Art by Gil Kane and Al Milgrom

Link: Skull the Slayer: Polemic or Pulp?

1975 saw two things happen almost simultaneously. Marv Wolfman came to Marvel comics and he created Skull the Slayer. Who? Yes, Skull was not the runaway success that Tomb of Dracula was. But it was a project that Marv had thought about for four years before getting to write it. What he wanted to do was take an entire skyscraper full of people and put them in the dinosaur-haunted past. The series would focus on a different character each issue. That idea is at least as old as Murray Leinster’s “The Runaway Skyscraper” (Argosy, February 22, 1919), but Wolfman’s version was a little closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Leinster’s early pulp tale has the skyscraper arrive in Manhattan before Columbus.

Art by Sal Buscema and Sonny Trinidad



A couple of things changed Wolfman’s original idea. First was the popularity of von Daniken’s The Chariot of the Gods (1969) and Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle (1974). The second was Gold Key’s Tragg and the Sky Gods, beginning April 1972, which featured cavemen and dinosaurs with aliens. Thirdly, Stan Lee liked the idea, but insisted on dropping the anthology part for a central character. Wolfman accepted the challenge and created Jim Scully or “Skull,” an ex-Viet Nam hero who has been branded a murderer. Encountering the left overs of a UFO, Scully finds an alien belt that gives him super strength.

Read the rest:

https://www.michaelmay.online/2015/09/skull-slayer-polemic-or-pulp.html

 
#4 now in paperback!
A stunning first novel!
A classic bestseller!

1 Comment Posted

Comments are closed.