Marvel Tales #117 (August 1953) offered us a strange Northern called “Terror in the North”. The author is not known but the classic artwork is by Don Perlin. An American named Marsh is in Quebec to hunt. He and a French Canadien find a body on the side of the road.
The Canuck tells him it is the work of a werewolf. Marsh is critical, calling the tales of the loup-garou superstitious nonsense. They retrieve the body and take it to the village. The villagers are huddled together in one cabin. The dead man is Paul Dubois and his throat has been ripped out. Marsh insists it is the work of a timber wolf. The villagers feel differently. They say Paul was lucky he died. If he had been bitten but not killed, he would have become a werewolf too.
There is talk of silver bullets and wolfbane but Marsh is having none of it. If the villagers are too afraid, he isn’t. He marches out into the storm and begins hunting the wolf.
The American goes back to the spot where they found Paul Dubois. Marsh follows the tracks for an hour before setting up a tent. He will sleep until the storm has blown out. The man feels jittery, looking behind him with a pocket mirror. He has a drink from a flask then falls asleep.
The wolf hunter wakes to find he has been bitten. In the mirror he can see the wolf outside the tent. His fear of werewolves, despite all his talk, drives him to put a gun in his mouth before he can become a werewolf. Too bad for Mr. Marsh…the wolf is just a wolf.
Not the most clever of werewolf stories but it does have the usual sense of irony of Marvel Tales. The setting in Quebec is typical, in that Canadians are portrayed as living in cabins while Americans are slicker. These kind of cliches will continue all through the 1960s and 1970s. (I think John Byrne might even have used them in the 1980s!) Northerns with werewolves are actually rarer than you think. S. Carleton’s “The Lame Priest” and “Clasp of Rank”, Algernon Blackwood’s “Running Wolf”, Sewell Peaslee Wright’s “The Wolf” in Weird Tales, are probably the best ones. It seems like such a likely pairing that I am surprised there aren’t hundreds of them.
