Donald F. Glut began his comic writing career in the late1960s with the Warren horror comics. This was good training, for he would pen some of the best Gold Key comics of the 1970s. His line-up of Tragg and the Sky-Gods, Tales of Sword and Sorcery as well as The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor form an interlacing saga in which these characters appear together, a Don Glut multiverse. Dr. Spektor appeared for the first time in Mystery Comics Digest #5 (July 1972) with “Of Inhuman Bondage”, drawn by Dan Spiegle. Spektor’s final Gold Key appearance (not counting reprints) was “Dragon Fire” in issue #24 (February 1977). Spektor would hang around Gold Key as a host of horror comics (all reprints) but his ghost-busting days were at an end until 2014 when he was revamped by Mark Waid for a four-part mini-series. Donald F. Glut would go onto write comics for all the big houses including Marvel, DC, Archie and Charlton, as well as respected horror non-fiction, novels, television shows and motion pictures. He is a writer who has shown a love of the fantastic throughout his career. We are pleased to talk with him about Dr. Spektor in particular.
Dark Worlds Quarterly: The 1970s was a time of great interest in the Occult. What influence did that trend have on the creation of Doctor Spektor? What was his origin as an idea and a comic?
Donald F. Glut: I was writing stand-alone horror stories for Gold Key’s Mystery Comics Digest. One day I thought I’d introduce an original host character. Gold Key already had various hosts to introduce stories, including real-life Boris Karloff and Rod Serling as well as the witch from Grimm’s Ghost Stories. Popular at the time were host characters like “Dr. Graves” over at Charlton, Warren’s Uncle Creepy, Cousin Eerie and Vampirella, and so forth. I think my greatest influence, though, was Jerry Grandenett’s “Secret Files of Dr. Drew” feature that appeared in Fiction House’s pre-Comics Code Ghost Comics. All these elements sort of melded together when I came up with Dr. Spektor, a guy I saw as owning a vast collection of supposedly true occult accounts in his files. Visually, his garb was certainly influenced by that worn by Barnabas Collins, the Dark Shadows vampire star. I was (and still am) a big fan of the original DS and various elements from that series still crop up in some of my writings.
DWQ: Doctor Spektor is part of long tradition of ghostbreakers going back at least as far as Dr. Martin Hesselius (1872), a line that includes Dr. Abraham van Helsing, John Silence, Jules de Grandin as well as comic book doctors such Dr. Occult and Stephen Strange. How much did this legacy influence the creation of Dr. Adam Spektor?
DFG: I always saw Spektor as a kind of combination of Van Helsing and Sherlock Holmes. I was aware of Dr. Occult and had read a lot of Dr. Strange’s adventures. Strange may have been an influence of sorts, being a wealthy and somewhat stuffy expert at what he did, living in a sanctum sanctorum with lots of weird artifacts. The name I’m sure was inspired by DC’s Spectre superhero, although they were not pronounced exactly the same.
DWQ: Lakota Rainflower seems like an interesting choice for a Watsonesque sidekick. She is Scully to Spektor’s Mulder, but like all Watsons she tends to play sounding board for Spektor. She is also a love interest. What is the story of her creation? You have quite a multi-cultural cast in your comics. Was this a hard sell with Gold Key or their idea?
DFG: Good question and I’ll answer the last part first. My Gold Key editors had no problem with me introducing Asian characters, even (as they used to say in those less enlightened times) “Yellow Peril” stereotypes, into the books; hence, Dr. Tong and his daughter Lu-Sai. But it was difficult indeed getting Black characters into the stories. The Gold Key editors were always afraid of using Blacks (aside from their jungle titles like Tarzan and Brothers of the Spear). They seemed to be genuinely afraid that the African-American community (wasn’t called that back then) would find offense in something we did and might – I’m not making this up! – riot and “burn down the building.” Compounding the problem was that one of the people in charge at the office was kind of a racist who, at least once in my presence, very emotionally used the “N” word. So it was a major coup that I was able to add characters like Elliot Kane and Torgus (in Dagar) to my rosters. As for Lakota, she was originally imagined by me as half Native and half Irish with the name Lakota O’Brien. My editor Del Connell, to his great credit, thought that was a sort of cop-out and suggested we make her 100 per cent Native American. And yes, I thought she played quite well against Spektor. Their relationship was very personal, based largely upon that of my then-girlfriend and myself.
DWQ: The comic book features many classic monsters such as Frankenstein’s Adam, mummies, Mr. Hyde, werewolves, vampires, beast men. You’ve written novels about Frankenstein’s Monster beginning with Frankenstein Lives Again! (1977) and non-fiction books like The Dracula Book (1975) and The Frankenstein Catalog (1984). Obviously these creatures fascinate you. Why? You love to team them up against Adam Spektor. Does this speak to old films like The House of Frankenstein (1944)?
DFG: Yes, I’ve loved those classic-monster type characters since I, as a pre-teens kid, first discovered their movies. It also speaks of the continuity and crossings-over found in Marvel and DC Comics, the stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, etc. I’ve always loved that sort of thing, having characters from different venues meet and interact. And I’ve always had the literary conceit that all (or at least most) of the stories I wrote, regardless of company or medium, coexisted within the same universe. I have a new novel Frankenstein: The Final Horror, which (I hope) will finally be published this year – by Bill Cunningham’s Pulp 2.0 Press – that winds up forever my old “New Adventures of Frankenstein” series that began with Frankenstein Lives Again! If you read between the lines in that novel, there are explanations for the various other appearances of the Monster in some of my comic book stories. And all of them relate to The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor.
DWQ: In the first Doctor Spektor story “Cult of the Vampire” the doctor saves a vampire from his curse, showing that Spektor is not one who hates all creatures supernatural. Was this a conscience decision to make the Doctor a man who walks on both sides of the darkness or was it Gold Key wanting less violence because the comics were for kids? How much latitude were you given with the horror elements?
DFG: Gold Key had nothing to do with that. I was just trying to tell a good and original story. Curing vampire Baron Tibor was entirely my own idea. I handed in a full-length script for that first issue and, to the editors’ surprise (and dismay), it featured Spektor as a character. I did not pitch a plot synopsis first, which was the usual way I did stories for that company. If they liked the plot, they’d give me the green light to write the script. But this particular story took the editors completely off guard. What they expected was a book comprising several stand-alone stories, each hosted by Spektor as narrator, the kind that had been appearing in Mystery Comics Digest. But I wanted the new book to feature the Doc participate in actual adventures. And no, I wasn’t thinking of Spektor and walking both sides – but a man fascinated by the supernatural and hungry to learn everything he could about that subject. Curing Baron Tibor was more of a learning experience and challenge than succumbing to any dark forces.
DWQ: You first included a descendent of van Helsing in “Dracula’s Vampire Legion”, making him a “supernatural bounty hunter”. He acts as an antagonist in several tales. Why did you decide to make a vampire, Baron Tibor, one of Spektor’s sidekicks, while the kin of van Helsing is more of a villain?
It was just an idea I had at the time. I wanted to bring in a colorful Van Helsing character to maintain some continuity with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But if I brought in a “typical” character bearing that family name, he’d be pretty much the same as Spektor. So, to be different, I made him a bounty hunter with a rather crude personality. I figured the readers, when seeing the name Van Helsing, would expect him to be someone like the character in the novel or in the movie versions. I thought portraying the descendant as a total opposite would be a refreshing surprise.
DWQ: Beginning with “I…Werewolf” Doctor Spektor became afflicted with lycanthropy. This sub-plot lasted for three issues. You tied this plot in with Simbar, the Lord of the Lions, a different type of shape-shifter and Jungle Lord. Was there a plan to give Simbar his own comic?
DFG: In my mind, yes. I really liked the Simbar character – who first appeared in a stand-alone Mystery Comics Digest story — and argued more than once with my editor to give him his own book. I thought Simbar as a character had a fair amount of potential. But it never happened.
DWQ: Doctor Spektor is the character that ties all your Gold Key series together (Tragg, Dagar, Man of the Atom, etc.). You wrote back-up stories for the main Dr. Spektor plotline. These first appeared as individual stories, but later they became background tales filling in your Gold Key universe. Was this planned from the beginning or did it just happen organically?
DFG: Organically as I recall. As I wrote more and more of those stories, I started getting ideas for tying them all together…the same U.S. Marshall reappearing in different stories, and so forth — In my mind they all existed in the same universe – which also included comics stories I wrote for other companies, my own prose short stories and novels, and later even my movies. Read some of my Frankenstein novels or some of the comics I wrote for DC, Marvel and Charlton, and you’ll find references to the Dark Gods and so forth. That was a lot of fun to do. I wonder if someone in the distant future, with way too much time on his or her hands, might figure out how all of these tales relate to one another.
DWQ: Your love of Victorian supernatural fiction is obvious with characters from Shelley, Polidori, Prest, Stoker, Stevenson, Le Fanu, as well non-fiction as mentioned in “A Tour of Spektor Manor” with such weirdies as Montague Summers, Sabine Baring-Gould, Dudley Wright and Sir Ernest Budge. Are you a fan of H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Cycle? The mention of a Demonomicon seems to suggest this as well as “The Loch of the Leviathan” features a Scottish squidgy rather than the more familiar Loch Ness Monster. The Ruthvenian, first mentioned in “Dracula’s Vampire Legion”, is a little like a vampire Necronomicon, and Ostellon’s Dark Gods seem vaguely Lovecraftian. The scenes of Prince Zagron fighting Neffron in “When the Gods Collide” seem almost Tolkienesque. Howardian, at the very least. What modern writers inspired you?
DFG: You are correct about the Victorian. My next movie, following Tales of Frankenstein (now in post-production) will be a modern-day story featuring Carmilla. And I only recently caught up with The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel, which I’d never read before. The books I mentioned in Spektor’s collection are also on my shelf. I liked what Lovecraft did with his continuity and mythologies very much and those were certainly big influences on my Spektor (and other) stories. The Dark Gods idea surely was inspired by Lovecraft’s “Old Ones” mythos. But I haven’t read many of his stories. The writing style is not really my cup of tea. Yes, the Ruthvenian – which more recently turned up in my Countess Dracula movies – as well as the Demonomicon were certainly inspired by Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. My hope was that one or both of my fictitious book titles would enter the “public domain” of supernatural fiction and that other authors would use them as a prop in their own writings. I never read Tolkien and the movies put me to sleep, again not to my tastes, so no influence on “When Gods Collide.” But the title was definitely a take-off on George Pal’s movie When Worlds Collide. The basic idea was probably more inspired by the “Tales of Asgard” series in Marvel’s Thor comic books.
DWQ: Jesse Santos provided the artwork for your Dr. Spektor comics. You even gave him a special nod in “The Painter of Doom” with your forger character copying a “Santos”. What was your working relationship like with Jesse? Did you ever meet in person? How did your collaboration work?
DFG: Surprisingly, it was not I but editor Del Connell who slipped the name Santos into that story. That was a trick I usually used back when we writers and artists weren’t getting credits at Gold Key, a way to prove I’d written a story. Jesse and I met quite a few times when he was in the LA area. He lived up in San Jose, California. I was down in Studio City at the time, many miles away. We worked mainly by ourselves. I would turn my scripts in at the Gold Key offices in Hollywood, then Del, after doing his edit on them would mail them off to Jesse. Frequently I sent picture references to Jesse directly.
DWQ: Reading over these comics, I see you used certain ideas that are currently popular, such as a skeptic and a believer (The X-Files), synthetic blood for vampires (True Blood), supernatural bounty hunters (Supernatural), and a Vampire Bible (The Strain). Do you laugh when you see these programs and think, “I was there first!” Can you enjoy the current run of supernatural movies and television?
DFG: To be honest, I haven’t seen most of those shows and was never much of a fan of The X-Files. I did watch a few episodes of Supernatural, but it seemed like the same old TV format of so many other shows. Never saw The Strain or True Blood. I just don’t have the time to get hooked on many TV shows with continuing story lines that never seem to go anywhere. I finally saw an episode of The Walking Dead and it was mostly, like way too many of these current shows, just a lot of talk that didn’t advance the plot – with just one zombie, that got killed off at the beginning. And frankly I’m really tired of zombies, at least the non-Voodoo variety that now defines the word.
DWQ: Dark Horse and Dynamite have recently resurrected some of the great Gold Key comics for new fans. I know back in the day many dismissed the Gold Keys as being less worthy than the usual DC and Marvel fare, but as I’ve grown older it simply hasn’t proven true for me. What do you think makes these comics an enduring part of comics history?
DFG: I can only speak for the ones I wrote. I tried my best to make Spektor, Dagar, Tragg, etc. behave like real people, especially Spektor. That was a very personal character for me, as I based him somewhat on my own personality. I think that constituted a large part of the Doc’s appeal. Now he seems to be enjoying a “second wind,” discovered by older readers who’d never even heard of him back when they were young Marvel and DC chauvinists. But I loved writing the Spektor book. Although I have been recently supplying The Creeps magazine with new comics scripts, I don’t want to go back to writing comic books full time. I’m too busy making movies with my new company Pecosborn Productions, the latest being Tales of Frankenstein. But in Spektor’s case, I’d make an exception. I did campaign to revive the character with Dark Horse when that company was reprinting the series. My “master plan” was to write a graphic novel set today. It would open with Spektor, now an old man, climbing out of the Dark Gods’ Hell where he’d been imprisoned since the late 1970s, with all of his friends – including a returned Lakota, whose departure would be explained – held in stasis, never aging. Spektor would battle and unequivocally defeat the Dark Gods. As a reward, the Warrior Gods would both restore him to his 1970s age, but also release his friends – and we’d be back to the status quo, with Spektor and the rest of the gang back doing their usual thing. Then, that out of the way and everything back to “normal,” I could turn the character over to another writer who could do a new ongoing series…or do that series myself. But it never happened. FYI, when the original book was canceled, I’d written an origin story for Spektor flashing back to the 1950s. The script was paid for and edited. And I still have it. I think it would be nice to see that story drawn and published someday. Well, one can hope!
And maybe also hard to justify some of it!!
DWQ: Thanks for talking with us, Don.
For more discussion from Donald Glut on the subject of Doctor Spektor, check out Charles R Rutledge’s interview at Occult Detective Quarterly #2, now on sale.
