Supernatural Thrillers Featuring THE LIVING MUMMY

I love the approach Marvel took to its Bronze Age horror comics, putting the monsters front and center as stars of their own titles. Of course, the big three dominated--Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, and Frankenstein Monster. But there were plenty of second-tier titles. Mostly, these seem to have begun as anthology series, featuring different monsters every issue, until some monster struck a chord and came to dominate the title. So Adventures into Fear essentially became Man-Thing, and later Morbius, and Creatures on the Loose concluded on a Man-Wolf run. The Living Mummy made his first appearance as a one-off in Supernatural Thrillers #5, sandwiched between one-offs about Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in issue 4 and the Headless Horseman in issue 6. Writer Steve Gerber and artist Rich Buckler deliver a fun, however by-the-numbers mummy yarn, complete with flashbacks to ancient Egypt and a rampage through modern Cairo.

Swathed in all those rotting bandages, mummies sure look awesome. I'm pretty sure that's the core of their appeal--their striking visual presence. Considering the lackluster lineup of monsters from previous issues, it's hardly surprising that the Living Mummy got slotted into the star position "by popular demand!"

Cool as they look, though, do mummies really lend themselves to ongoing series? Gerber seems out of ideas already with this launch of the character's official starring run. He rehashes the events of the prior issue at great length, including the whole ancient backstory, and sends the mummy on yet another rampage, this time in New York. On a more positive note, Val Mayerik picks up the art chores. Where Buckler's mummy was basically a big guy in bandages, Mayerik's is more monstrous, showing signs of dessication and decay, and doing a lot more shambling.

This story, and Gerber's stint, concludes with the mummy disappearing into an alley, leaving things wide-open for whatever might come next.

Tony Isabella picks up the writing for the next installment. I think the opening pages actually look quite promising, with their suggestion of a distinctly groovy psychedelic direction:

Alas, Isabella drops this turd in our laps:

These supposedly scary elemental gods never come off as anything but an incredibly lame supervillain gang. They're some of the weakest, most uninspired shit I've ever seen a storyteller pull out of his ass. And with that, the series is fucked, because these bozos are the main villains the rest of the way out.

In this next issue, it gets even worse. Apparently, there's another Egypt-themed character in the Marvel Universe--one of the X-Men's lowest-tier and most forgettable villains, a mutant calling himself the Living Pharaoh. He's as broad a stereotype as you can imagine, with a small army of flunkies costumed like the palace slaves who fan the princess with palm-fronds in any B-movie you've ever seen with an ancient Egyptian setting. If Living Mummy jumped the shark in the previous issue, it crash-lands in this one, and never gets back up.

Was this a tragically missed opportunity? Could another writer have crafted a much better horror series around the mummy--one that actually aimed at horror, instead of whatever they were aiming for here (I honestly have no idea what they were thinking with the direction they took)? Or is a mummy just too limited to serve as the starring monster character in an ongoing series?

Whatever the case, at least the covers were pretty decent, for the most part. Here are the rest of them: