This is the second in a series of two posts about American comic book characters who have their roots in Canadian comic books. For part one, click here.
One of my favorite comic titles in the 1980s and beyond was a book about a character called Mr. Monster! Mr. Monster was the creation of Michael T. Gilbert, who usually wrote and usually drew the hero's adventures.
Mr. Monster generally eschewed time-honored methods of monster disposal -- silver bullets, wooden stakes, holy water, exorcisms, etc. -- and instead, often blasted away with two Colt .45s! Each story -- there were often two or more per issue -- featured plenty of slam-bang action, with a decidedly twisted, humorous slant. That doesn't mean that there weren't moments of poignancy, I must stress.
(It's a shame, by the way, that I can only tell you what charms certain comics hold or held for me, since I try to avoid fully reprinting copyrighted stories. I can only hope that, if you are a comic book fan, you'll seek out whatever I've mentioned... titles, characters, stories, artists, writers, etc.!)
(It's a shame, by the way, that I can only tell you what charms certain comics hold or held for me, since I try to avoid fully reprinting copyrighted stories. I can only hope that, if you are a comic book fan, you'll seek out whatever I've mentioned... titles, characters, stories, artists, writers, etc.!)
And now, in order to avoid my usual long-windedness, I'll instead present a Mr. Monster cover gallery!
A two-part crossover with the Airboy character.... One of the examples
of "poignancy" which I mentioned earlier. Highly recommended!
"But," you may be asking -- and even if you're not, I'm gonna tell you anyway -- "where did the idea for Mr. Monster come from?"
I'll let Michael T. Gilbert tell you himself!
"Mike
Friedrich, my agent, got me a gig doing an eight-page story for another
Pacific title, Vanguard Illustrated. The comic was an anthology with
numerous features, and they told me to come up with a new character.
Time was short, so I went to my trusty comic collection to see if
anything there would spark my imagination. That’s when I found Mr.
Monster.
Actually, I found him a decade earlier at the 1971 New York Comic
Convention, when I’d stumbled upon a coverless 1947 comic starring a
weird monster-fighting hero called Mr. Monster, written and drawn by
Fred Kelly, a Canadian cartoonist. I later found out that this comic,
Super Duper Comics #3, featured the only full story starring the Golden
Age Mr. Monster. It was printed by Bell Publishing, a Canadian company,
shortly before they went out of business... I remember buying it for
fifty cents and thinking, “Boy, this would be such a cool character to
bring back!” Now I had the chance to do just that, only reinventing him
for the 80s... And that’s
how Mr. Monster began."
Here's a shot of Mr. Monster from the cover of 1947's Super Duper Comics #3! It may look a tad familiar, as that Super Duper Comics cover was also shown in our last installment
And here's one of the issues in which MTG established that
the 1947 Mr. Monster was the father of the current version!
Here, once again, is the cover to Super Duper Comics #3...
And here is the complete Mr. Monster story that inspired Michael T. Gilbert!
