I mentioned in my earlier post today that there was a Marvel comics adaptation of "The Thing on the Roof" in issue #3 of Chamber of Chills (March 1973), scripted by Roy Thomas (of Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan fame, among many others) and drawn by Frank Brunner. Here's the cover – and, no, nothing like this happens in either the story or the adaptation.
The adaptation is broadly faithful to Howard's story, though it eliminates the first part of it, where Tussmann comes to the narrator (here given the name of Mr Erwin rather than being unnamed) and asks his help in procuring a copy of the 1839 edition of Nameless Cults, instead launching straight into the narrator's visit to Tussmann's Sussex manor. It's also a bit more melodramatic, adding little flourishes here and there that I assume were intended to heighten the tension and horror of the tale.
Likewise, the comic ends with an actual revelation of the creature that is responsible for Tussmann's demise, something Howard intentionally leaves vague:
I can certainly see why Thomas and Brunner decided to depict the unseen Thing on the Roof, but, as is so often the case, I'm not sure it could ever have done justice to anyone's imagination of what the creature looked like. In any case, I'm nonetheless pleased to draw your attention to another comic book adaptation of a pulp writer. I think the role comics, especially Marvel comics, played in introducing a new generation to the works writers from decades before. Come to think of it, that'd a worthy topic for a post all its own ...
I was probably five when I came across a small stack of Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery from Gold Key Comics in my grandmother's house. I think they had been left behind by visiting cousins. I don't recall any of its stories being adapted from the old pulps, but I'd argue that those books gave me a great sense of the pulps that I'd come upon later, even though they were simpler and less scary than whatever Marvel was doing at the time. (although I wonder: Karloff likely would have kept the monster "off screen" had they done "The Thing on the Roof.")
ReplyDeleteKarloff was a great current, active and direct link to the pulps, considering that in addition to iconically playing Frankenstein from the pulp era, he also portrayed Imhotep in The Mummy, which was a soft adaptation of the gaslight pulp The Ring of Thoth combined with the self-proclaimed wizard occultist (and conman) Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, as well as the direct-from-pulps Man they Couldn't Hang.
But the fact that he was still working (in the iconic horror movie Targets, the Grinch) throughout the 1960s, and then, from beyond the grave for 10 more years throughout the 1970s as the "host" and narrator of the new stories, really did a lot to keep the pulps current. Vincent Price did this to a lesser degree, but he didn't become iconic until the 1950s, during the rapid decline of the pulps.
Between comics like Karloff and probably Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle cartoons on Saturday morning, the pulps were refreshed and non-canonized throughout the 70s, at least.