Island of the Damned! (Marvel Spotlight #4) (1972)

HALLOWEEN REVIEWS 2025

Writer: Gerry Conway

Artist: Mike Ploog 

Buck Cowan, a writer who is researching a piece about “the new interest in the occult,” informs Jack Russell that his stepfather has sold the family’s European castle to a mysterious man called Blackgar, who has transported it to and rebuilt it on an island off the Monterey coast.

Russell heads for the island, where he hopes to find the mystic tome known as the Darkhold, but the elements don’t cooperate.

Nevertheless, he gets there, if not in the manner he intended.

Things seem pretty suspicious.

Jack makes an ally.

Escaping from confinement, Jack continues his investigation into Blackgar’s activities.

Continuing his search, he discovers the Darkhold…but too late.

Really though, how could someone with his affliction lose track of the time?

Garth, one of Blackgar’s men, finds him, but doesn’t seem to find it strange that a semi-human creature might be running about the premises.

The reason for that soon becomes clear.

As the werewolf leads the revolt, the pattern established in these early stories remains unbroken: he is apparently not that much more powerful than a skilled human, but his opponents always seem to become unnerved when they realize what he is, and that is their undoing.

The werewolf leaves Garth to his fate at the hands of Blackgar’s medical experiments, searching for the forest, but along the way…

Okay, I’m tired of seeing the werewolf portrayed as such a weakling, which is the same reason why I was underwhelmed by the classic Wolf Man movie with Lon Chaney, Jr., in which the lycanthrope was beaten to death by an old man with a silver-headed cane.

With Blackgar out of the way, the werewolf is left alone with Blackgar’s daughter, and he learns who the real “monster” is.

A decent issue, but the way the werewolf is portrayed as so aware, both through thought bubbles and first-person captions that suggest  very human thought processes, shows that Conway may have been struggling with the limitations of the character.