Some even tried their hands at doing superhero titles which had made a stellar comeback thanks to DC Comics. But many creators from the heydays of EC Comics’ were ready to jump back into horror when provided with a platform that gave them creative freedoms beyond what comics were able to offer. This afforded Warren the opportunity to assemble a rogue’s gallery of top artists for the first couple of issues of his new magazines. For Joe Orlando, arguably one of the best illustrators for this type of content, this horror renaissance which James Warren and his editors Russ Jones and Archie Goodwin orchestrated, opened many doors. As of the first issue of Creepy, Joe provided story ideas and served as a story editor, on top of working as a penciler and inker. Two years later, Joe started to work as a freelancer for DC Comics, then the uncontested market leader in the comic book industry. Another two years later, DC was suddenly feeling the pinch from its upstart rival Marvel Comics. With just eleven monthly books, Marvel was steadily creeping towards the top ten of the sales charts, only that in 1968 there wouldn’t be just these eleven books. It was the year the embargo fell that held Marvel to an older distribution agreement with DC’s sister company Independent News. Even worse, this was also the year when Martin Goodman sold Marvel Comics’ parent Magazine Management to Perfect Film, a company that was also in the midst of acquiring a distribution outfit of their own, Curtis Circulation. Independent News’ contract would come to an end pretty soon. This was when panic set in at DC. Irwin Donenfeld, DC’s Executive Director and son of founder Harry Donenfeld, who’d died three years earlier, and his art director Carmine Infantino knew they needed to beef-up their overall output and their creative staff. It was a time for fresh blood, especially with a lot of young writers and artists ready to break into comics. These were the baby boomers, a motley crew of long-time comic book readers, comic fans and hippies, who were chomping at the bit to shake things up, in other words, creatives who might bring some of that more contemporary Marvel magic to DC to counteract the insurance business vibe that seemed so outdated all of a sudden. But who to lead them? This was when Donenfeld and Infantino hired Orlando and Dick Giordano as editors. The latter was a well-connected editor at rival Charlton Comics, and when he was made the offer, it came with the understanding that many of the young creatives he’d mentored at the smaller publisher would jump ship to DC as well. This gave Giordano considerable cachet. As for Orlando who was five years older than his new colleague, his tenure at EC made him an ideal candidate to revive DC’s moribund horror comics that had survived the culling of the Code but had become terribly bland in the process. Albeit, their flagship House of Mystery, which had started in 1951, had never been anything but. The thing was, that by now, the series was a lackluster superhero title for second stringers who couldn’t hold down enough fans to warrant a book of their own. When Orlando took over editorial with issue No. 174 (cover-dated May-June 1968), not only did he return the series to its roots, but with the creepy cover, which was by Joe and Infantino, readers were put on notice that this old daddy had a brand-new bag. Given the short lead time the editor had to work with, the issue was a disappointment. Besides the cool cover, there were only reprints of old yarns. But Orlando was just getting started. Once the next issue hit the spinner racks, readers knew for certain that the title was under new management. This time, there was new material with Orlando pulling the trick he’d learned from Al Feldstein. He gave the series a host who’d narrate every story like the Ghoulunatics used to do in the EC books he’d been an integral a part of. Cain the Caretaker had the same dry, ironic wit that had made EC’s hosts such fan-favorite characters in their own right. Impressed by his approach, DC asked Joe Orlando to bring another horror series back from the dead, House of Secrets, which got the same treatment with issue No. 81 in 1969, with the title getting its own horror host, who of course was consequently named Abel. Orlando, who would become instrumental in the recruitment of exciting new artists from the Philippines, made it all the way to the top of the food chain when he was named DC’s Vice President in 1985. In 1992, Joe was appointed Associate Publisher of MAD. DC’s parent company Warner Communications had bought the hugely successful magazine in the 60s. Back then, his career was ways into the future, but if there’s a single tenet about the organizational structure of corporations that’ll always hold true, it surely must be that if an individual or a department finds success, this will invariably lead to envy and awake desires. No sooner had Irwin Donenfeld learned about the vastly improved sales numbers on House of Mystery, and the intel began to trickle down to the editors who worked under him, that he and Carmine Infantino had found their wunderkind, Giordano was immediately jockeying for the same position. If revamping an ol’ horror title by adding a blabbering host to it, did the trick, he’d do Joe one better: twice better in fact. With Irwin pushed out of the door by Warner, and Infantino made Editorial Director, he petitioned the latter with his pitch for a brand-new horror book. There was a hook to it. Infantino liked the sound of that. This is how it is with success. It breeds competition. Giordano’s idea, it was indeed pretty genius. The Witching Hour, which saw its debut early in 1969, resolved around an interesting conceit which, at least at first glance, was even more in line with what Feldstein and Craig had done in the old EC Comics days. Each story in any given issue was narrated by a different host of which there were three. The hosts were witches of course, with two of them looking like a considerably watered-down version of EC’s Old Witch, the erstwhile hostess of The Haunt of Fear who also frequently showed up in other horror comics of the long since defunct publisher and former trailblazer of the horror trend in the comic book industry. The third witch, who was reviled by the other two, she was very unique. Not only was stepsister Cynthia a beautiful young blonde, which meant that in the minds of Mordred and Mildred she was hideous, she was also finely attuned to the times that were changin’, or at least as finely attuned as writer-artist Alex Toth managed to make her out to be, with Toth not being a spring chicken exactly. Still, at forty, he had a good ear for a lingo that sounded more like how young people actually talked than anything Stan Lee ever wrote when he took Spider-Man’s alter-ego Peter Parker to college in the 1960s. There was even some more meat to it. The witches wouldn’t just appear on the splash page or in little panels throughout each story one of them narrated, but there’d be a whole framing device which ran for several pages to hook readers in. These sequences that bookended each issue were written and drawn by Toth, who’d been tapped by Giordano exclusively for this purpose, though the veteran artist would provide some of the stories as well. For one, there was an ongoing gag. Cousin Egor had been turned into a monster by Mordred and Mildred, and he’d made off into the swamp that surrounded their castle. Still, he needed to be included in a new family portrait which meant that readers would learn what he looked like, only that Toth held off on the reveal while he added new twists along the way. Then you had the three ladies themselves. The idea of two witches who looked like your stereotypical crone and the third one drawn to look like the most gorgeous woman who’d ever walked the Earth was indeed not a new one. In No. 15 of Military Comics (cover-dated January 1943), a book that featured aviator war hero Blackhawk and his crew, characters that years later would be purchased by DC Comics, Otto Binder and Reed Crandell told their groundbreaking story “Men Who Never Came Back” which also featured three witches. Binder and Crandell were clearly riffing on Shakespeare’s drama “Macbeth”, but unlike in the play, the witches got involved in the atrocities of the war, though they remained in the background and very only shown to the readers. While the sisters Trouble and Terror, who Crandell depicted as fierce-looking hags, used their magic powers for ill, thereby testing the mettle of the unsuspecting heroes, the third witch aided Blackhawk and his men in secret, with her face concealed by the low brim of her witch hat and her scarf until the last two panels. With her hat and her scarf removed, her now naked face surely made readers jump out of their seats and do a double take. This witch, Mystery, she was the most beautiful Asian girl you’d ever seen, and most obviously, she had a crush on Blackhawk who looked like a matinee idol. But the story ended there, the two of them separated by geo-political interests and the war. Like Mystery, Toth’s Cynthia showed a lot of compassion, especially towards the unfortunate, cursed and most likely misshapen Egor, the target of some of that biting verbal poison that her two stepsisters constantly and rather viciously were wont to spew, but still, a lot of their bile and their utmost contempt was reserved for the beautiful blonde. Even though she was the freak in this family, and she was continuously berated by her siblings by law, she was an independent young woman who was aware that she was the butterfly among caterpillars, only that for Mordred and Mildred there wouldn’t be a transformation. They were stuck in the old days of, and this was how they lived and how they practiced their magic, ancient, gothic rituals, and that was why the stories they told totally sucked. To have the hosts comment on the stories was nothing new, and neither was this trio of witches, but Giordano and Toth took it a step further. Not only was there some fourth wall breaking, but the witches bickered with each other about whose tales were better, with Mordred and Mildred openly showing their disdain for Cynthia’s modern stories that often came with contemporary settings and science fiction tropes, while she offered a few choice words for their tales of which she concluded that they had a “predictable style”, as she mocked her stepsisters’ inability to tell stories that were fresh and interesting: “Time for you two to break with the past? Hah!! You’ll dredge up more of those mouldy old tales you’ve told for centuries… ol’ dear, you’re out of date!”

In a way, this was a miniature revolution. There was some one-upmanship going on between the ghouls of EC back in the 1950s, but when the Crypt Keeper, the Old Witch and the Vault Keeper mocked a tale that had just been narrated by one of their fellow hosts, this was presented with witty humor as a rivalry between these slightly over-motivated fiends. On the other hand, what readers got with the very first issue of The Witching Hour (cover-dated February-March 1969) and in issues that followed, was unique, though not every kid who read these stories including the clever bookends might have gotten the joke. Toth’s writing and art style felt very modern, and his layouts were as innovative as anything a younger artist might produce if not far better, and Dick Giordano, for his part, had led an exodus of young guns right to DC’s doorstep. What the duo had Cynthia do, was to pit the new style of the baby boomers and the old way of telling stories, written by veterans of the comic industry who had worked as pulp writers once, squarely against one another, but without making it a secret where their sympathies lay. Surely, they had their witches tell the readers that they would have to decide whose stories they liked best in the context of the book, but really this was Giordano and Toth letting you know that you could still read stories by Gardner Fox or John Broome or instead you might want to check out what this new kid Steve Skeates was cooking in his cauldron. In some respect, The Witching Hour No. 1 was the first Marvel title ever to be published by DC Comics. This approach would bear out in intriguing ways they couldn’t have predicted. Though there were no vampires in Mario Bava’s seminal film “Planet of the Vampires” (1965) and hence no blood sucking, still the movie inspired writer-editor Forrest J. Ackerman to come up with the idea for a bewitching girl who was a vampire from another planet and who looked a lot like Vampira, only that she was more sensual, considerably less well-endowed in the chest area, younger and clearly not the sharpest knife. Ackerman, a bespectacled guy who was well over fifty in 1969, was even too old some fifteen years earlier to have paid any attention at all to the “The Vampira Show” while it still was on the air. But he did like attractive woman, young women especially, so there was that. If these women donned some horror cosplay, this made it even better. But Ackerman had actually worked as Ed Wood’s agent once, and thus, his exposure to Vampira hadn’t been limited to watching Manila Nurmi perform in her somewhat iconic role on a small, eye-shaped television screen. Wood had introduced him to the actress who looked far less interesting sans her chalk-white makeup, her black wig and a low-cut dress, still the encounter had imprinted itself on his brain, and with the way she’d looked in “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, his memory of Vampira definitely informed his idea for a vampire girl as well. There was more. As a nerdy guy, he read comics. He was aware of Giordano’s The Witching Hour and the platinum blonde witch who was one of the hosts. This gave him the inspiration of how to make good use of his character. Soon, he began to pester James Warren about a new horror comic magazine that could star his beautiful vampire girl from outer space in some weird adventures, and like Cynthia, she could be the host of this new horror comic magazine as well. As luck would have it, Ackerman worked as editor for Jim Warren’s film magazines. Since Jim considered him a guru where the tastes of teenage boys were concerned, he listened to the man. Warren agreed to put yet another horror mag on the schedule. Thus, in September 1969, Vampirella No. 1 began to haunt the magazines shelves with an eerily beautiful cover by arguably the best cover illustrator willing to work for the notoriously stingy Warren. Frank Frazetta’s cover lured readers in, and while the art by Tom Sutton for the first Vampirella yarn ever to see print wasn’t bad, it was the writing that almost staked the alluring, severely apparel-challenged vampire through her black heart as she had hardly climbed out of her coffin, which seemed nearly impossible since Vampi was one of Frank Scully’s aliens and she didn’t need a casket. It’s equally hard to fathom that Ackerman’s drivel only got worse with the consecutive issue, but that was what happened. Vampirella had vanished from her own magazine with the third installment, other than still being a hostess. Luckily, she was too good a character to give up on. When Jim’s horror magazine editor Archie Goodwin took on the writing duties as of issue No. 8 (November 1970), he quickly managed to imbue Vampi with something that resembled a personality. Unfortunately, Goodwin had a propensity for gothic horror tales, exactly the kind of tales that Cynthia accused her stepsisters of peddling: “… skies filled with thunder and lightning and strange twisting shapes and creatures…! Stories of ghosts that walk!!!” Though Goodwin managed to create an interesting mythology around Ackerman’s raven-haired vampire girl, courtesy of H.P. Lovecraft’s pulp stories about ancient gods, and he was massively aided by an incredibly talented artist from Spain, José “Pepe” González, who’d become the Vampirella artist, his Vampirella tales were woefully stuck in the past. The lowest point arrived with Vampirella No. 16 (April 1972), when he had the stunning girl meet none other than Dracula in a gothic castle, only that now Dracula was an alien, too. None of that worked really, especially not with González’ very contemporary art that made Vampirella look like a fashionable European jet-set glamour girl. Goodwin shortly thereafter quit his job at Warren Publishing because he knew that Jim was having money issues. Like Sutton, he left for Marvel, and ironically like with the artist, his departure made the series arguably better. Incoming writer Bill DuBay, a baby boomer and huge fan of comics since his childhood, and Goodwin’s junior by eleven years, he led Vampirella into the modern age, making her the character that is well known today. It’s easy to see why DuBay was Jim’s new golden boy and why he entrusted him with editing his entire line of horror magazines. DuBay, like Cynthia, was into stories that were the opposite of any ol’ gothic horror tale. As for The Witching Hour No. 1, when it was time for the pretty blonde witch to present her first horror yarn to her stepsisters and the readers, Cynthia narrated a tale about a surf maniac who was looking for the perfect wave. However, his name wasn’t Chris but Stanley, and with Cynthia’s tale, you needed to be on your toes, or you’d miss the twist that came at the end. As The Witching Hour continued, Toth slowly began to tip the scales of power in the relationship of the witches. Cynthia only grew more beautiful. On the splash page for the story she narrated in issue No. 8 (April-May 1970), a yarn about a couple that had found each other via computer dating that was scripted and penciled by Toth, Cynthia was clad in a black dress with a plunging neckline that was reminiscent of Vampira’s garb, only that the cut of her dress seemed even tighter around her waist, revealing that maybe witches had no need for inner organs, and the platinum blonde’s robe came with ridiculously high side slits which made the most of her long legs. As for the story, it didn’t end well. Still, Toth and Dick Giordano were careful not to let her devolve into a goth bunny. The duo was mindful that she’d always be portrayed as a confident young woman with her own head who didn’t allow others to tell her what to do. She needed to be sexy, though. While there were again a lot of girl readers in the market for comics, however, unlike back in the 1950s, they didn’t drift towards the horror or superhero books but the romance comics that saw a bit of a renaissance as well. Horror titles and horror magazines were clearly marketed to teen boys and their older brothers. Naturally, Giordano wanted to ensure that his book flew as quickly off the spinner racks as House of Mystery did. With Vampi’s growing popularity, they faced additional competition, especially since Warren’s vampire girl from the stars appeared in a more lurid comic magazine which enabled Sutton and González to put her into more cheesecake poses than you could shake a stick at. Nevertheless, independent of one another, the different creative teams depicted these female characters as intelligent, though the platinum blonde witch definitely had a leg up on the raven-haired vampire, two legs in fact, as became fairly obvious when The Witching Hour No. 10 (cover-dated August-September 1970) hit the spinner racks with a bitchin’ cover by Neal Adams. The issue started with Mildred and her sister Mordred storming into their stepsister’s room in the castle to complain bitterly about her ways, what else. They, and the readers, found the pretty witch in a chipper mood as she was studying a huge tome, her naked legs stretched out, with her feet in high heels placed on a low shelf that was also stuffed with old books. Cynthia was quick to remind her embittered siblings by law that the Witching Hour was nigh and that it was her time to spin a yarn, only this time they’d be watching these events unfold in person and in real time. With that Cynthia raised her hands up into the air and as if by magic, the three of them were teleported into the tale that unfolded over the course of the next nine pages. The artwork also switched from Toth and inker Bill Draut to the more than capable hands of artist Gray Morrow who also handled the inks on “A Warp in Time… Loses Everything!” While Mildred and Mordred dreary old garb hadn’t changed when the three of them were whisked away into a setting that was a contemporary, tastefully decorated office by Cynthia’s spell, readers were quick to spot that the pretty platinum girl had used her witchy and wicked powers for quick change of her attire.

As they entered the medical practice of psychiatrist Bernard Angst, though they were hidden from the eyes of ordinary men, as the colorist indicated by tinting the trio in a green hue, with aid from Morrow, Cynthia had donned a mod mini dress, fishnets and knee-high boots, garms that were about right for a hip and happening woman, and exactly the same ensemble that frontwoman Manson would know how to rock to perfection twenty-five years later, the Scottish singer indie producer/drummer Butch Vig and his two equally nerdy buddies would pick for their band Garbage. As a man who was clearly a nervous wreck was pulled into the office by two burly orderlies, and Cynthia’s latest tale began to unfurl before the eyes of the somewhat bewildered witches, their stepsister, who was accessorizing her trendy wear with an Alice band and a choker that came with a silver skull, offered some helpful commentary as this behooved her position of being the one who wielded the most power, the one who was in control. She explained that this was not a story about this unfortunate dork Stanley Owen, a psychiatrist, and a man quite evidently barking-mad, but this was Dr. Angst’s story, who knew Owen since they were colleagues. One of the orderlies was quick to offer a reason for Owen’s erratic behavior, and why they had brought him in front of Angst’s desk. He believed that he’d been caught in a time warp. Stroking his chin gently with his fingers, the slick psychiatrist, who resembled pretty boy Richard Price, the co-founder of Esalen, except for the pair of horn-rimmed of specs that Angst wore, he was swift to condescend: “Time Warp? That old science fiction bit? No such thing.” Though Stanley Owen pleaded with his smug acquaintance, the smarmy headshrinker, who clearly spend more time with selecting the right shirt to go with his suit than he did with patients, pink in this case, he simply refused to listen to any gobbledygook about time warps, though his doppelganger Price could have told him about LSD. Over Stanley’s protestations and his continued insistence that “It’s true… it’s true! I was in one… I saw it with my own eyes!”, he ordered the man to “a 30-day observation… strictly a formality… after that he’ll have to be committed.” Pleased with his day’s work, Angst left the office building that housed his practice, but no sooner had he made it onto the street, things were suddenly getting bizarre. Now it was Angst who was pulled into the same time warp that had messed up Stanley Owen. As panic gripped his mind that couldn’t comprehend what was happening, Cynthia gleefully offered an aside: “Ah, but the good doctor should know… don’t knock something if you haven’t tried it!” And what Angst involuntarily “tried”, it was the mother of a bad acid trip. He was thrown through time only to land in a surrealist page, masterfully crafted by Morrow, which featured a death-head spider sitting in the center of a rose, a hand with clutched fingers and an angrily staring red eye in its open palm, a clock face stabbed with a dagger, and a girl caught by tree branches. His noggin was about to burst open as a skull floated into his left eye. As the trip wore off, the confused headshrinker was back on the street he might have never left in the first place, only now the psychiatrist was being accosted by police officers and an orderly who were getting into his face. Obviously, the man had caused quite a commotion in public. With the orderly keeping one of his hairy arms intently on his shoulder, he was consequently interviewed by one of his colleagues, a portly, pipe-smoking fellow who listened for change and who told him that he believed every word he was saying. Then the orderly and the psychiatrist, who sported a Van Dyke beard to underline his respectability, led poor Dr. Angst along a hallway in the loony bin and to a nice, rubber-padded room of his own. Back in his office, the man put on his hat while he talked smack to the readers or no one in particular about his colleague Bernard who was clearly off his rocker, or so it would seem. As he opened the door that led to the corridor, a pattern began to form that was by now familiar. He was about to enter the time warp, and there was Cynthia, who of course looked smashing in green, and her somewhat shell-shocked sisters, who were as ugly as ever, the color green did absolutely nothing for them, and as was to be expected, the sexy witch capped off her tale in an epic way like a boss: “And now, dear sisters, would either of you care to challenge that story? Mildred? Mordred? Hee hee… just as I thought… speechless!” However, in the real world, that’s assuming our world is real, it was the editor who was at a loss for words. Early in ‘71, Carmine Infantino was named publisher of DC Comics, and no sooner had the ink on his contract dried, did he tap Orlando for a recruitment trip to the Philippines. This only added more fire to the fuel of jealousy and discontent that was raging in Giordano’s mind. He’d began to sour on DC when more interesting books were given to other editors while he was stuck with second stringers like Aquaman and Teen Titans. The Witching Hour was well received, and his pal Neal Adams had created some memorable covers and, when time allowed, some interior art as well, but it didn’t come close to the units Joe Orlando moved with his two titles House of Mystery and House of Secrets. As frustrated as he was, when Adams asked if he wanted to form a studio with him, Giordano had ample motivation to leave the security of the steady paycheck his employment as editor offered far behind. It was a smart move. DC wanted to be in the Neal Adams business and since Neal kept requesting Giordano as his inker, the two of them didn’t burn any bridges, quite the contrary. On top of working as freelancers for various comic companies, having a studio gave them the opportunity to land better paying art gigs in other industries. Giordano would eventually come back to DC in 1980 when DC’s new publisher Jenette Kahn phoned him up. With DC Comics under new management, he quickly rose through the ranks, and in 1984, Dick was named VP and Executive Editor, though in the meantime, his work on The Witching Hour ended with issue No. 14 (April-May 1971). The editorial reins for the series were handed to veteran Murray Boltinoff who did a serviceable job at best. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics, who loved to call themselves “The House of Ideas”, had become aware of the success DC was having with their mini horror revival of sorts. Naturally, editor Stan Lee did what he did best. He copied what others were doing as long as it didn’t involve any work for himself, as was the case with the first issue of Tower of Shadows that Marvel rushed to the newsstands in September 1969, the month that saw the premier issue of Vampirella’s book. Though Marvel, by then under the editorial stewardship of Roy Thomas, would eventually find tremendous success with their own line of black and white horror magazines once Martin Goodman had departed the company, horror comics weren’t their forte particularly. There’d be some exceptions, the excellent Tomb of Dracula comic for one, an expertly crafted title by baby boomer writer Marv Wolfman and veteran horror artist Gene Colan which ran for seven years and sometimes tied-in with Dracula Lives, one of Marvel’s new magazines, but overall, most of their horror comics were a wash even though some of the restrictions of The Comics Code were lifted in 1971. As for Tower of Shadows, the first issue was still interesting, but the quality of the book dropped off a cliff soon thereafter and the series was quickly re-vamped after two years and nine issues, whereas Orlando’s House of Mystery, which would eventually have its own bona fide vampire as a star, and even got a spin-off with a Vampira look-alike host, managed to stay alive until 1983. Albeit Tower of Shadows operated with the same conceit as all the other horror comics and magazines, a ghoulish character was to narrate every yarn in the same voice and mocking tone like any regular host except for Giordano and Toth’s trio of witches, though Marvel quickly decided to offer some meta commentary of their own. In issue No. 3, Tower’s host Digger, also known as Headstone P. Gravely, shared hosting duties with baby boomer Gary Friedrich who wrote that particular story. Once the fourth issue rolled around, Digger had to dig elsewhere since henceforth the pencilers for the respective yarns were filling his over-sized shoes. As was Marvel’s wont, the artists were given funky monikers. However, the series never recovered from the loss in quality it would experience after the first two stories in the first issue which were spectacular, though each of which for a unique set of reasons. The reason why “At the Stroke of Midnight”, the first story, was such a standout is best summed up in two words. Jim Steranko. Though Steranko was hardly a baby boomer, born in 1938 he missed that generation by about eight years, there was nothing about him one would consider old-timey or out of date by a long shot. Among many other activities, Steranko had performed as an escape artist, an illusionist, and a close-up magician in nightclubs across the States when he was in his twenties. During the same time, the strikingly handsome Steranko played in various bands and according to his own account, he was the first to put go-go-girls on stage during rock concerts (although not for one of his bands), girls who dressed like Cynthia in Morrow’s story or Ms. Manson. In 1966, he entered into a career of drawing and writing comic books. Though he’d already worked in the industry as early as 1957 when he inked the artwork of Vince Colletta and Matt Baker, he’d abandoned this line of work initially. However, 1966 proved an important year for his development as an artist. Joe Simon, Marvel’s first editor for their superhero line back in the 1940s, hired him do some work for his then-current employer Harvey Comics. Soon thereafter, Steranko darkened Marvel’s door. Roy Thomas, then a staff writer, was instructed to let the kids down gently who wandered into their offices constantly albeit uninvited since they were convinced that they were the next Jack Kirby or John Buscema. A long-time comic book fan, and until recently the editor of a well-respected comic book fanzine, Thomas knew what proper art in sequential storytelling needed to look like. With a “here we go again” expression on his face, he took a look at the portfolio the young applicant presented to him. In fact, Steranko was two years older than Thomas. The art Thomas saw was nowhere near as good as the art Marvel’s best artists produced in those days, but it had a certain flair as it betrayed a lot of talent that could easily be refined over time. After consulting with production manager Sol Brodsky, Thomas phoned up Stan Lee, advising his boss that he should take a look as well. Since Lee had just fired John Buscema off Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. earlier in the week, the very popular Marvel artist had dared to erase the layouts Jack Kirby had provided to do his own thing, the book was an artist short, and this kid’s work was good enough to make something out of Kirby’s roughs that could be published. Thus, Steranko began his tenure at “The House of Ideas” by replacing John Buscema. Kirby would be next. As it were, Kirby, the King of Comics, had plenty on his plate, and this kid with the James Dean hairdo, he improved at a rapid pace. Once the training-wheels came off that were Kirby’s breakdowns, Jim Steranko exploded onto the scene. By then, he’d turned his work on the book into a one-man show. On top of creating mind-blowing artwork that was the visual approximation of listening to psychedelic rock albums or tripping on Psilocybin, Steranko wrote the scripts, which sometimes were entirely wordless, and he provided the color guides. Thomas would later word it like this: “I think Jim’s legacy to Marvel was demonstrating that there were ways in which the Kirby style could be mutated… many artists went off increasingly in their own direction after that.” As bold a claim as this represents, this one quote, albeit taken of context, was short selling what Jim Steranko brought to comic book art. Within only a few years, and with a very limited body of work, the artist who was also a stage magician, innovated the medium in ways that hadn’t been seen the days of EC Comics. Like he was performing some sleight-of-hand, Jim incorporated surrealist art, pop art and expressionism into comic book art, without copying other artists. As far as Jim’s layouts are concerned, his vivid “staccato panels” represent a consequent continuation of Krigstein’s non-cinematic approach.

If one looks at Steranko’s script for “At the Stroke of Midnight”, there isn’t much to it, at least not where the plot is concerned. A married couple is rummaging through every room of an ancient mansion that sits atop a very steep mountain near a body of water. Marie Fowler, the woman, is a beautiful redhead who has a piece of cold rock in want of an actual beating heart. She’s married to Lou, a doormat if there ever was one, whom she’d picked as her mate not for his dashing looks, or the interesting conversations he knows how to conduct, or his skills as a lover, he has none of that to offer, but because Lou has the right kind of uncle, old and crazy-rich. Well, he had. The old-timer has very recently passed away, with his smarmy nephew the sole heir to his fortune. That’s Lou Fowler and his money-grubbing, supremely entitled wife. Consequently, it’s the uncle’s death that kicks off the proceedings as Marie, with her weak hubby in tow, descends like a vulture onto the late man’s residence, spurred on by her knowledge that the money and the exquisite jewels their dear uncle had amassed within his lifetime must be inside the house the old man was never wont to leave, at least not in recent memory. Only that his vast treasure’s hidden. The place is called Shadow House, because of course it is, and it’s one foreboding looking place. The manner in which Steranko presents this gloomy, gothic manor, the house itself comes alive. As for the dead guy, despite his demise, Lou’s uncle, or his mean old spirit, seems to be alive and kicking. Only four pages into this 7-pager, Lou’s easily spooked by a portrait of the old guy, which may or may not be haunted. An old, isolated house, a rich uncle, greedy relatives that come across as if they were plucked from central casting, this does read like a standard gothic horror story. Then there’s the revelation that Lou’s uncle had a keen interest in witchcraft and demonology, that in fact he was obsessed with “finding a path thru time itself.” He could have asked Dr. Angst about that. And with that, we have entered the domain of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of mystery that has been smashed into an H. P. Lovecraft pulp yarn about witches and barking madness. Nothing original to be seen. Alas, there’s a twist, telegraphed from miles away, unfortunately. As it turns out, in a moment of courage, if you want to call it that, Lou had murdered his feeble, wheelchair-bound relative, making his death look like an accident, obviously. Before there was the risk of yet another déjà vu to older, arguably better stories, even to one of Graham Ingels’ masterpieces in EC’s The Haunt of Fear, Marie and Lou are able to locate a secret room. And like she knew it would be there, cleverly concealed deep within the bowels of this grotesque architectural horror of a house, the pretty, unscrupulous red-haired gold-digger finds stacks of old coins, jewels, even a crown which Marie immediately puts on and which fits her perfectly as if this diadem had been waiting for her head in this dark dungeon the entire time: “It’s a fortune! A treasure! A king’s ransom. Look at me… I’m a queen!” It’s then that Lou realizes something: “The path uncle was seeking, that pathway to the past… he found it! He found it!!” And with these two exclamation points that mark the end of Lou’s fearful sentence, another door opens, a door into the past, the 18th century to be precise. The location, that was France during the revolution: “People looking at us… yelling for the king… queen!” And next to the object that cast a long shadow in the pale moonlight, there was Lou’s uncle. He was alive and he wasn’t in need of his wheelchair. He pointed one bony finger at Lou and Marie as the guillotine waited.  Actually, Jim Steranko’s tale is better than one is initially willing to give him credit for, that’s considering the clichéd plot mechanics, his concoction of tropes from the Romantic period and American pulps, and the overwrought, purple prose narration he (or is it “Digger”?) employs to set the tone. For starters, it isn’t until the end of the story that the couple’s names no longer feel random. And since this is a story about time travel, and maybe reincarnation as well, who’s to say that Marie and Lou weren’t destined for a date with the guillotine? But what makes the script come alive is how Steranko weaves it into the art. As the couple frantically searches the house room after room, the panels become smaller. Steranko uses small panels almost throughout the story, an indication of Marie’s one-track mind, but whereas a widescreen panel caps off the second page, once we get to the third page, the panels grew ever more claustrophobic whenever we only see the couple in their interactions with one another, as for example on the third page which has twenty-two panels with a layout that is very reminiscent of Krigstein’s work. Once the focus is placed on the house, Steranko moves the camera back which creates the impression that the house is watching the intruding plunderers. For the last page, Jim switches back to widescreen shots, one for Marie and Lou to absorb the tableau that is the guillotine, the rail-thin figure of Lou’s late relative who is dressed in black like an accuser and an executioner, and of course, the unwashed masses of the French Revolution who want their heads which are depicted prominently and in juxtaposition. In the last panel, the second rectangular panel on this page, there’s just the house against the gray clouds of the night sky. Yet Steranko, ever the illusionists, knows better than to pull just one trick. On the first and the last page we see Marie and Lou’s heads next to each other. They are united by a common goal as they are spurred on by greed. In the final panel, they share the same fate. On page four, which is the mid-point, as Marie’s getting frustrated with their lack of progress and Lou’s fear that his late uncle may very well be still around, his face is in the first panel, hers is in the last frame. Lou is looking down versus Maria who is looking upwards. Steranko’s use of symmetrical callbacks, visual cues and plants and pay-offs supports the overall narrative excellently. But then there are his colors. The colors he chooses are highly unusual for comic book storytelling. There’re greens, light blues, oranges and purples. Trippy LSD hues which the master artist finely calibrated for the rather primitive, cheap-looking four-color printing process and the pulpy newsprint paper that came with it. None of the subsequent reprints of this story, of which there have been many, have managed to fully do justice to the color palette Steranko employs. While this holds true for most if not for all of his comic stories once they’re subjected to modern printing methods and high gloss paper, nowhere is Jim Steranko’s very conscious use of color more evident than in his only horror tale, and thus, no other tale of his has this much to lose whenever it is forced through the harsh lens that is contemporary color re-mastering. Suffice to say that “At the Stroke of Midnight” is a story that one wants to experience in the format in which it was originally published, and it is quite the experience. It is one of those rare tales, especially thanks to Steranko’s color scheme, that is a trip. Steranko once remarked that he left comics when he felt that he’d mastered the medium. That he did.

To compete with such an opener would be a tall order for any artist, but luckily, though presumably to the chagrin of one of the two parties involved, the second story was a tale of two artists. “From Beyond the Brink!” was written, penciled and inked by legendary writer-artist Johnny Craig, the artist who had created Drusilla. When the Code was established, he’d eventually left comics to work in advertising. In the mid-1960s Craig returned, in part since Archie Goodwin recruited him to work on the Warren mags. When he received an offer from Marvel, Craig begun an unhappy and short-lived tenure at “The House of Ideas”. Even during his EC days, Craig was slow, which had led to a forced collaboration with his boss Al Feldstein, a highly accomplished artist in his own right. At Marvel, Craig had a hard time with keeping up as well, but he was also not one for a house style. This led to another shared assignment, albeit after the fact. When art director John Romita inspected Craig’s linework, he wasn’t too pleased. Romita had also created the cover for the first issue of Tower of Shadows, with his cover depicting a scene from Jim Steranko’s lead-in story, after Lee or Goodman had rejected Steranko’s original cover proposal. Now he took a hacksaw to Craig’s pencils, and both men shared inking duties. Due to the wildly different styles of the two artists, the result good have easily turned into a jumbled mess, but as luck would have it, the illustrators meshed well with each other, well, their art did. Romita gave Craig’s noir sensibilities of rain wet city streets, run-down buildings and seedy backrooms a Douglas Sirk sheen that added to the story which was about fakery and deception. Like with Mr. Owen, this was not a story about the first man on the scene. This guy was hat, horn-rimmed glasses and trench coat wearing Arthur Watson, a writer who was under the gun. With his wife expecting, he figures he’d better finish the book he’s working on stat. But there’s something missing. The subject of his book, a true-life account, is a bald-headed man named Hayden Hathaway, “a member of the famed spiritual society” who “had earned an amazing record as a debunker of fake spiritualists…!” During flashbacks that played out in Watson’s mind, Craig introduced the work of this man to the readers. Hathaway believed that “all séances are fixed” and not only did he know every trick a charlatan preying on the hopes of the bereaved might pull, he often stormed into a house or parlor where such allegedly occult sessions were underway, only to violently tear apart hidden wall panels and tricked out furniture without abandonment or any pity for the wallets of those who ran such scams. And he was not above making threats. With a “zeal extraordinary”, he was willing to expose every phony to the media if they didn’t get out of Dodge posthaste. While being allowed to accompany such a smart fellow as he ripped through every charade was exciting in and by itself, Watson knew that he needed a stronger hook for the reading public to become invested in the man’s biography. He hadn’t yet learned why Hathaway acted like a man possessed when it came to these shams and hoodwinkers. But he’d learn his secret eventually, he was certain. He did, on this rainy night as he drove to the address the subject of his book had given him. Another fake séance with a medium who claimed that he or she was speaking to those “beyond the veil”, a fraud like all the others he’d witnessed in recent weeks. As it turned out, the medium was a she. Madame Angelica, she was a ravishing brunette who wore a long red gown that was very adept at accentuating her tall, voluptuous figure quite nicely, in no small thanks to John Romita, but Watson was no fool. After all the fortune tellers and their grimy parlors, the mystics who operated out of cheap, heavily draped backrooms, he knew that Hathaway would expose her, the only question was what type of gimmick she might’ve hidden away and where, like Lou Fowler’s uncle had done with his gold coins and jewels. Soon the séance started, and there were formless apparitions, but they vanished as quickly as they’d appeared, and as Madame Angelica came out of her trance, and she claimed that the spirits had tired her out, this got Hathaway really mad. He took out a crowbar, and more affronted than Watson had ever seen him, he began to dismantle her entire apartment. But there is nothing. No projector, no trick mirror, no double bottom. Watson assumes “that Hathaway has finally met a spiritualist who’s too clever for him… and that his string of victories is about to be broken.” What Watson couldn’t know, this was the moment Mr. Hathaway had been waiting and praying for. However, Madame Angelica, she’d been aware of this right when he set foot into her apartment. The spirits, they had told her. As it turned out, Hathaway was a spirit as well. He was long dead, only that he had gotten lost. He’d been seeking a path that would lead him beyond the veil ever since. That was why he’d been this adamant about exposing every false medium and mentalist he heard of. He was desperately seeking a real spiritualist who could guide him on his way, so he could finally find peace. This was what the tall brunette did as Arthur Watson watched with his mouth agape and the readers marveled at the wicked twist and the nice art by Craig and Romita. Uri Geller, he wouldn’t have this much luck. When a real-life Hayden Hathaway got on his case, it was not to unite the man with the telekinetic and telepathic mind with a race of extraterrestrials that waited for him in their fantastic ship some 53,000 light years away. Instead, it was a matter of revealing him for the fraud he was. This man was James Randi, better known to many kids and adults as “The Amazing Randi” since he was a popular television magician. As his side-business, he was in the same line of work as Hathaway only that he wasn’t looking for any real mediums. The men and woman who made such claims, to Randi they were shams, and worse, they robbed gullible people blind, folks who wanted to believe that there was spiritualism and an afterlife, and that with the help of a medium with the power to see beyond the veil, they’d be able say goodbye to a loved one. In a way, to Geller, Randi was Lt. Col. Austin W. Kibler all over again, a fitting comparison since he’d never met the Air Force psychologist, only his hatchet man Ray Hyman. An executioner of a different kind was waiting for him on network television. Albeit when his handlers Targ and Puthoff received an invitation for Geller to appear on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson”, they thought they’d struck gold, or more adequately put, they’d been able to dowse a hidden pool of water. Little did the trio suspect that the silver-haired late show host had a spiritual power all of his own; the magical ability to spot a bullshit artist a mile off. Indeed, one has to wonder how an appearance of Price and his buddy Michael Murphy on “The Tonight Show” might have gone down, but unfortunately, that never happen. What did happen was that prior to the taping of his show on August 1, 1973, Johnny consulted James Randi. Per Randi’s advice, Carson’s team prepared their own props for Uri, and they wouldn’t let him anywhere near the items they had selected. But Randi showed them a brilliant trick of misdirection as well. A producer did ask Geller about forty questions which he claimed were to prep him for the interview with Carson, only that Johnny never intended to pose any questions. What the host asked him instead, was to perform a few of the feats he’d gotten famous for. Placed on an orange leather sofa, it was the 70s, next to actor Ricardo Montalbán, the once and future Khan Noonien Singh, and announcer, sidekick and straight man Ed McMahon, Geller looked as dashing as ever. Wearing a pink shirt like a certain Dr. Angst, he was just getting comfortable. Brimming with overflowing confidence that came from a superior intellect and the fact that his alien benefactors had gifted him with the face and fit body of a slightly older David Cassidy, he came across less like one of Hathaway’s charlatans who needed to put on outlandish garbs but more like an exotic love guru. In a way, here was a male version of Madame Angelica. Mothers and their teen daughters took notice as they sat in front of their TVs. So did the gay men from Frisco who Murphy and Price had chased out of Slates Hot Springs. If they hadn’t, the loud sports cars of their clients surely had. Geller’s tan mug began to tense up as soon as he realized that he’d been lured into a trap. Carson, who was happily puffing on a smoke while feigning innocence, must have seemed like a fiery demon to him, or like the devil. Carson had donned a red blazer. “I’m also a skeptic,” an annoyed and exasperated Uri Geller exclaimed when Carson put him on the spot. Visible uncomfortable, the self-proclaimed psychic resorted to giving explanations that sounded like excuses. “He needed to be in the mood,” he told the live audience like a man who was talking to his disappointed lover, who couldn’t help but glance at and pity his tool that wouldn’t do its intended job. Still Geller knew, he had to make a go at it. Uri managed a light spoon bending, at least something bent, and when asked to spot the one canister that contained water and which had been placed by Carson’s team among nineteen identical ones that were only full of hot air, Geller made it so much easier for others to read his mind. The former male model was aware that the late show host wanted him to play roulette with his reputation. It was painfully obvious. Geller tried a few lucky guesses. Surely, he was not the lover he was hyped up to be. Once his ordeal was over, all told, it had lasted twenty-two minutes, a devastated Uri Geller returned to his hotel. As he later told a reporter, his racing mind knew but one thought: “That’s it – I’m destroyed.” Only the thing was, that was not how the television audience saw it. In an ironic twist well worthy of an old EC comic or a recent yarn spun by a certain platinum blonde witch, Carson and Randi’s attempt to debunk him had backfired in spectacular fashion. People reasoned that the fact that he wasn’t able to perform was confirmation that he wasn’t a fraud and that his powers were real. No professional, self-respecting con artist or sham would have hesitated like he had. Soon thereafter, he was booked by “The Merv Griffin Show”. He even made it into an issue of Marvel’s Daredevil. Readers who picked up issue No. 133 (May 1976) saw how Uri aided the blind hero in a story called “Mind-Wave and his Fearsome Think Tank!” Later he explained: “That Johnny Carson Show made Uri Geller.” While Geller rode on the perfect mind-wave to more fame and plenty of money, “The Amazing Randi” continued his crusade to expose every charlatan by showing his astonished audiences who easily anyone can be deceived, most recently in a highly entertaining TED Talk, and to this day he remains a skeptical Dana Scully for those who want to believe. What eventually led to Geller’s downfall was the tried and proven mix of hubris and changing times. When he was asked to assist in the investigation of a kidnapping case in 1992, he boldly predicted that the victim, a model from Hungary, would be found in “good health” but to this day, nobody has seen her again. Since Geller came from Israel, it’s somewhat excusable that he couldn’t have foreseen that his greatest nemesis was not some lieutenant colonel, or a bearded, specs wearing, aging stage magician, but the American legal system. Geller was sued until even his countersuits were sued or simply thrown out of court with judges making him pay hefty sanctions. And then, he became an irrelevant has-been. Clearly, his alien masters hadn’t told him that in the loud 1990s, partying jocks and pretty co-eds would have a hardened look on their faces, and while they believed in their country and a bright future, you just needed to ask any nerd on campus to learn that they didn’t believe in aliens or disk-shaped flying objects, or in spiritualism. To believe, one needs a soul. In the days of raves on ecstasy and Ren & Stimpy, those were in short supply.

There is a reason why the 1970s were the heydays of Esalen, Erich von Däniken, Geller and many other self-styled prophets and slick New Age gurus. Despite the domestic political turmoil that was Watergate and the energy crisis, or perhaps because of it, it was a time of experimentation for a middle class that was getting younger as the first baby boomers had families of their own. A time to try out recreational marijuana with your white wine and to mix up fondue parties with key parties. A time for flower prints, photo wallpapers, thong sandals, the sweat of clothes made of plastic, and ascots to hide hickeys from your co-workers. It was a time when you watched “Family” on ABC and you didn’t identify with the old married couple, but with their adult kids who were on a confusing path to sexual liberation and strange romantic entanglements. In the 1960s, the center wouldn’t hold, now the lens was switched to a softer focus, a hazy blur. It was a time when people in America wanted to believe. And as the decade came to an end, right before the hostage crisis and the invasion of Afghanistan became reminders that the world was a cruel place and that there was a cold war still going on, it was what Americans did. They believed. In May 1977, “Star Wars” showed kids that there were many other life-forms in space, but none of this was threatening and needed to be buried in the sands of New Mexico. On the contrary, it was exciting. The message was a simple one: good will always triumph over evil. The kids who dreamt of themselves as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Princess Lea, they believed that when all that they found under the tree on Christmas were cards made out of cardboard, that come spring, these could be redeemed for action figures, those hotly anticipated Star Wars toys that were not yet available since Kenner Toys had failed to believe in magic. And once these kids had played for some nine months with their action figures that allowed them to create many sequels to the original movie, another film made them, and their parents believe that a man can fly. But the Soviet Union did invade Afghanistan and the hostage crisis, it lasted for 444 days till it ended under a new President on January 20, 1981. If you were a fifteen-year-old boy and you picked up No. 93 of Vampirella during this month, copies were probably still on the shelf since meanwhile the Warren magazines were selling poorly, you’d see that the spiritualism and the magic of the happy days of this decade between 1972 and 1978 had taken a decidedly darker turn. If you were a surfer, which likely you weren’t, that is unless your name was Chris, this felt like the equivalent of the beach getting shut down come the end of a summer that had once seemed endless. But if you selected a black and white magazine that almost always featured a near naked woman on its covers who was as stunningly beautiful as Maila Nurmi had been when she was a dead ringer for another actress, chances were high that you were a nerd, and as a boy of fifteen or sixteen, the Vampirella series had long been your Playboy. The problem was, like this decade was slowly revealing its uglier side, the artwork for the Vampirella strip had gone downhill. Like writer Bill DuBay, José González had long left the vampire girl. The scripts for her adventures had become a bit mediocre, and the art by Rudy Nebres, one of Infantino and Orlando’s recruits from their trip to the Philippines in ‘71, left a lot to be desired. Nebres’ proclivity for inks that felt heavy all the time was noticeable. They were downing his characters in a sea of misery while making his backgrounds look like cheap TV sets. This was Vampi cast as Vampira on a depressing, poorly lit backlot with a fake looking spider as her sole companion and plaything. Like the attractiveness of Nurmi’s face had hardened until nothing remained from her younger self, as if the neon brutality of Los Angeles had etched itself deeply into her erstwhile beautiful features, Nebres had transformed the fashionable jet-setting swinger of the González years into a hooker, with a body which had a real weight to it but not much in way of elegance. As for the writing, a guy named Rich Margopoulos who had done a bunch of Archie comics, was handed the keys to a Porsche so he could wreck it. Editor extraordinaire Louise Jones was half-way out of the door. She’d be taking Bruce Jones, Warren’s top writer, to Marvel, her new place of employment. As for Margopoulos, an army vet and college graduate in philosophy and religion, he was most likely the only baby boomer comic writer who idolized another writer of the same generation. But he and Steve Englehart were either not smoking the same weed or Margopoulos simply only knew how to bogart a doobie. But if you had picked up Vampirella No. 93, and as a boy, despite all of those shortcomings, of course you did, all was not lost. This was also the time when Warren, as they were on their last legs, were somewhat frantically peddling hot, supernatural babes in hopes of hitting another home run as they once had with Vampirella who came from hunger, then became of superstar, especially among teenaged boys, young soldiers and prison inmates, and who was still fairly popular. It was in this issue, that Margopoulos presented a new character he had co-created with Rudy Nebres. At least this was according to the credits that were printed at the bottom of the first page that introduced her, well, of course the character was a she, only as a die-hard comic fan you needn’t do a double take to know that the idiot editor had messed up. Rudy and his dark pool of inks hadn’t been anywhere near the artboards where this nugget was concerned. The thin, poetic line art and equally feathery inks were the signature style of Spanish illustrator Rafael Auraleón. Like it was José González’ forte, his characters expressed an unmistakable flair of high street class that not even a reckless driver could wreck. But not so fast. Though this tale looked somewhat decent for a change, Margopoulos, to compensate for a lack of heavy inks due to the absence of his usual cohort, he simply had to weigh down page after page with words, oh, so many words, that there was a real risk of drowning the artwork, but in a testament to the power of the penciler, many of the beautiful images were spared such an undignified end. It would have been a crying shame otherwise since Auraleón knew how to render the most gorgeous women, as was the case with this heroine, and she wasn’t the only female character in this story, she had a girl sidekick. But in case there were any uncertainties who was boss, or what her name was, the first page, that had her look out of the panorama window of a posh Manhattan penthouse while she was strutting her stuff, of which there was plenty, clued you in with huge letters that made you forget the snafu with the credits that were printed underneath. “Cassandra St. Night”, huge capital letters proudly proclaimed. And since this Cassandra was a looker with the way Auraleón drew her, the art was more distracting than a bunch of huge letters that spelled out her name, distracting in a good way. A cursory glance through the eight pages that made up her first outing, quickly revealed that this woman, who obviously had a propensity for wearing long gowns with a plunging neckline and an aversion to putting on shoes, was a mystic and a bit of a New Age nut. Those were the last days of disco, but still, in get-ups like these, Miss St. Knight surely did need her invisible aura of psychic energy to avoid catching pneumonia. All things being equal, you needn’t wreck your brain to get a very good idea of what Margopoulos’ elevator pitch to editor-in-chief James Warren must have been like: “It’s like Dr. Strange… but with boobs!” As some of the many words revealed, with the word “voluptuous” leading the word count, she was “silver-tressed”, and she had green eyes, which was actually helpful information since these magazines came without color. And indeed, Cassandra looked like the love child of Dr. Strange and the lovely silver-haired Clea, the woman the Master of the Mystic Arts had once rescued from the Dark Dimension, characters Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner had saved from obscurity by turning the series into a day-glo acid trip not seen since the days when Gene Colan worked on the title, or since Cynthia had told her story about Dr. Angst. With Englehart fanboy Margopoulos taking a page from his idol’s playbook, soon Ms. St. Knight and her pretty sidekick, raven-haired Tarot, enter into a trance in the woman’s private chamber with a rather expected result: “… slowly, like ghostly spectres, their consciousness… their astral forms leave their bodies!” And though this sounded at lot like the “remote viewing” the CIA and the Stanford guys were looking for in the candidates they tested in some of the projects that would be bundled and re-branded as “Stargate” in the 1990s, Marvel readers knew that this method of astral projection came from one mind only, that of Steve Ditko, the creator of Dr. Strange. While Cassandra and Tarot mentally hang out at a place which may or may not was heaven, only that like Ditko, the writer had Cassandra call it “astral planes”, there’s a b-plot happing in front of her door as Margopoulos and Auraleón introduced her supporting cast, and more details about the mysterious, stunningly beautiful mistress of the mystic arts got slowly revealed.

There was Nadir, who was Cassandra’s driver and bodyguard. Considering that this was the late 1970s, if such a character didn’t seem racist enough, well, Cassandra’s loyal servant was a mute as well. There was a long tradition of treating people of color as the invisibles, but Margopoulos made sure that Nadir wouldn’t be heard either, though his editor Will Richardson messed up once again right in the next issue when he didn’t catch that Nadir was talking up a storm in two panels. Perhaps, like some of the readers, Richardson was just looking at the pretty pictures. In all fairness, Rich Margopoulos gave him a moment in the spotlight in the same issue when he saved Cassandra and Tarot from a nefarious astral entity that had broken through to our plane of existence due to Tarot’s carelessness and inexperience. But in the end, the two white women needed to save the day. Alas, it was revealed in a later issue that Nadir was the King of the fabled continent of Atlantis reincarnated, though his station in life hadn’t improved. But then again, if you considered how people of color were treated on television in the 1990s, the way this character was handled was unfortunately standard operating procedure for many creatives. The other man on her team also didn’t get much to work with. Young Harry Pitman was Ms. St. Knight agent and stage manager. As readers learned in the first issue, in true Uri Geller fashion, the silver-tressed mystic seemed to be making the money for her fancy penthouse by performing some magic tricks on the late show circuit, still with the way she came across on television, the woman did a bit of modeling as well. On this occasion, she had Nadir fire an arrow at her face only that she disintegrated the razor-sharp tip “with the destructive power of her mind!” As for Pitman, he was a milquetoast like Lou Fowler. He often needed rescue while he was otherwise pretty useless, except for the fact that Tarot fancied him as her would-be lover perhaps, or the girl might just friend zone him. Only clairvoyant readers would be able to tell since the strip never got around to exploring either option. Then there was a new addition to her inner circle, CIA agent Benjamin Dark who was paying Cassandra a visit to recruit her into the Agency’s top secret “Project Dante.” You see, Margopoulos was hip to the various supernatural research projects that had been going on earlier in the 1970s, only that by the time he wrote this tale, these weren’t that secret anymore, not with Uri bending spoons on TV like nobody’s business. Dark was introduced as one tough-as-nails super-agent, a macho who was a bit on the ugly side which made him more attractive by the beauty standards of that time. It would take one or two more years before the idea of metrosexual males, as evidenced by the new James Bond, actor Roger Moore, truly took hold in the zeitgeist. As was expected, he was eager to get into St. Knight’s panties, only that Pitman, who on top of being her agent and stage manager, acted as her gatekeeper as well, advised against such attempts, not because Harry was jealous, that would have been futile since his boss Cassandra St. Knight was clearly of out his league, because better men had tried their luck, which was understandable. Not only was Auraleón adept at drawing the most gorgeous women, he gave the green-eyed Cassandra St. Knight the face and possibly the body of popular actress Susan George, on paper that is, who was a stunning beauty in her own right and a bit of an idol for the flower power generation. She was best known for her role in Sam Peckinpah’s controversial movie “Straw Dogs” (1971). Consequently, the master illustrator supplied her with a range highly detailed facial expressions that either conveyed worry, supreme confidence and power, or made her appear as if she was on the verge of a powerful orgasm, like in the third panel on the last page. This was a delicate balancing act, but then again, the man from Barcelona was one of Warren’s best artists. Rafael Auraleón was extremely good with faces. His ability to let his characters emote, to express their most intimate and unguarded thoughts through their mimic, was uncanny and he hasn’t been matched, if at all, by other craftsmen who employ similar naturalistic or photorealistic styles. Not pictured in the first story were two other players who would show up later. For one, there was Guruji, who, as his name suggested, was Cassandra’s guru and spiritual mentor. Like Marvel’s Dr. Strange was initially guided by an old man who was aptly named “The Ancient One”, Cassandra relied heavily on the teachings of this distinctly Chinese looking old-timer who espoused the type of Zen teachings that had inspired a young Chris Carter to create a well-nigh uncountable numbers of vases and ashtrays from clay. Though Guruji had some vaguely defined mystical powers of his own, he was quite pleased with Cassandra doing most of the heavy lifting, which was in keeping with how Steve Ditko had originally depicted Dr. Strange’s old boss man. When all was said and done, not much meaning could be gleaned from the statements these sages provided to their pupils that couldn’t be found inside a fortune cookie as well. But the words did sound deep. The other character absent from the first adventure was Jeff. He was a dark-haired, rather attractive man, and as it turned out, like Emma Peel, Ms. St. Knight was actually a Missus, and to serve up another cliché which has been endlessly fascinating for nerds and many men since the beginning of time, Cassandra was both, a saint and a bit of a whore, well, at least Margopoulos requested his Spanish artist to dress her like one, and Auraleón was happy to oblige. And if readers thought her low-cut dress was pretty daring, they only needed to wait until issue No. 95 to be in for a big surprise. Still, while the first issue depicted Cassandra as a woman who had been with a number of men, earlier in her life she’d “saved” herself for her weeding night. But right after they’d exchanged their vows, with Cassandra and Jeff understandably eager to get it on, this was when disaster struck. With the couple racing across one of those treacherous Californian coastal highways in Jeff’s snazzy convertible sports car, one of the car’s tires blew, a small event in the grand scheme of things, but powerful enough to send the vehicle against the low guardrail and down the high cliff. As the car with Jeff inside plunged to a certain doom, he’d be burned to a crisp in the ensuing explosion, his bride instinctively levitated herself out of the unfortunate convertible, and for such a feat she didn’t even require a cloak, only a low-cut, high-slit dress. Naturally, she blamed herself when she stood at her late husband’s grave in what looked like an image that came right from the cover of a 1970s paperback edition of some gothic classic. But Jeff’s spirit loomed large throughout some of the stories. On one occasion, in Vampirella No. 101 (December 1981) a powerful, horn-sporting demon, who did look like the devil himself, tempted her to join forces with him by telling her that he was in fact keeping Jeff in his nether realm, but like “The Amazing Randi”, she had a sensor for bullshiters. The man he presented to her; he was but a lower demon in disguise. But there were also those sexually charged daydreams she was constantly having, like the one in issue No. 95 (April 1981), which went as far into softcore territory as the two creators could get away with in a magazine that was sold to minors over the counter, but without leaving much to the imagination, something that was par for the course by the time Cassandra’s third adventure saw print. The first two tales, which formed her origin story didn’t set the world on fire. For one, though Auraleón’s artwork was fantastic, the writing was hackneyed at best. What Margopoulos presented was pretty much a hogwash of New Age concepts paired with ideas that were lifted straight out of John Farris’ seminal novel “The Fury” (1976), a thriller that was clearly influenced by Watergate, the CIA’s paranormal research and Geller’s exploits. This book was also a massive blueprint for the then recently published Stephen King novel “Firestarter” (1980), a book that most likely sat on Margopoulos nightstand right next to Farris’ tome which would eventually see three sequels, the Brian DePalma adaptation from 1978 notwithstanding, or DePalma’s earlier film “Carrie” (1976), based on King’s first novel, which actually pre-dated Farris’ work about teenagers with psychic powers who are trained by a shady, CIA-type government outfit, secretly, and against their will. However, Cassandra’s origin didn’t tell readers much. To be fair, this was also the case with Ditko’s first Dr. Strange tale which had appeared in Strange Tales No. 110 (July 1963), but the bottom line was, that while Marvel was at its infancy back then and they couldn’t do no wrong in the eyes of the readers, the clock was running out on Warren. Margopoulos knew he had to step up his game, and knowing his boss Jim Warren, he had an implied mandate. He and Auraleón needed to crank up the eye candy to eleven.

The tales about Cassandra St. Knight and her team, of which there would be nine in total, did get sexier, but to the surprise of many teenaged boys who cared enough to actually read these stories, the writing also improved, a lot actually. Rich Margopoulos achieved this by selecting an intriguing approach for his narrative going forward that was similar to what Chris Carter and his writers would be doing just some twelve odd years later. He’d be telling two distinct types of tales. One set of yarns would exclusively, or at least mainly focus on mysticism and spirituality, like in the tale in issue No. 96 (May 1981) when Tarot took the weakass stage manager on a spiritual journey in order for the two of them to witness past lives they had once led. In this aforementioned Atlantis story, which did Erich von Däniken proud, the main players have important roles, except for Tarot, who’s the handmaiden of the queen (Cassandra). Nadir’s the king, Harry Pitman’s a guardsman and a proud warrior, which seems a bit ironic, and Dark’s ancestor is his captain in the royal guard. Though Cassandra’s words at the end of the story, once Tarot and the stage manager had returned from the trip, did sound a lot like they came right out of Esalen’s playbook for self-help, self-growth, and meditation (“The past is fixed because it is but a memory! And the future is just a dream! When seeking eternity, it can be found in neither of these… only in the here and now! Remember that, Tarot!”), this sort of experience was actually sold by a number of occultists, and James Randi knew all about those that there was to know. As “The Amazing Randi” would frequently let people know, if somebody told you that they could take you back to a past life through hypnosis or some similar means, you were being taken for a ride, especially if these shams promised to you that their techniques would let you find out that in the past you were somebody really important, like a princess of Egypt or the queen of Atlantis. Only perhaps like Madame Angelica, the silver-tressed woman was the real deal with the way she lifted Harry up like a man-size doll to levitate him to a comfortable sofa after the poor fellow had fainted from all the stress. But then again, if she was, then in a past life she might have been a witch. This was at least what young engineering student Alex Lorian believed after he’d experimented with drugs for the very first time. The hallucinogenic mushrooms Alex had swallowed and digested had shown him a past in which he was a priest who was brutally slain by a beautiful sorceress. Certain that this meant that he’d soon die in the present, Alex began to roam the streets of Manhattan until he saw a magazine that was displayed on a newsstand. This witch, she was real, and she lived in New York City. He had to kill her first, it was self-defense, of course. Quickly the incel returned to his shabby one-room-apartment where he sharpened a long butcher knife. While this was going on in issue No. 102 (January 1982), Guruji had summoned Cassandra to tell her about a major crisis. An earthquake was about to hit the city unless she focused all her mystic energy to stop the catastrophe from happening. Margopoulos was clearly riffing on the excellent Richard Burton film “The Medusa Touch” (1978) but he added some clever twists. For one, the earthquake was not going to be caused by a fellow with paranormal abilities who wanted it to happen, but by the anxiety of people who were afraid that this might happen. As she enters into a trance, Alex breaks into her apartment. Since she knows that she might not be able to stop what’s coming, she’d sent her unsuspecting crew away. Tarot knows what’s up as soon as the buildings begin to shake and the facades of the skyscrapers in Manhattan begin to crack, with concrete and metal raining onto the canyons that are the busy streets below. As panic spreads, Alex has stabbed the green-eyed woman who can’t maintain her spell. In the end, Cassandra did save the city. Then she taught the incel an important lesson. Her ancestor was a witch, but his ancestor was a witchfinder general. In that past she was just defending herself. Thus, properly chastised, Alex promises to lead a better life and to stay off the drugs. This was the other side of reincarnation. If you had committed a crime in one of your past lives, with the aid of a guru, and a bit of cash, you’d be able to redeem yourself. Gurus were still a dime a dozen, only in her world, there was one fraud less with the way St. Knight demolished a religious leader who was a sham in issue No. 97 (July 1981). Still, Cassandra’s best supernatural tale appeared in No. 101 (December 1981). In “Hell on Earth” you got one epic endgame between the forces of evil and the forces of good, the latter army led by Ms. St. Knight. With the way Auraleón managed to top himself with the incredibly detailed artwork he supplied, there’s a strong likelihood that two British artists took note, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben who’d soon be working with writer Alan Moore on DC Comics’ Swamp Thing. There is a lot of Auraleón’s style in their work on that series. The second group of stories that Margopoulos and Auraleón created, had her go up against an evil of a different kind, Colonel Krakov and his paranormal project in the Soviet Union. But the scheming Colonel was in America when Agent Dark invited Cassandra to join his crew, and while Krakov was holed up in the Soviet Consulate, he had a mole within Project Dante, a saboteur who programed the computer system to kill her. All in all, these were actually the better stories, and the first one was no exception. But “The Initiation” from issue No. 95 (April 1981) also conveyed two things loud and clear. For one, with this 16-page epic, Margopoulos had found his footing as a scripter, and secondly, he and Auraleón were ready to give the teenaged fans and Jim Warren what they desired, incredibly steamy drawings of the voluptuous mystic who had Susan George’s face. For starters, there was the softcore love scene with her husband that played out in her head, and perhaps elsewhere on her body. But as the already somewhat stimulated or over-stimulated readers turned the page, they glimpsed a full figure image of Cassandra in a micro-bikini. Actually, such a tiny two-piece outfit that nothing was left to the imagination, especially not with the way she moaned and moved on an inflatable mattress that floated in her pool while she was caught in the sexual reverie of making love to her deceased husband in the movie that played exclusively in the theater of her mind. Soon thereafter, you had Benjamin Dark who handed her a clingy jumpsuit and shiny knee-high boots. This CIA “standard issue jumpsuit” took the idea of giving Cassandra’s fashionable attire a dangerously low neckline to an entirely new level of ridiculousness, or if you were a fifteen-year-old male reader, an overt and not entirely unwelcomed level of objectification, that isn’t to say that girls couldn’t enjoy the sight of so much real estate of naked, curvy skin that was put on display. Still, there was the Soviet mole. As Cassandra was being tested in a maze with some automations attacking her, she quickly figured out that the machine men weren’t firing with blanks. However, chances that a woman with her abilities was going to get hurt by these crude robots or their submachine guns were slim to none, while the risk that she might fall out of her jumpsuit was exponentially going towards one hundred percent with the way the green-eyed mystic moved around to avoid the spray of bullets. Indeed, these were the last days of Disco. Earlier in the decade, artist Dave Cockrum had quickly become a fan favorite when he redesigned the outfits of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and he’d turned the Legion girls into proto-Disco dancers. He didn’t have the freedoms of a comic book magazine, which meant that Auraleón was able to include as many butt shots as he darn well pleased without having to spill blots of ink over her backside, with that ink still reserved for Nebres and some headshrinkers. But these paranormal cold war spy stories weren’t only about how many pin-up poses the artist could fit on one page. Case in point the story “Mindwars” from Vampirella No. 98 (August 1981) which is arguably the best in the whole series. In this tale, Colonel Krakov pitted the commander of the KGB’s psychic warfare division against Ms. St. Knight, and Katarina Yorganoff was certainly a force to be reckoned with. She and her team had built a device that increased their psychic powers to such a degree that they could launch a strike at the heart of Project Dante from Mother Russia without leaving the facility. By contrast, Cassandra’s new colleagues were on the pitiful side. There were only two of them. There was child prodigy Gilbert, a supremely entitled little snot who was too young to be impressed by her many gifts, and Nicholas, a peacenik turned hawk after the death of his soldier brother in some foreign country. As Katarina leads the charge, not only does she manage to destroy the equipment of the American project, Benjamin Dark nearly gets himself killed as well. This means war of course, paranormal war, and with the help of her new friends, Cassandra teleports herself into the midst of the surprised Soviet team. However, after she’s bent Colonel Krakov somewhat out of shape, it seems that she’s found her match. The Russians turn their mighty psychotron on her, which is fueled by the minds of their best mentalists. Caught in the beam of psychic energy that the device emits, Cassandra was slated to perish, that was until her mentor Guruji chimed in to impart some advice you could get from a fortune cookie, or Dick Price if you dug deep. She was so far advanced as a mystic that not trying too hard was the ticket. By resorting to what was basically mind tai chi, Cassandra unleashed her own Phoenix Force, carefully avoiding not getting sued by Chris Claremont and John Byrne who had transformed the rather dull mutant Marvel Girl from a teen with telepathic and telekinetic powers into the most awesome and terrifying being in the entire Marvel Universe. Consequently, Cassandra quickly lay waste to the Soviet machine and the KGB’s paranormal project. When an angry, yet newly impotent Colonel Krakov confronted her after the fact and eye-to-eye, the power she radiated was so strong that her face was not what he was staring at. Unfortunately, Ms. St. Knight wasn’t just powerful enough to save her own series or Warren Publishing. Her last story appeared in Vampirella No. 102 and Vampirella, she took a nap herself for some years once the last issue of her magazine, issue No. 112 (March 1983), made it to the magazine racks. It’s tempting to believe that a better writer, like a Chris Claremont, would have been able to save Cassandra and Warren Publishing. The reality is sadly no. With the final vestiges of the softer-focused 1970s going up in smoke with one last marijuana cigarette, the appetite for horror stories and horror magazines wasn’t there any longer. Marvel was folding their comic mags one by one.

It only seems fitting that arguably the best story that appeared in a comic magazine past the 1970s was written by Chris Claremont. The writer who was born shortly after the war in England had once started his career with writing comic and prose stories that appeared in these publications in their heydays. In short, before Claremont had settled into his history making run on Marvel’s X-Men, he’d developed his writer’s toolbox on a character who in many ways was a precursor to Phoenix, Satana Hellstrom. Chris Claremont hadn’t created the Devil’s Daughter, like he hadn’t come up with the character who became Phoenix, but it were his sensibilities that made these two fictional females interesting. The writer, who by 1981 was at the height of his superstar status where comic fans were concerned, had two influences. His mother, who had uprooted their family for a better life that she hoped they would have in America, and all things occult. In Claremont’s mind these two factors combined into the image of an ideal woman who was beautiful, confident, who was in touch with Mother Nature, and who wielded powers greater than that of any man. This idea had led to his outstanding Satana stories, which in turn had led to Jean Grey embracing a force of pure energy, and to his marriage to Marvel colorist Bonnie Wilford who not only shared his love for the occult but who was a Wiccan high priestess. Chris and his wife Bonnie were active in the demi-monde of New York City, but Bonnie was far better connected. In fact, this was her third marriage and she insisted on maintaining an open relationship, which meant that they were both free to take other lovers, which Bonnie did. Though Chris was clearly a nerd and Bonnie far outranked him in the occult circles they frequented, his interest in BDSM was intriguing to her, at least for a while. Through Bonnie, as with his mother, Claremont experienced first-hand how powerful women were. In a be careful what you wish for scenario, their marriage wouldn’t last. Phoenix was a concept he and his collaborator John Byrne explored as he was still married to Bonnie. It was a story of how absolute power corrupts absolutely. However, when he sat down to pen “By Virtue of Blood!” less than a year later, his perspective had changed somewhat. Now divorced, this story reads like a warning that with power, this way lies madness, but then again, like with many stories from the Romantic period, from which he lifted the motif of the doppelganger, the dark double of the protagonist, it’s open to many interpretations as it leaves the reader with more questions than answers. But “By Virtue of Blood!” is also the origin story of a new character he’d created, Lady Daemon, who sadly never caught on. A house ad had announced Lady Daemon’s arrival for Marvel Preview No. 24, but it took yet another issue. By then, the magazine, which had gotten a bit directionless, had been re-branded as Bizarre Adventures. When Lady Daemon finally did make her debut in issue No. 25 (March 1981), she shared the cover with three other Marvel characters who were created in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. Though she was somewhat relegated to the background on the painted cover by Paul Gulacy, she was still in the center of the image, and as readers could tell from the hand-painted illustration and the set of cards in her gloved hand, she was a platinum blonde like the witch Cynthia, and apparently, she knew how to do sleight-of-hand tricks. Both impressions would be proven correct. Not only did she look a lot like Toth’s sexy witch, she was a witch. And as far as the latter aspect was concerned, her greatest trick was that she wasn’t Lady Daemon, at least the title wasn’t her birthright. Her name was Megan Daemon, and she had an older sister Alisabeth to whom this title and the estate belonged. The estate, that was an old manor, perched on a cliff like it was the case with Steranko’s Shadow House, and the land in the Sutherlands Highlands in Scotland that surrounded it. Told from Megan’s perspective (and brilliantly illustrated by penciler Michael Golden and inker Terry Austin) this was a story about pairs and contradictions, a story about identity that came with a double bottom. Consequently, the opening page was a study in contrasts. Just two panels that without a dividing horizontal line were connected, yet worlds apart. The first image was a photo of the Zeppelin Hindenburg as it was famously engulfed in a ball of fire of exploding hydrogen gas. With this tale set in 1937, the medium, a photo, and what it depicts, a pinnacle of man’s ingenuity and German engineering, are both, modern and of their time, but one is doomed. The other image is a drawing of the old manor that belongs to the Clan Daemon. As the next pages and the story reveal, this is where the sisters live. The older sister, Alisabeth, she is as old as the century. Megan is four years younger. The older sibling, she was born on the winter solstice, her younger sister was born on the summer solstice. The older one is treated coldly by their father, the same man who calls her sibling “his child of light.” Two blonde girls who look near identical only four years removed, one volatile and on the move, the other frozen in time like she was caught in a photography, or in the moment right before the picture was taken, back when you were told to stand still for a few seconds, only that with Megan, the seconds turned into years. We don’t know this yet from looking at the first page, but what we do learn is best summed up in the lines at the top and at the bottom of the page. “I stand before the gates of hell.” This is how the story ended, in a fiery holocaust on May 6, 1937. “Clan Daemon is old.” This was a beginning born out of the past. It is the year 1910, when Megan is six years old and her sister is ten. It is the year when the girls study the old books in the manor’s vast library that are as old as the Clan Daemon, it is when they discover magic, and they perform ancient rituals for fun. Early on, there’s blood involved. When Alisabeth experiences the onset of womanhood, the curse of blood that has been a woman’s plight since the dawn of mankind, this is when things turn deadly: “Our mother’s mutilated corpse was found the next morning, sprawled in a mountainside. She’d been torn limb from limb.” Four years later, it is “Megan’s night”, the first full moon after she’s become a woman. Like her sister before her, she retraces a diagram in one of the old books with her own blood as she repeats Alisabeth’s invocation. “I did not want to do it, yet I could not help myself. I was not surprised when the servants found Lord Daemon butchered and bloodless in his bed. All the same, I grieved.” Soon thereafter, Alisabeth leaves the war-torn continent, like Claremont’s mother had done so in the aftermath of yet another war. Megan had come to dread her sister, and she dreaded her return. Her acquiescence to her sister’s machinations, her part in their parents’ death, had led to a feeling of guilt at first, but remorse was something that was in the past. She had since accepted who Alisabeth was, who she was. She knew she couldn’t trust herself when her sister was around. Now she was worried about the future. But she could study and use what she’d learn for good. But since we are told about these events from the point of view of an older Megan in 1937, there is sense of clarity that comes with the perspective only the passing of time will allow for: “I thought none harm, I did none harm, or so I believed.” In 1937, Megan is thirty-three. In numerology, thirty-three is an influential and important number. It resonates with spiritual energies, like sincerity, compassion and courage. But it’s also an unlucky number. Japanese people who believe in Yakudoshi (the unlucky years) will tell you that women who are thirty-three are in great danger, that it is most unlucky number. Sincerity, compassion and courage, but you are still coursed. But it is on her 18th birthday that Megan receives a gift from her absent sister that arrives by mail: “A deck of French Tarot cards, made especially for me. They became my constant companions. Three years later, on her 21st birthday, Alisabeth herself returned briefly to the seat of her ancestors. She meets with the elders from the village. Nobody will see these men ever again. Then Alisabeth leaves again. This time there are two presents for her sibling: a writ of abdication and “a cat’s skull necklace of translucent quartz.” The number two is an important number as well. We know this because there are two sisters and we know it because though there are five horizontal panels on this page, the first and the last panel show the same thing: the Tarot cards, only that the first panel is illuminated by light, it is day, while in the other panel the day has ended and night has fallen. Like the number thirty-three. This was yin and yang, light and darkness. Megan, who is now Lady Daemon, has many suitors, she is attractive, more so because she’s quite wealthy, but she refuses all of them, as she refuses to leave the house. One sister on the move, the other frozen like in a photo. However, Megan’s no longer alone, one of her suitors, Ian MacInnis has stuck around. Ian’s a burly guy, ruggedly handsome as they come, and a Major in his Majesty’s loyal Royal Scots Borderers no less. She’s friend zoned him. Perhaps because he’s a skeptic. He doesn’t believe in magic, Tarot cards or other spiritual hokum. In his world, there lies nothing beyond the veil. Ian knows what Megan needs, but instead he suggests a long trip, a change of scenery. That’ll help lighten her mood. However, Lady Daemon has other things on her mind that an idle tourist tour across the globe. She knows that her sister is haunting her, that Alisabeth is watching. Like when they were children, since they were children, she’s pulling the strings and all that Megan can do is dance like a puppet. This is when Megan realizes that the cards that her sister had sent her for her 18th birthday, a deck that was made exclusively for her, it now has two death cards. Before she can contemplate whatever that means, she and Ian are on their journey. As they rush from Iverness to London to Salisbury Plain, they eventually end up in Stonehenge. There they observe six hooded and robed figures, five of which hold white candles, the sixth has a dagger that is raised over her head. She is Alisabeth and the deed has been down. Outstretched and sprawled in ghastly manner, a young, naked woman lies in the midst of this unholy assemblage with blood flowing from her torso. This might be all a dream, the journey, the sacrifice, but she knows it is what Alisabeth wants it to be, and what Megan’s wants is for her sister to witness how a seat for good magic is perverted by the powers she has, powers they both have. While it is Alisabeth who holds a dead girl’s heart in one hand, it might be Megan, like Megan had killer her own mother. Then the scenery shifts, and Megan and Ian find themselves aboard the LZ 129 Hindenburg which is adorned with swastikas. Right-facing, it’s a symbol of unspeakable evil, left-facing it’s an ancient religious icon which symbolized good luck. Two sides of one coin, the number thirty-three. Two blonde girls who trace an old pentagram with their first blood. Two death cards in one deck. Mother and father. The beginning and the end. This is when she “stands before the gates of hell.” This is when the gates of hell open to let the monsters escape. As they are minutes out from Lakehurst, this is when Alisabeth levitates Megan through the ceiling and on one of the steel girders inside the big airship to presents here with a final gift, the Leviathan she’s freed from hell. For the doors to stay open, she needs Megan’s powers. This was her game all along, and Megan went with it, she had allowed her sister to corrupt her. This is when Ian shows up who fires at the beast because it’s what Alisabeth needs him to do, this is why she has left his service revolver with him. One last sacrifice. All will be over soon. As they rush towards Armageddon, this is when Megan turns away. As the ship explodes around them, she and Ian make it out alive. This is not the end, Megan knows, but she knows something else: “When next we meet, when next I behold Alisabeth’s face, when next she tries to open her gate, she will find a fellow damned sorceress there to bar her way. The title that was mine by gift is now mine by right. I am Lady Daemon and I will prevail.” She didn’t, however. This was her only appearance. In America, in the world of the 1980s, if people believed at all, they believe in a sharp distinction between good and evil, but as we learned from the first page and from Lady Daemon’s origin, such a line didn’t exist. In a strange twist of fate, Martin Goodman, the publisher of what would become Marvel Comics, was to be on the Hindenburg. But when he and his wife couldn’t secure two seats next to each other, he decided that they would take a plane to America instead. As for Ian, his skepticism separated him from Megan, only that Megan didn’t want him to believe. But Lady Daemon, she knew. It was “too late, he believed.”

Author Profile

Chris Buse

A comic book reader since 1972. When he is not reading or writing about the books he loves or is listening to The Twilight Sad, you can find Chris at his consulting company in Germany... drinking damn good coffee. Also a proud member of the ICC (International Comics Collective) Podcast with Al Mega and Dave Elliott.

Latest entries

• ColumnsDecember 30, 2020“FORGET THE NIGHT AHEAD” – WITHOUT FEAR, PART 1
• ColumnsDecember 16, 2020“I WANT TO BELIEVE” – THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, PART 5
• ColumnsNovember 25, 2020“HE STILL INSISTS HE SEES THE GHOSTS“ THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, PART 4
• ColumnsNovember 11, 2020“WHATEVER WALKED THERE, WALKED ALONE” THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT, PART 3