The ' Lost ' Tales Of The Zombie

Here's a treat for fans of Marvel's Bronze Age shambling zombie, Simon Garth.
In the 9th issue of TOTZ, you would be mistaken for thinking the adventures of our putrefying pal were over. Garth had been granted one day back on earth, and then returned to the peace of the grave, never to rise again. Or to put it another way: Unleashed from hell for 24 hours!!!

But no, there was at least one more story to be told, scripted by Gerry Conway, and with art by Rico Rival, ' The Partial Resurrection Of Simon Garth ' was due to appear in the very next issue.
But when issue 10 rolled around, no Zombie was to be seen, only an admittedly very good Brother Voodoo piece courtesy of Doug Moench & Tony DeZuniga. It turns out that Rival's artwork somehow got lost somewhere in between Honolulu & Guam, leading to all kinds of rush repairs being done to fill a whole issue without it's title character.
The ' next issue ' blurb for TOTZ # 11 promises faithfully that the strip will appear:

But neither it, nor the next issue, ever did.
BUT some of those pages have finally appeared on the net! Here, after 30 odd years, finally, is the first 15 pages of this legendarily lost strip: Enjoy, and if anyone has any more pages, you know what to do.

Tales Of The Zombie

Long, long, long before The Walking Dead shambled their way into our comic stores & TV's, and started a wave of Zombiemania that shows no signs of abating, the mindless corpse of Simon Garth wandered his undead way through ten issues of his own b / w horror mag from Marvel.
Here, let Tony ( The Tiger ) Isabella tell you all about it, from that world screamiere, fantastic, fear-filled first issue:

And here's Wild Bill's original Zombie ( with retouched scraggly hair and narration ), along with Big John's new & improved '70's version:

Soul-less Simon was mostly written by Steve Gerber, who was a genius at writing mindless, speechless characters and making you care about them. ( See also Man-Thing ) Pablo Marcus did the art, in great gruelly, drooly, sickly wash tones that reeked of decay and rot.

The Zombie strip itself was always kind of directionless, with Garth wandering around at the mercy of whoever had hold of the amulet of Damballah ( that being the thing that could control him ), and with only brief glimpses of his original self poking through. But he's a zombie, how motivated can he be?

This was a terrifying, forbidden strip for a Bronze Age kid ( see previous post about issue 7, which gave little me nightmares for months ) though, sad to say, the rest of the book wasn't that great, consisting of '50's reprints and movie articles ( to help cut costs ), and fairly soon, the limitations of a regular book about nothing but zombies began to show.

But the main strip itself was fantastic, and even came to a resolution in the last story, where Simon Garth is granted one day of life once more, to put his affairs in order, and return to the piece of the grave.

Here's Gerber & Marcos in fine form with the wonderfully titled  A Death Made Out Of Ticky-Tacky:

Marvel did actually bring Simon Garth back a few years ago for their Max series, by the way, in two Romero influenced mini-series by Kyle Hotz, and these are great, nasty fun also.

Earl Norem

A major part of the Marvel black & white mags, and therefore of my own particular Bronze Age, were the glorious cover paintings by Earl Norem, who seemed to contribute to just about every title in the line.
Earl had previously toiled in the 'Men's Sweat' magazines, contributing magnificent work like this:

And this:

But even if we hadn't known that's where he earned his chops, you could kind of tell from his Marvel covers anyway. His figures have absolute weight and reality, and are just this side of over the top. Here's some of my favourites: