Tales of the Zombie - Marvel Magazine

[andydecker]

(Tales of the) Zombie #1 (Marvel Comics, 1973, Magazine, bw, 76 pages)

Cover: Boris Vallejo

Marvel's black and white magazine offensive in 1973 focused mostly on horror comics, branded as "Marvel Monster Group". Published bi-monthly, nearly all of the series were cancelled after two years or earlier. The line-up over the time was Dracula Lives! (13 issues), Monster's Unleashed (11 issues), Vampire Tales (11 issues), Monster Madness (3 issues), The Haunt of Horror (5 issues), Savage Tales (11 issues) and (Tales of the) Zombie (10 issues). They were joined by Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction (5 Issues), Kull and the Barbarians (3 issues), Crazy (3 issues), Marvel Preview (24 issues), The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (33 issues), Planet of the Apes (29 issues) and Savage Sword of Conan (235 issues).


Tales of the Zombie (listed only as Zombie in many databases) concentrates on, well, the Zombie. Created a few years before George Romero's Dawn of the Dead its concepts hark back to the old zombie movies. As this is Marvel and the book needed a recurring hero – or in this case anti-hero – Roy Thomas and staff created Simon Garth, the Zombie. Or rather re-imagined, as the zombie-character was originally created for an old Atlas pre-code horror story in the 50s by Stan Lee and Bill Everett.

In the new version, ill-fated Garth is your typical tyrannical white business man in New Orleans who beats his gardener after the man tries to molest Garth's daughter. Seeking vengeance, the gardener kills Garth and with the help of a voodoo sect transforms him into a zombie. Controlled by a mystical amulet Garth is condemned to shuffle through the swamp or the city, forced to do the bidding of the current amulet owner. His only help is the voodoo-priestess Layla who is responsible for his transformation and tries to protect him.

Not the best concept in terms of universe building as the hero was just a dead puppet. Marvel's hip writers of the time were also a bit infatuated with the second person point of view, which didn't help either, elevating the overwritten scripts often to an even more pretentious and/or silly level.

Your typical issue was a great cover by Vallejo and later Earl Norem, a Simon Garth story with great artwork by artists like Pablo Marcos or Tony De Zuniga, in later issues a Brother Voodoo story, a few dull articles, pre-code Atlas reprints and some random so-so zombie stories.

From today's viewpoint it is understandable why this was more of a misfire than a success. It doesn't work very well. (And after Romero's movie which changed the genre it is very old-fashioned and tame.) Considering Marvel's  exhaustive reprint program of old comics this one isn't even available as a digital edition, even in print the series was only collected in one of the Essential Marvel which is long OOP. That says a lot. Not much love for the magazine. The Simon Garth stories tried to be edgy with some violence and pseudo-nudity, but basically they repeat themselves endlessly, which make them pretty dull over the time. As the hero is only a supernatural prop, they stand and fall with the newly created characters and circumstances. The art is sometimes inspired, though.