Body and Soul
Issues 27-37 of Werewolf by Night are when Moench really hit his stride, after which there was one more multipart storyline (38-41) and an ill-conceived pair of issues that moved the character closer to the superhero genre in what must have been a last-ditch attempt to stave off cancellation (why else would Werewolf by Night have Iron Man as a guest star?). Of these eleven issues, 32 and 33 are probably best remembered as a milestone, since they featured the introduction of Moon Knight (co-created by Moench and longtime Werewolf by Night artist Don Perlin). Issue 31 is an unusually disturbing story in which Jack, Topaz, Buck, Buck’s new girlfriend Elaine and young daughter Buttons are snowed in at a ski resort during the full moon. Buttons gets lost, Jack turns into the werewolf and is about to attack her, before she is saved by Buck, whom the Werewolf mauls and leaves for dead.
To an even greater extent than the “Reddicth” trilogy, the two storylines that bracket the ski resort and Moon Knight issues are fairly complex thematizations of the problem of interiority and selfhood, all through the metaphors of magic. Issues 27-30 finally addresses the long-running question of whether or not Jack’s sister Lissa will become a werewolf at 18 (the answer is yes, although it gets more complicated), while delving further into the character of Topaz thanks to the group’s confrontation with her enemy, a bald sorcerer named “Doctor Glitternight” who emits mystic light from the center of his chest. Glitternight, who (of course) wants to take over the world, tends to do two things with his power: move souls in and out of bodies, and corrupt any soul that falls under his sway.
Created by Marv Wolfman and Mike Ploog in Werewolf by Night 13 (January 1974), Topaz is the blonde, white-skinned adopted daughter of a Punjabi sorcerer named “Taboo” (bonus points to anyone who can effectively decolonize this sentence). She has natural psychic abilities, and quickly develops a rapport with both Jack and the Werewolf. Moench had just returned her to the series right before the Glitternight arc, setting the stage for a possible romantic relationship between Topaz and Jack. In issue 27, she finally explains where she has been and what has happened to her.
After returning to India to try to revive her waning powers, she meets Glitternight, whom she remembers as a colleague of her deceased father, Taboo. Glitternight hypnotizes her, and then draws her soul out of her mouth as ectoplasm. He places it within a large clear egg, which he bathes in his energy to turn it completely opaque. Now her soul has been transformed into a hideous monster, a creature that the Werewolf fights at the very beginning of the issue.
This turns out to be the key motif of the Glitternight story: the evil mage repeatedly takes souls from bodies, incubates them, and transforms them into flesh, in a kind of Satanic inversion of the Christian miracle of Incarnation. He does this to Topaz a second time at the end of issue 27, and this is what emerges:
“It was beyond words, that thing—a slick schemers scene of slimy sordid sin…
"Topaz’ sin.”
In the next issue, we discover that Topaz’s father still exists, as a disembodies spirit. Upon his death, Glitternight found him, did his soul/egg trick, and drew forth his ghost. But where Glitternight usually corrupts the innocent, this time he horrifies the previously villainous Taboo into opposing him:
Taboo: “He proposed the methodical murder of every person on earth—after which he and I would such their souls free—/—to create from them an army of hideous, subservient demons.”
Glitternight’s bizarre alchemy is almost a pathology, or at the very least, a repetition compulsion. He simply cannot tolerate the fact that so many bodies roam the earth, containing souls. Instead, he must kill the bodies, steal their souls, and turn them back into something approach physical matter (i.e., bodies). He must make the interior manifest, but in the process, he must also corrupt it, moulding it into a newly monstrous exterior.
The timing of the group’s conflict with Glitternight could not be worse. Glitternight attacks them just before sunset on the night of the first full moon since Lissa’s 18th birthday. She starts to change, but Topaz and Taboo combine their powers to try to prevent her transformation. Lissa is simultaneously bathed with moonlight and Glitternight’s energy rays at the same time, turning her into something more than an ordinary werewolf. Long-tailed, blue-furred, and bat-eared, with the ability to shoot flames from her eyes, by the end of issue 28 Lisa has become a “were-demon.” It almost goes without saying that she and the Werewolf are going to fight.
The fight takes place over the course of the following issue, providing the perfect vehicle for Moench’s first-person parallel narrative technique. A battle between two nonverbal monsters might well have its visual appeal, and the fight is well-choreographed by Perlin (a talented visual storyteller whose dated style meant that he would never be a fan favorite). [1] But the emotional resonance would have to be supplied by the words.
The stage is set with a thematic splash page that has a giant Were-Demon facing off against the Werewolf as he stands on the stone letters that form the issue’s title (“A Sister of Hell”), in a move straight out of Will Eisner’s The Spirit:
“A nightmare: my little sister Lissa was about ten. I was a few years older. She looked up to me, raising a skinned elbow, and cried for sympathy.
“Years passed. Full moons, hideous and glaring, came and went. Now I looked up at Lissa, but neither wanting nor knowing how to cry. Besides, I”d get no sympathy form the monstrous thing which was once my little sister….
“You see, through the years and under the moon, we had both changed for the worse.”
Two pages later, the narration restates the conflict while also reminding the reader of the Werewolf/Jack’s complicated ontological status:
“It was brother against sister, and not even the Civil War could’ve mustered an equivalently insane frenzy.
“But in all fairness to the werewolf, it must be remembered that the concept and significance of sibling loyalty was alien to him.
“He was a beast—completely unaware that his human alter-ego, Jack Russell (me!) even had a sister…or what that mean tot him/me once the moon went down…
“But as innocent as the werewolf might’ve been, I’ll never forget one screaming truth: the werewolf was me…
“…and I was doing my very best to maul my little sister straight into death and beyond."
A few pages later, the narrator once again frames the Werewolf’s violent fight with the Were-Demon interns of their shared (and temporary forgotten) childhood conflicts:
“Looking back on it all, I get a flash where in this crazy castled hell of sorcery and savagery
“Was reality? Where—?!
“Another nightmare: we would play-fight, Lissa and I, when we were young and stuffed with too much television. She was always the good guy and I was the bad. The roles were locked…
“…and so we’d wrestle around on the living room rug, giggling, panting, more often tickling than fighting.”
[This is a caption floating above a panel showing the Were-Demon slashing the Were-Wolf’s face with her claws]
“One of these sessions stand out more vividly than the others. I had underestimated Lissa’s strength, and she’d succeeded in throwing me off-balance…
“My arm flailed in reflex panic and I struck her across the side of her head. Hard.”
[In this panel the Werewolf mauls the Were-Demon’s face]
“She cried for ten minutes, then demanded that I kiss it better.
“I refused, on the unspoken grounds that it was too mushy and wouldn’t do any good anyway.
“I was wrong.”
Now Glitternight has corrupted and transformed the two women closes to Jack (first Topaz, then Lissa. Glitternight is temporarily captured, both were-creatures survive the night, but they still have to face the following night’s full moon (and Glitternight’s escape from their captivity).
First, though, Jack has a late-afternoon nightmare about a battle between the Werewolf and Were-Demon, but with the human heads of Jack and Lissa. In an inversion of their previous fight, the captions now describe what is actually happening, rather than the past, but this time human-headed Werewolf is “I.” Jack’s perspective is completely subsumed within that of the Werwolf, while the Were-Demon with his sister’s head tries to reassert their original identities: “No, Jack! It’s me—Lissa—!!”
Soon after he wakes, the moon rises, and Jack becomes the Werewolf. Yet now the Werewolf’s motivations are a mix of his and Jack’s, as though following up on the metaphor implied by Jack’s nightmare:
“Sister” was a concept he could never grasp, but the need to find her was trapped somewhere in the transformational void between my id and the beast’s vapid ego…”
The Freudian terminology is jarring here. It superimposes a tripartite notion of the self onto the Jack/Werewolf relationship, although if we see the Werewolf here as a kind of synthesis of himself and Jack, one could stretch the point and say that the result is a triadic self. But the assignment of id to Jack and ego to the Werewolf looks like a mistake—shouldn’t the Werewolf be entirely id, while Jack’s ego is evident in the narration itself? If we give Moench the benefit of the doubt, this distribution of Freudian concepts further supports the muddle that is the Jack/Werewolf identity. Jack calls the Werewolf’s ego “vapid,” and we have already asserted that the beast doesn’t really have a personality, but, on the other hand, the constant slippage between “I” and “the Werewolf” in Jack’s narration is evidence that Jack does not really know where he stops and the wolf begins.
When the Werewolf encounters Lissa, she has already changed into the Were-Demon, and this time Glitternight has drawn forth her soul from her mouth as ectoplasm, transforming it into a yellow and orange glowing leash extending from his chest around her neck. Topaz is aghast, immediately understanding what has happened, and taken aback yet again when the ghost of Taboo announces his decision to sacrifice his own soul to save Lissa. Turning back into ectoplasm, taboo slides into Lissa’s mouth, whereupon she regains human form. [2]
This scenario will play itself out again in the haunted house storying (issue 34-37), where skeletons and skulls are hidden inside houses and statues, souls turn into physical material, and a ghost sacrifices his afterlife to save Buck.[3] Such sacrifices do not result in any changes to Lissa’s or Buck’s personality, despite the substitution of Lissa's original soul with that of an old magician and Buck’s with that of a man long dead. Souls in Werewolf by Night are both utterly individual (the ghost of Taboo has Taboo’s personality) and shockingly fungible: it does not seem to matter whose soul a character has, the important thing is simply to have one. The soul can be a vehicle for subjectivity (Taboo again), but it is also an ethereal substance that magic easily turns material and even impersonal. For a comic steeped in the folk horror traditions of Europe, Werewolf by Night proves almost Buddhist in its separation of the soul from one’s ordinary sense of self. Perhaps Moench’s use of the term “vapid ego” to describe the Werewolf is not as erroneous as it first seems. The Werewolf and Jack share a soul, but it is Jack who has enough sense of self to be able to be somehow co-present with the Werewolf as first-person narrator.
Notes
[1] Perlin’s work on Werewolf by Night (17-43, from March 1974 to March 1977) was some of the best of his long career, aided by the fact that he inked his own pencils.
[2] Lisa is cured of lycanthropy to boot.
[3] This story is a series high point, but an extended analysis would add little that we haven’t already seen.