Friday, November 18, 2011

Dark Shadows Writers: Full Update

Updating my earlier post, here's a writers' index of the entire run of Gold Key's Dark Shadows; thanks go to darkmark for my seeing the issues filling in the first half of the list. The artist was Joe Certa.

Dark Shadows 8 panel with dialogue: '...have you read Arneson's account of witchcraft and voodooism in New England?'

D. J. Arneson had an uninterrupted 17-issue tenure on the feature (and then one more issue). This article by Jeff Thompson quotes editor Wallace Green on  how, after finishing the first issue's script, Arneson had to hustle with six more pages—they went with an epilogue instead of a second story—when it was decided to publish the issue with no ads.

Arneson is probably best known for graphic novels (as they had yet to be labeled in the Sixties) like The Great Society Comic Book, bylined along with artist Tony Tallarico. With Bill Fraccio's and Tallarico's art at Dell, he wrote the monster superheroes, Frankenstein, Dracula, and Werewolf; I misattributed those books' uncredited scripting some time ago to Don Segall.

To touch very briefly upon writers' styles here, when the scream "Augh" appears for the first time in the series in issue 18, I know that John Warner has come aboard; he's the only one of these four early-70s Gold Key writers to use that particular exclamation (although not in his every issue).

The issue numbers in boldface indicate the ones new to this update.

Dark Shadows Writers

Mar/69#1 The Vampire's PreyD. J. Arneson
Aug/69#2 The Fires of DarknessArneson
Nov/69#3 Return for RevengeArneson
Feb/70#4 The Man Who Could Not DieArneson
May/70#5 The Curse of Collins IsleArneson
Aug/70#6 Awake to EvilArneson
Nov/70#7 Wings of FearArneson
Feb/71#8 The Vampire TrapArneson
May/71#9 Creatures in TormentArneson
Aug/71#10 Souls in BondageArneson
Nov/71#11 The Thirteenth StarArneson
Feb/72#12 The GloveArneson
Apr/72#13 HellfireArneson
Jun/72#14 The Mystic PaintingArneson
Aug/72#15 The Night ChildrenArneson
Oct/72#16 The ScarabArneson
Dec/72#17 The Bride of Barnabas CollinsArneson
Feb/73#18 Guest in the HouseJohn David Warner
Apr/73#19 Island of Eternal LifeArneson
Jun/73#20 Quentin the VampireWarner
Aug/73#21 The Crimson CarnivalGerry Boudreau
Oct/73#22 Seed of EvilArnold Drake
Dec/73#23 The Cult of the DasniWarner
Feb/74#24 On Borrowed BloodDrake
Apr/74#25 The ImmortalWarner
Jun/74#26 The Witch DollsDrake
Aug/74#27 My Blood or YoursDrake
Oct/74#28 The VisitorWarner
Dec74#29 Stolen CenturiesWarner
Feb/75#30 The Weekend Witch HuntersDrake
May/75#31 The Doom of Helgi KolnissonWarner
Jun/75#32 The Secret of the LighthouseWarner
Aug/75#33 King of the WolvesDrake
Nov/75#34 Collinwood PossessedWarner
Feb/76#35 The Missing ManuscriptWarner

4 comments:

  1. Martin,

    Thanks for sharing this information. As someone who bought many of the original issues off the stands its good to know who the authors were. Growing up I was a big fan of the show, and it was a thrill to see a comic book out devoted to the series, even if it didn't use all the charactrers and changed a few things. Joe Certa had a distinctive style which I like quite a bit.

    Marvel or DC couldn't have published a DS comic at that point, since vampires were restricted by the Comics Code, but it would have been interesting to see what someone like Roy Thomas (also a fan of the show) and Gene Colan could have done with the series.

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  2. At least Roy got to do "Darn Shadows" with Marie Severin in Spoof #1.

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  3. What a great contribution to comics history! Well done, Martin. So often the writers in comics are overlooked.

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  4. Thanks, Mykal. It's mind-boggling that the practice of leaving writers and artists uncredited in the books themselves didn't really die out for half a century. (Off the top of my head I figure Harvey for the last straggler, in the mid-Eighties.)

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