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In each full year since I started writing this column, I’ve done a report on a memorial commemorating the passing of an important figure in the artform of comics. There was Julius Schwartz in 2004 (in “Comics in Context” #32) and Will Eisner in 2005 (in “Comics in Context” #80 and #81), each of whom had spent over half a century in comics and lived very long lives. This year I’m writing about someone who suddenly died when he was only halfway through his career. My friend Mark Gruenwald, writer of Captain America for ten years and editor of Marvel’s Avengers line of comics, who eventually rose to become the company’s senior executive editor, abruptly succumbed to a cardiac attack on August 12, 1996 at the age of only 43.

There were two memorials for Mark in New York City in 1996. The first, at the Ethical Culture Society, was held shortly after his death. Then there was another, held at the New York Film Academy, which was less an occasion for mourning than a celebration of his life. In retrospect, it also now seems to represent the end of an era. This second memorial was attended by an enormous number of people, more than the Schwartz memorial and far, far more than Eisner’s. It now seems to me to have been the last great gathering of the Boomer generation of the New York comics community. Not just Marvel but the whole American comics industry has changed radically over the subsequent decade. There are now few people still on staff at either Marvel or DC who knew Mark.

But those of us who did know him haven’t forgotten. Including this one, I have written three articles about Mark this year. One will run in TwoMorrows’ Back Issue magazine. I did another, dealing with Mark’s creation of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, for the forthcoming Handbook to the alternative superhero series Invincible; this article may appear in a possible paperback collection.

This year I’ve been holding a lecture series called “1986: The Year That Changed Comics,” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA, at www.moccany.org) in downtown Manhattan. I scheduled my talk about Mark’s finest series, Squadron Supreme, for August since Mark had died ten years ago that month. I suggested to MoCCA that we could also hold a tenth anniversary tribute for Mark, and contacted his widow, Catherine Schuller, who liked the idea. As the lecture date (Monday, August 7) approached, I e-mailed invitations to various friends of Mark’s in the comics business, and encouraged them to invite still others.

The result surpassed my expectations. The night of August 7 became a reunion for so many former Marvel staffers from the 1980s and 1990s, and the museum, which resembles a small art gallery in size, had a standing room only crowd. On his blog (http://www.marvel.com/blogs//entry/383) Marvel editor Tom Brevoort, who attended, observed that “Only Mark could bring together so many expatriate Marvelites after so many years.”

In my “1986” series usually I spend two hours lecturing about that evening’s books, but this night I cut my talk about Squadron Supreme down to a tenth of that length, knowing that the Marvel veterans in the audience far outnumbered the students. But I made my major points nonetheless: that although it was overshadowed in 1986 by works like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, Mark’s Squadron Supreme was also an important reevaluation of the superhero myth. Squadron also proved prophetic for the future development of the genre, and foreshadowed such works as Kingdom Come and even Identity Crisis. Since the superhero is a specifically American construct, then Squadron is an American tragedy, about how people dedicated to the benefit of humanity, with all good intentions, nonetheless compromise their own morality and subvert American ideals and liberty. As I said that night, Squadron takes on new relevance during the current conflict in Iraq. With luck someday I will have the opportunity to write at length about Squadron, a work that is still underappreciated.

As Mark himself once wrote:
Mark’s Remark: “I admit it. The fiction I write is primarily intended for juveniles. But just because it’s for juveniles doesn’t mean it has to be valueless. I try to imbed my juvenile adventure stories with values I believe in, values that transcend the genre. Sometimes I succeed.”

Then I turned the evening’s proceedings over to Catherine, who had a surprise for the audience: just a short time before, she had discovered that “sixteen years before he died,” Mark “wrote his own eulogy.” He even specified the music he wanted played: the Beatles, Pachebel’s Canon, and Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Mark’s Remark: “Another of the things that make life worth living: music.”

Then Catherine began reading Mark’s eulogy, which began with a greeting, “Hello, friends; you know who you are.” Mark went on to assure us that he still existed. “I believe in life, death,” an “afterlife” and an “afterdeath.” He believed that there is “a creative intelligence” that is “above us.” Although Mark said he believed there was “no personal God,” meaning a God who takes interest in each of us personally, but speculated that “perhaps” there were also “higher powers” who did. (I’ve hypothesized the same idea.) Mark contended that there was “no purpose in being,” by which he meant an inherent purpose, and that it was “up to all of us to find [the] highest purpose we can aspire to.”

In his case “I believe in love,” and asserted that he had “done good here and there for others,” and had given “a bit more than I’ve taken.” Further, “I’ve not as a whole done anything that has given me remorse.”

Stating that “a long time ago I became aware of my mortality,” Mark said he had written this “message” to be “read instead of religious hoopla.” He encouraged us to “feel free to laugh” during the reading of this eulogy: “If you went before me, I’d laugh at your jokes, too.”

As for his “personal image” of the hereafter, Mark wrote that “I’ll be in a hazy dreamworld,” adding, “much like the one I left.” He envisioned that in the hereafter he would see the “spirits of all those who I’ve loved” who had died before him, and listed a series of names, including his cat Nanda Parbat. (Appropriately, this cat was named after a mystical land in the DC Comics series Deadman.) “I hope all these people are there in the afterlife,” Mark wrote, “and it starts with a welcome party.” Among the people he hoped would be on the guest list were “Moe, Curly, Shemp, and Larry”; Groucho Marx; Rod Serling, the creator of his favorite TV series, the original Twilight Zone; Boris Karloff; Dada artist Marcel Duchamp; Snorri Sturluson, who first compiled the Norse myths (and who was a primary source for Walter Simonson’s run writing and drawing Marvel’s Thor); and Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin (apt choices for the longtime writer of Captain America).

After the party, Mark hoped he would “go on an adventure” with a late friend and his cat Nanda, and “then on I go until entropy comes.”

Mark wrote that the “main difference” between life and death is that “Death lasts a lot longer. Life is too thin: I wish life were a lot thicker.”

In conclusion, Mark observed that “I’m beyond caring right now” but “I thank you one last time for being part of it,” his life. He stated that “What I miss most in life is Sara,” his daughter, and closed by telling the assemblage that “you people were good people,” who were “great to know.”

Mark’s Remark: “Another of the things that makes life worth living: hearing your child say something she learned from you.”

Then Sara herself went to the lectern to speak, no longer the small girl whom we remember, but a tall, grown woman who has become an artist, and had a show of her work a few years ago. She reminisced about her father as a “master of stories”: he read all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books to her. (That makes sense to me: Baum created his own highly detailed fictional universe, just as Marvel has.) More than that, Mark created stories of his own to tell Sara, which she called “Gru narrative.”

She then recounted one he told her when she was a “small child,” about a magic bracelet of many colors, each of which represented a different power: red for super-speed, blue for flight, purple for invisibility. The magic bracelet was used to defend the “light side” of Earth from the “dark side.” But “the bracelet was lost for thousands of years,” during which time “people forgot” about such things as “centaurs” and “magic,” and “strip malls replaced castles and dragon’s lairs.” But then one day the bracelet was found, and, Sara said, showing it off on her wrist to us, “I have been the bracelet’s loyal guardian ever since.”

Sara explained that with “every story he told. . .it was like it was real.” She continued, “I really believed in this bracelet,” and told us that Mark “also told stories in which I used the bracelet” to perform good deeds.

Mark’s Remark: “To be as alive as it’s possible to be, you must wonder like a child, feel like a teenager, and think like an adult.”

Next up was Mike Carlin, who began his long career in comics as Mark’s assistant editor at Marvel. He started his talk by saying that the “second Catherine said she had found this eulogy,” he remembered a time years ago when “Mark asked me to housesit his apartment” while he was away. If anything dire was to happen to Mark, he had instructed Mike to find this “special book.” Mike and his Marvel cohorts Eliot Brown and Jack Morelli did indeed find the book. “As she was reading it,” Mike told us, he realized, “holy shit, I already read this.” It was the eulogy, and back then, Mike said, he, Brown and Morelli “just never stopped laughing at the name Snorri Sturluson.”

Mike next started commenting on a series of slides made from photos taken back in the 1980s, “B.C.–Before Catherine.” First there were shots of Mark’s office at Marvel. “Mark, he was a weirdo,” Carlin said affectionately., “He insisted on all the desks in the room” being totally clear of papers or anything else. (This is true: my own desk was stacked with neatly arranged piles of paper, but I could tell that Mark quietly disapproved.) “He didn’t want telephones on the desk,” Carlin continued, so they put them in the desk drawers. “Now all my phones are out,” Carlin told us, but “nobody calls.”

Mark’s Remark: “Life goes on, whether we’re in it or not.”

Next came a slide from Michelle Marsh Day, which is now a legend among Marvel employees of the 1980s. Michelle Marsh is a beautiful news anchorwoman who had a long career in New York City television, and at one point her face adorned posters around the city advertising her local news show. As Mike Carlin recalled, Mark took a fancy to the poster and said, “I’ll give you a dollar if you get me another one.” Eventually he spent eighty to ninety dollars on Michelle Marsh posters that Marvel personnel surreptitiously removed from subway stations and other sites, and he was “wallpapering his office with them.” (This was but one of the unusual decorating themes Mark chose for his office; at another point his office was decorated to resemble a medieval dungeon.) Finally, Carlin recounted, they “cut them up” and staged a “secret surprise party” one afternoon, in which the Marvel staff crammed into Mark’s office and donned Michelle Marsh masks made from the posters. This was Michelle Marsh Day, recorded for posterity on videotape.

Mark’s Remark: “Gruenwald’s second rule of comedy: If something is not funny the first time, by the fiftieth time you repeat it, it will be hilarious.”

As the slide show continued, Mike Carlin reminisced about how he, Mark and Eliot would spend “sleepover weekends” at the Marvel offices to work on The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. (In case you’re wondering, I stayed home writing entries, though I spent many late weeknights at the office working on the Handbook in later years. People who have subsequently undertaken comics encyclopedia projects with which I’ve been involved never comprehend beforehand how much time and work they take. The fact that Mark and company spent entire weekends at the office should give you some idea.)

“Mark threw a pie fight for my birthday,” Carlin told us. (Now you see why Mark wanted the Three Stooges at his welcoming party in heaven.) “He used real whipped cream” for the pies, though they then discovered it “doesn’t come out of your clothes.”

Mark’s Remark: “Men: if you can find a woman who really likes the Three Stooges or old Twilight Zones, don’t let her out of your life.”

Long before the rise of digital video and the age of YouTube, Mark was a video maven. The slide show also included a picture of Mark in costume as Weebwo (I am uncertain of the proper spelling), a “character from the future,” which, Carlin explained, then meant the 1990s, who appeared on Cheap Laughs, a sketch comedy series that Mark, Mike and Eliot produced, wrote and acted in for public access cable TV in New York.

Mike Carlin summed up by saying of Mark, “He was my best friend” and “gave me a shot at getting into the comic business.” He added, “It’s crazy to me that it’s ten years later,” meaning since Mark’s death. Carlin recommended that we “go check out” the “Mark’s Remarks” columns that Gruenwald used to write in Marvel Age and other comics. Carlin said Mark would “write Marvel Age columns about his thinking processes,” and though they were “ostensibly about editing,” they were about “how he got through the day.” He’s right: “Mark’s Remarks” were like a blog before there were blogs, covering not only comics but also more personal matters. You can find many of these columns posted online at http://www.geocities.com/mh_prime/, including the one from Marvel Age #100 which I borrowed the quotations in this week’s column.

Mark’s Remark: “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with all the energy you can bring to it.”

As you can surely tell by now, Mark was a dynamo of creative energy, who wasn’t satisfied with simply doing his day job from 9 to 5. Why did he work so hard and so much? Carlin told us, “I always felt subconsciously he knew he didn’t have as much time” as the rest of us. “He left a big mark on a lot of people,” Mike said, apparently unaware of his inadvertent pun (which Mark would have appreciated). Carlin asserted, “He affected way more things than you’ll ever know about.”

Mark’s Remark: “I wish that when I was young somebody had told me that time goes by more quickly the older you get.”

Then Mike Carlin read a message from comics editor/writer Denny O’Neil, who hadn’t been able to attend in person: Mark had been his assistant when O’Neil was an editor at Marvel, and later Mark edited O’Neil’s run writing Iron Man. O’Neil wrote that “Only now after ten years” was he “beginning to realize what a loss Mark was.” O’Neil declared Mark to be “a near perfect assistant” and, quoting the title of one of Tom Wolfe’s books, called him “a man in full.” O’Neil closed by saying, “I think of him often.”

There was also a message from O’Neil’s wife, Marifran, who wrote that, like Catherine, she had only “met Mark closer to his end.” But she recalled Mark’s marriage to Catherine as the “most joyous wedding I ever attended.”

Mark’s Remark: “Gruenwald’s first rule of Halloween costumes: A costume should totally disguise one’s appearance.”

Marifran also noted, “I remember his bag lady impersonation” at the first comics industry Halloween party she attended, when he “didn’t utter a sound.” Presumably this was one of the Halloween parties that John Byrne used to hold. Each year there would be a different theme, and in this particular year we were instructed to come in a costume that made us completely unrecognizable. This was harder than it seemed. I found this parrot mask that completely concealed my head (and wore it with a normal suit), but as soon as I walked in, Ann DeLarye Gold (then the wife of DC editor Mike Gold, and looking quite fetching in full makeup and costume as one of the cats from the musical Cats), happily exclaimed, “Peter!” However, Mark loved Halloween and took Halloween costumes quite seriously. His bag lady disguise really was nearly impenetrable, and he didn’t make a sound to prevent anyone from recognizing his voice.

Mark’s Remark: “I caution people against meeting writers whose work they admire. Once you find out the guy’s a slob in real life, how can you not let that color your impression of his work?”

The next speaker and his friends weren’t disappointed by what they learned about Mark from this evening’s tribute. This was Mike Fichera, who introduced himself as one of the “new generation” of writers for the new Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe projects that Marvel has lately been producing. He was one of three of these writers who came to New York specifically to attend this tribute, including Anthony Flamini and Michael Hoskins, and spoke on their behalf. He said they “feel really fortunate to be following in Mark Gruenwald’s footsteps.” He said that as a “kid” he had been fascinated with “mythology” and was interested both in the Argonauts and that latter day mythic hero, Spider-Man. But then he discovered that “the Marvel Universe was much larger than just Spider-Man” from reading the Handbook during a six hour flight he took in 1984. “I ate it up,” he recalled. It was through the Handbook he learned about the X-Men, although, he said, his father threw out his first X-Men comic, thinking “X-Men” meant X-rated. To see the Marvel Universe presented “as a whole” and “cohesively” was “inspirational to me.”

Today, Mike Fichera told the audience, the Handbook writers are based on places ranging from Australia to Florida to Calgary to England, and when faced with a problem writing the Handbook they ask themselves, “What would Gru do?” He said it was their “big regret” that “Mark couldn’t be part of our team” since “his passion, his love for the characters. . .lit our flames.” (You can find their photos of the tribute at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23781769@N00/sets/72157594230827210
and http://www.flickr.com/photos/43412863@N00/sets/72157594232021137).

Next up was former Marvel editor (and current PaperCutz editor) Jim Salicrup, but I need not recap what he said in detail because Fred Hembeck included Jim’s entire speech in his own recent tribute to Mark over at “The Fred Hembeck Show” Episode 72 (http://asitecalledfred.com/?p=1546). I like Jim’s observation that Mark “was sort of a combination of Bill Murray and Jack Nicholson: the bad boy with that endearing twinkle in his eye.” And I especially liked Jim’s closing tribute: “Mark’s life was a constant expression of his humor, compassion, love and spirit. As much as I enjoyed Mark’s comic book work, I think Mark himself was his greatest creation.” That echoed Denny O’Neil’s concluding statement in his speech at the New York Film Academy memorial to Mark: that Mark’s greatest artwork was his life.

Mark’s Remark: “If I didn’t exist, I’d have to invent me.”

The next speaker was master inker Tom Palmer, who had started at Marvel at the close of the Silver Age. He said he had met Mark when he “asked if I would work on an Avengers issue with John Buscema.” Palmer said he “wound up doing ten years.”

Palmer recalled how once he was in Mark’s office back when Howard Mackie was Mark’s assistant. There was a closet full of boxes. Then in came one particular freelancer. “The next moment there were boxes everywhere,” Palmer said, and the boxes landed atop this unnamed freelancer. afterwards Howard put the boxes back. Palmer told us he learned that “Mark had one box” that was the “key box,” and “when people he didn’t like came in,” he would pull the key box, and the avalanche would commence. And what did Tom Palmer think? “I like this guy. He’s the guy I grew up with. We got very close.” Then Palmer brought his talk to an end, explaining that he “didn’t want to talk too long” because he would “get emotional.”

Mark’s Remark: “Sometimes I wonder if the haircut I wear now is going to embarrass me when I look at a picture of myself ten years from now.”

This was just the first example of the evening of Mark Gruenwald as prince of pranksters, the foremost trickster of the Marvel Universe. This was the topic of our next speaker, former Marvel editor Glenn Herdling, who began by pointing out the difficulty in resurrecting Mark via cloning. Herdling reminded us that Mark was cremated and they “put his ashes in comic books.” (Following Mark’s wishes, his ashes were mixed with the ink used in printing the original run of the Squadron Supreme trade paperback. This is true.) “Nothing organic remains,” Herdling declared, pausing, “except–“ and he held up a familiar-looking ponytail, as if it were a long lost relic. “How did I come by this?” Herdling asked, cupping his ear when he didn’t think we responded loudly enough.

Mark’s Remark: “If we can’t kid each other, who can we kid?”

The tale “goes back to around 1991, our first ski trip to Vermont,” comprising Glenn, Mark, and their fellow Marvel editors Ralph Macchio and Fabian Nicieza. “Mark has something planned,” Herdling tells us. Before the trip, “Mark goes around the office with envelope in hand,” asking both men and women to donate some of their hair to his scheme. “Fabian was battling chronic baldness,” Herdling said, and Mark “wanted to place a whole bunch of hair on Fabian’s pillow when he woke up.”

So, during the ski trip, while Fabian was taking a shower, Mark and Glenn emptied the envelope onto his pillow, but “it wasn’t enough.” So they got additional hair out of bathroom drains and used a hair dryer on it. “Mark was ecstatic,” Herdling reported, noting his willingness to “go that extra length for a practical joke.” Then Fabian walked in, and Mark said, “Fabian, we’re just looking at your pillow here.”

“Next year,” Herdling continued, “we had to outdo ourselves.” This time “Ralph didn’t come” and an assistant editor took his place. This time Mark brought along a fake ponytail so Glenn could pretend to cut it off while he was asleep. Mark had tucked his real ponytail beneath his collar, a simple trick that nonetheless took in both Fabian and the assistant editor, who panicked: “You cut off the executive editor’s ponytail! You are going to get so fired!”

Mark’s Remark: “Gruenwald’s third rule of comedy: Rules, like comedy, should always come in threes.”

Part three came “a couple of years later” at a Marvel editorial retreat. The previous ponytail incident, Herdling said, was now “legendary” and “Mark called me” and said, “I want you to cut off my ponytail. This time I want you to really do it.”

So on Saturday night the editors were playing a game of Thumper, and Herdling decided, “I’m going to throw the game.” Mark won and the other editors lifted him up in his chair to acclaim his victory. “Out come the scissors,” Herdling told us, and he cut off Mark’s ponytail and held “it up in the air as a trophy. There was dead silence.”

The next morning Tom DeFalco, the editor in chief, “calls me over.” Here Herdling slipped into an impression of Tom, one that many Marvelites of the 1980s did, perhaps made funnier by the fact that Tom (a good sport) was right there in the audience. “What you did to Mark was inexcusable,” Glenn said Tom told him with a “stone face.” Herdling recalled, “When you’re a practical joker, Mark would say, you can’t live comfortably.” Herdling told us he thought DeFalco was in on the gag. DeFalco commanded him, “I want to see you in my office.” Herdling asked, “Tom, do you know?” “Do I know what?” DeFalco ominously replied. “It’s a joke,” Herdling pleaded, explaining that he and Mark had collaborated on it. “I want to see you both of you in my office,” DeFalco thundered.

But at the end of the retreat, Herdling told us, DeFalco had him and Mark stand up and told the others, “You’ve been had by the best.” Moreover, he added, “That’s what comics are all about. If you’re not having fun at work, it’s going to show.” (Here I recalled the deafening silence in the halls of Marvel in my final years there, post-Mark. Those last two sentences should be framed and hanged in every comics editorial office.)

Mark’s Remark:”Be good to people who care about you.”

Next up was another former Marvel editor, Glenn Greenberg, who spoke about “how Mark cared about everyone at the company,” and gave his own case as an example. It was in the 1990s, during Marvel’s “darkest time.” Glenn had just been “promoted to associate editor,” but “every book I was given was a dog or was going to be canceled.” There had already been “one or two rounds of downsizing,” and “I figured this was it.” So “I came to the decision to turn back my promotion” and go back to being Tom Brevoort’s assistant.

When Greenberg told Mark he was totally surprised and told him, “In the history of this company, no one has ever done this before.” And indeed, Glenn now realizes, as he said, “Why would the company want someone who did that to himself?”

But Mark made up for Glenn’s naivete. “Later that day Mark took me aside” and said he told the editor in chief (not DeFalco at this point) why Greenberg had turned back his promotion “and that it should not be held as a black mark against me.” Greenberg told us, “To this day I get very choked up” when he thinks about that. “That spoke volumes about how much he cared. It was no more than a month or two later that he passed away.” (Another recently written tribute to Mark suggested that he was too soft-hearted when it came to getting rid of people. I leave it to you readers to decide if this is a vice or a virtue.)

Glenn also recalled the classes in the craft of comics that Mark used to teach to the assistant editors, including himself, and said, “I really took to my heart” what he learned in them. He concluded, “If I had stayed in the industry my goal [would be that] I could be mentioned in the same breath as Mark Gruenwald and Archie Goodwin,” another respected and beloved editor who passed away two years later.

Mark’s Remark: “Another of the things that make life worth living: falling in love.”

Then yet another former Marvel editor, Carl Potts, stepped up to the lectern. (Do you get the impression that Marvel has gotten rid of a lot of editors over the last dozen years?) Potts recalled that Mark was happy “almost totally consistently” when he was “in the presence of his comrades” except for “one short period when he was slightly down,” because he was “concerned about his love life.” (This would be after the end of his first marriage.) But one day Marvel issued “a casting call for models” to dress as superheroines. This is how Mark met Catherine, and he “was immediately smitten.” (If you ever meet Catherine, you’ll understand why.) Potts recalled that Mark had said, “your first marriage is your starter marriage” and once Mark had married Catherine, “he was so happy with that side of his life.”

Here Sara interjected that the first time that Mark told her he was dating a model, she asked him, “Dad, how can you date a mannequin? They’re not real.” Sara explained that she had seen the Twilight Zone episode in which the department store mannequins come to life.

Mark’s Remark: “Gruenwald’s first rule of comedy: Anything more annoying to someone else than it is to you is funny.”

Before the night of the MoCCA tribute, Tom DeFalco had said he didn’t want to speak publicly about his old friend Mark. But now Mike Carlin prodded him to tell the tale of one of Mark’s grandest practical jokes, “the gun story.” So Tom made his way to the lectern.

But first he wanted to add his side to the saga of the night Glenn Herdling cut off Mark’s ponytail for real. DeFalco was asleep, but “for the next hour and a half I got frantic calls from everybody.” But, Tom told us, “I knew of the other fake ponytail incident,” so he figured it out: “one plus one equals two.”

As for the gun story, Carlin had first assured everybody that this took place before the 9/11 attacks. DeFalco began by saying, “I used to have to do a lot of traveling with Mark.” On this particular business trip, “we were heading off to the airport” but after they arrived, suddenly “I’m surrounded by security.” It turned out that the X-ray machines had detected the outline of a gun in one of DeFalco’s bags. Security emptied the bag, but found “nothing that resembles a gun,” so they put the bag through the X-ray machine again, and the image of the gun reappeared. They finally realized that the “bottom flap” of the suitcase “will open up,” and inside they found tinfoil in the shape of a gun. DeFalco said security people were “trying to decide if they’re going to arrest me or not.” He then saw “Mark with a look of panic on his face” and “right away I knew.”

Mark’s Remark: “As a young child, I used to go to my friends’ houses and reorganize their toys.”

Mark was also DeFalco’s assistant editor at one point. In another example of what DeFalco termed Mark’s “lovely sense of humor,” “every time I took a trip” when Mark stayed behind in New York, when Tom returned, “my bookshelf would be rearranged.” DeFalco informed us, “We never really discussed the jokes,” and he would simply “try to figure out” the governing principle behind the new order Mark had arranged the books into.

Then there was a convention in Oakland (presumably WonderCon before it moved to San Francisco), when DeFalco had a “late night business meeting at the bar” and at 2 AM discovered a “giant poster” proclaiming that Tom DeFalco would be signing autographs twenty-four hours a day and giving his room number. “Just knock,” the poster advised.

Other friends of Mark’s were potential targets as well. DeFalco recalled how once when Ralph Macchio returned from a week’s vacation, he discovered that “every item” had been removed from his office, and there was a note saying that a former DC editor would be taking over the space. “Ralph ignored it,” DeFalco said, and “next morning everything was back” in place.

And then there was Mark’s spinning wheel that would tell who was going to get downsized. “Mark was always ahead of his time,” DeFalco commented dryly. DeFalco explained that the wheel was “jury-rigged” so that “whichever office we walked into,” the wheel would always pick the “guy sitting in front of us.”

Mark’s Remark: “I take humor seriously. If you haven’t laughed so hard you thought you’d vomit at least once a year, there was no point in living that year.”

Mark was also Marvel’s self-appointed, unofficial officer in charge of keeping morale high. I learned something when DeFalco mentioned “all the crazy parties” that used to be held at Marvel–Halloween parties, Christmas parties–and revealed that “the company never paid for them. It was always Mark’s idea.” DeFalco told us he used to tell Mark, “You can’t afford this stuff,” and Mark would reply, “We can’t afford not to do it.”

Moreover, “Mark was always the instigator” of “all the crazy stuff we used to do at conventions.” DeFalco said the convention would give us “two or three hours” of panel time to sell things. Mark, however, contended that the fans have “either bought it”–the new comics projects–“or not,” so he wanted to “give [Marvel’s] sales people one hour” and “then do two hours of crazy entertainment.” (Mark, you see, was trying to convey the idea that the spirit of Marvel was not grim and gritty or mercenary: the spirit of Marvel was fun.) DeFalco even confessed that in one of the Marvel game shows Mark staged at comics conventions, “he conned me into busting a balloon with my butt!”

Mark’s Remark: “Are all writers frustrated performers?”

This served as a good segue into the showing of a videotape compiling excerpts from some of the game shows that Mark staged at comics conventions under such titles as “Mondo Marvel” and the “Marvelympics.”
The tape was, of course, introduced by a clip of Mark’s idol, Rod Serling. Here was Mark getting fans to impersonate Doctor Strange getting a wedgie or (ironically) Aunt May having a stroke. He challenges another fan to improvise a rap song about Ka-Zar, Quasar, and the Living Laser (well, they sort of rhyme). In another form of wrapping, Mark has fans compete in wrapping twenty-five feet of fabric around Marvel editors Bobbie Chase and Hildy Mesnik. And then there was the “Terror Box,” named after the now-forgotten lead of his own Marvel series: the box with Terror’s macabre visage would be placed over the heads of volunteer fans, who would then scream as loud as they could. And yes, there was a clip of a competition at busting balloons by sitting on them, with Tom DeFalco as a participant. Having unsuccessfully attempted to fight off boredom while sitting through a Marvel panel at this year’s New York Comic Con, I think something important is missing from Marvel presentations in the 21st Century A. G. (After Gru).

Next on the tape was Mark in a tuxedo, emceeing a comics industry roast, I think, and doing jokes about the ribbons that celebrities used to wear at awards shows to support various causes. On the tape Mark said his “black and blue ribbon” represented “the Union of Downsized Marvelites.” In the museum Glenn Greenberg interjected, “That’s everybody here!”

The tape concluded with a four-minute-long montage of still pictures from throughout Mark’s life, set to familiar music from the Peanuts animated specials, with Mark looking very different as a child, and later adopting a longhaired, bearded hippie look before emerging looking the way we knew him.
There were pictures of himself with his buddy Dean Mullaney from their days publishing their fanzine Omniverse, pictures of Mark with Sara and Catherine, a shot of Tom DeFalco and Mark kissing Stan Lee on the cheeks, covers from the Silver Age comics that influenced Mark, and covers from the most important series he wrote: DP7, Quasar, Captain America, Squadron Supreme, and the Handbook. The tape concluded with a shot of Mark, intelligent and contemplative, looking out at us, with a picture of Captain America in the background. The montage was a portrait of a short but full life.

Mark’s Remark: “There is no excuse for leading a boring life.”

Finally, in accordance with Mark’s wishes, a friend of Catherine’s, known as Henry O., played the Beatles’ “In My Life” on the guitar. And with that, the tribute came to an end, although everyone remained to mingle for a while longer.

The next day on his blog Tom Brevoort wrote that the evening “was like a strange time machine, like stepping back into the past and reliving the Marvel-that-was more than a decade ago.” He also observed that “For good or ill, that Marvel will never exist again, largely due to the passing of Mark Gruenwald.”

Mark’s Remark: “When I die, I’m really going to miss me.”

He’s not the only one.

-Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

Only last week in “The Fred Hembeck Show” #74, its namesake confessed what he considered his deep, dark and shameful secret: that he, Fred Hembeck, was a soap opera fan. In sharp contrast, from almost the very start of “Comics in Context” three years ago, I have proudly proclaimed my own undying devotion to one particular soap opera: that classic melding of the daytime serial with Gothic melodrama, Dark Shadows, whose leading character was a villain turned tragic hero, the vampire Barnabas Collins.

During the series’ original run, Dark Shadows became an enormous hit among young Baby Boomers, much like that later serial TV drama about vampires in a small town, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, did among young viewers in more recent years. During its original run Dark Shadows spawned two MGM movies, one of which, House of Dark Shadows (1970), will be shown on Turner Classic Movies the night of October 20. There were also Dark Shadows novels, a Dark Shadows newspaper comic strip, and Dark Shadows comic books, more than justifying the show’s suitability as a topic for my column.

Way back in “Comics in Context” #11 I wrote an appreciation of the show, and in #12 I wrote about the 2003 Dark Shadows Festival, one of the annual conventions that celebrate the series. It had been announced that this would be the last of the official Festivals, much to the distress of both fans and members of the show’s original cast. In fact, one of the leading cast members, Kathryn Leigh Scott, even publicly confronted Festival head Jim Pierson onstage over this issue. So the conventions continued, albeit under different names, like the “Dark Shadows Weekend” on which I reported in “Comics in Context” #50 in 2004. Last year’s convention was held in Los Angeles, and I did not attend, but this August the convention returned to New York to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the original series, which ran from 1966 to 1971.

You might expect that these conventions would be attended almost entirely by aging Boomers who watched the show as children, and there are indeed a lot of us there. But, appropriately, Dark Shadows has proved to be The Show That Will Not Die. Several years after it went off the air in 1971, Dark Shadows returned in syndication, and it later found a home on various public television stations, and still later on the newly founded Sci-Fi Channel. As a result, new generations of viewers have had the opportunity to discover Dark Shadows for themselves.

You may have observed that many cable networks start out by running classic TV series from the 1950s and 1960s, which they can acquire inexpensively, but as the cable network grows more successful, it dumps them. The Sci-Fi Channel followed the same pattern (but its management has had the good taste to retain the original Twilight Zone and to run the new Doctor Who, so they should be forgiven).

But this has not spelled the end of Dark Shadows, either. At this year’s “Dark Shadows 40th Anniversary Celebration Weekend,” when speakers asked how many people in the audience were attending for the first time, an astoundingly large number of hands were raised. The reason is the revolution in video technology. MPI Home Video has issued the entire original series, first on VHS and now on DVD, and once a movie or television show is on DVD, its permanence is assured. (The short-lived 1991 revival of Dark Shadows, which had the misfortune of debuting the week that the first Gulf War began, also recently came out on DVD.) Moreover, as was noted onstage, it seems that people who watched DS when they were growing up are now using the DVDs to introduce the show to their children–and even grandchildren.

Here is an aspect of the DVD revolution that is worth further examination: its capacity for extending the shelf life of the popular culture of previous generations. For example, I’ve worried in this column about how Cartoon Network and Boomerang have considerably reduced showings of classic Warners cartoons. Will the superb Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD sets succeed in introducing new generations to Bugs Bunny and company instead?

Earlier in this fortieth anniversary year for Dark Shadows, its creator, executive producer, and owner Dan Curtis, who directed its two movie spinoffs, passed away at the age of 78. Yet 2006 has also brought a rebirth for Dark Shadows in the form of new projects that serve as continuations of the original series. One is a new paperback novel from Tor Books, Dark Shadows: The Salem Branch, written by Lara Parker, who played the key role of the witch Angelique on the original series. The other is a new series of radio-style dramas on CD, produced by the British company Big Finish, which is best known for its long series of Doctor Who audio dramas featuring cast members from over the long history of that television series. Big Finish’s first two Dark Shadows CDs debuted at this year’s “40th Anniversary Celebration Weekend”; two more, including a Christmas-themed story, will be released in November.

With Dark Shadows: The Salem Branch, Lara Parker has now written two Dark Shadows novels, which simultaneously serve as prequels and sequels to the original television series. In Barnabas’s backstory, in the late 18th century he visited the West Indian island of Martinique, where he had an affair with Angelique, the servant of an emigre French aristocrat named Josette DuPres. However, Barnabas dumped Angelique in order to become engaged to the wealthier and more socially respectable Josette. Unknown to either Barnabas or Josette, Angelique had been taught magic, including voodoo, by her mother. In the television series’ classic 1795 flashback arc, Josette arrived in Collinsport for her wedding to Barnabas, accompanied by the seemingly loyal Angelique, who began secretly using magic to prevent their marriage. In time Angelique succeeded in persuading Barnabas to marry her instead, but after their wedding he discovered she was a witch. His love for Josette returned, and he shot Angelique, who, dying, cursed Barnabas to become a vampire.

Like actor Jonathan Frid as Barnabas, from the start Parker always endowed a character who could easily have been played as a one-dimensional villain with a sympathetic side, and the show’s writers responded. Angelique did not stay dead, but repeatedly returned through most of the series, often to take further vengeance on Barnabas. But, though it was mixed with hatred, the love she professed for Barnabas was real, as the series continued, she increasingly acted as his ally. In fact, in Angelique’s final appearances in the series, she lifted Barnabas’s curse and achieved redemption, only to be murdered by one of Barnabas’s enemies.

The title of Parker’s first novel, Angelique’s Descent, which is now out of print, carries a double meaning. The book is partially set in 1971, immediately after the end of the original television series. Now human once more, Barnabas finds Angelique’s 18th century diaries, which make up the heart of the novel. Through the diaries Parker fleshes out the Martinique backstory for Barnabas, Josette, and Angelique, depicting events that were never actually dramatized on the TV series, while showing them from Angelique’s viewpoint. Thus the readers get to learn Angelique’s “descent.” Her mother not only knew voodoo but was black (though since Angelique/Parker looks wholly Caucasian, this seems unlikely). Parker also reveals the identity of Angelique’s father, which will not only surprise Dark Shadows fans but makes such good sense thematically and dramatically that it should be part of the show’s official canon.

Through the diaries traces Angelique’s life from her childhood, when she is worshipped as a voodoo goddess, through her affair with Barnabas, presenting her not as a stereotypical scheming femme fatale but as an innocent who fell deeply in love for the first time and was indeed betrayed. The novel moves on to retell the familiar events of the 1795 arc from Angelique’s perspective, as her frustrated, unrequited passion for Barnabas led her down an increasingly immoral path, climaxing with the laying of her curse on Barnabas, whereby she sealed her own damnation. This is the other meaning of the title Angelique’s Descent.

My impression is that Dark Shadows fans generally prefer a more clearly evil Angelique, and, indeed, the two attempted revivals of the series for television portray the character as purely villainous. (Even so, Lysette Anthony’s sensual Angelique in the 1991 revival was perhaps its most memorable performance.)

But I’ve liked the resolution of Angelique’s story in 1971, including Barnabas’s anguished reaction to her death, ever since I first saw it, because there, towards the very end of the series, the writers performed the startling feat of turning the show upside down. Until then, it had seemed to be the story of how evil Angelique persecuted Barnabas, who remained steadfastly (or obsessively) in love with Josette–and with numerous ingenue characters who reminded him of her. The final Angelique episodes postulated that Barnabas had subconsciously been in love with Angelique all along but had refused to let himself admit him, thus inducing the longtime viewer to reconsider the entire series from a different perspective. Angelique’s Descent accomplishes a similar feat, reinterpreting the Barnabas-Angelique-Josette triangle at the heart of the series, without either excusing Angelique’s crimes or violating the spirit of the original show.

Parker’s second novel, Dark Shadows: The Salem Branch, concocts lemonade from the seeming lemons that the original series offered up in the fall of 1970. Dark Shadows‘ writers had traditionally been careful in maintaining its continuity in detail, but they became sloppy in the show’s final year. Having previously established that Angelique had grown up in Martinique in the late 18th century, in 1970 they devised a flashback sequence showing that Angelique was really Miranda Duval, a member of a witches’ coven headed by the warlock Judah Zachary in the late 17th century. Miranda had been persuaded by Barnabas’s ancestor, Amadeus Collins, to testify against Zachary in a trial that was obviously inspired by the actual Salem witch trials of the same period. (Perhaps the writers thought no one would notice the discrepancy, but in the age of home video, TV series can no longer get away with violating their own continuity.) Parker solves the continuity conundrum by establishing that Angelique was a reincarnation of Miranda.

If Miranda/Angelique had been reincarnated once, it could happen again. Angelique’s Descent concludes with an Angelique/Parker lookalike turning up in Collinsport. This woman and her troubled daughter become major characters in The Salem Branch, and Barnabas is understandably suspicious that Angelique has returned again; I will leave it to you to read the book and find out whether he is right.

The Miranda storyline enables Parker to engage in one of Dark Shadows‘ trademark tropes: a character traveling from the present into another time period. In this case, Barnabas finds himself transported to Miranda’s own time. It might have been more dramatically effective had Parker found a less passive role for Barnabas to play in the 17th century than that of witness. Presumably, however, Barnabas could not have been allowed to intervene in events enough to alter the established history of Dark Shadows characters.

What is most remarkable about The Salem Branch are Parker’s successful efforts at updating Dark Shadows without violating either its letter or its spirit. One obvious example is that the Angelique lookalike befriends a community of hippies who settle on the property she has purchased from the Collins family. At this year’s convention Parker admitted that she based this aspect of the book on her own countercultural experiences in the 1960s.

In order to maintain the proper Gothic atmosphere, the original Dark Shadows series, even when telling stories set in the then-present (1966-1971), downplayed any evidence of modernity. As cast member Nancy Barrett remarks in her cabaret show, the Collinses were wealthy, but (as far as we could tell) didn’t own a radio or a television set. Aside from the younger actresses’ miniskirts, the Sixties rarely made their presence felt onscreen in the original series.

But in Parker’s novel the hippies’ presence works. For one thing, the Sixties no longer connote the present but the past, approaching a half-century ago: the hippie sequences have themselves become period pieces, and thus more appropriate to Dark Shadows.

Also, one of the things that made Dark Shadows work was the contrast between the emotionally repressed world of the normal characters and the secret world of the vampires, werewolves and witches, who embodied those forbidden lusts and violent passions. There was not even a hint that ingenue characters like Maggie and Carolyn and Vicki slept with their boyfriends. Barnabas himself typically suffered in unconsummated love for characters like Josette; his compulsive vampiric attacks might represent his frustrated emotions uncontrollably bursting forth. So it is intriguing for Parker to juxtapose Barnabas and these decidedly uninhibited hippies and to examine his reactions to them. Parker thus challenges the inhibited Gothic milieu of Dark Shadows without overturning it.

Unsurprisingly, family patriarch Roger Collins is outraged by the newcomers. Come to think of it, Parker’s hippies are not unlike the gypsies who settled on Collins property in the original series’ 1897 story arc; that generation’s patriarch, Edward Collins, disdained them, too.

The time travel element permits Parker to pursue a narrative strategy similar to that of Angelique’s Descent: this time she retells the real history of the Salem witch trials, but from the perspective of a Miranda, a practitioner of witchcraft. At this year’s convention, Parker observed that in most stories about the trials, the alleged witches are innocent, but, she asked, what if there had been a real witch present?

In the original Dark Shadows series, all practitioners of witchcraft were in league with the devil. Parker takes a more contemporary and positive attitude towards witchcraft in her book. Judah Zachary remains a satanic presence, but Miranda’s magical abilities are not depicted as gifts of the devil, but as innate talents that can be used either for good or evil (as with witches Willow and Tara on Buffy). Parker is aware of contemporary Wiccans, as evidenced by a video shown at the convention in which she visits the real Salem. Her depiction of Miranda may also remind readers of mutants in Marvel’s X-Men: a young girl who discovers her unusual abilities, but must hide them for fear of persecution.

This approach is actually more in keeping with the spirit of the original Dark Shadows than one might at first think. Barnabas began in the show as a villain, but eventually evolved into the series’ hero, who utilized his vampiric abilities to protect the family against various threats. But if he was publicly exposed as a vampire, he knew he would become an outcast, and be hunted down and destroyed. Although the series established Angelique to be a servant of the Devil, as it went on, she repeatedly allied herself with the heroes against other evildoers (and therefore, presumably, against her supposed Master’s wishes). Witchhunters, like the members of the Trask family, were greater menaces on Dark Shadows than some of the supernatural beings they hounded. Dark Shadows and X-Men were products of the same decade, and I have long wondered about the seeming coincidence that the most notorious mutant hunters in X-Men also bear the last name of Trask.

What is most astonishing is The Salem Branch‘s depiction of vampirism. The original series depicted vampirism as a curse, which Barnabas longed to escape. But in Parker’s new novel, the cured Barnabas finds himself missing various aspects of being a vampire. As a vampire his senses were sharper, he had greater strength and physical grace, and he even could think more clearly. Now he can see his own reflection, but is distraught to find signs of aging. This surely reflects the author’s–and her readers’–own concerns about growing older. But I suspect it also indicates the influence of contemporary pop culture treatments of vampirism, such as Anne Rice’s novels and Joss Whedon’s Angel, which present vampires not as repulsive walking corpses but as superhuman immortals whose powers are enviable.

Again, Parker is actually being faithful to a subtext of the original series. Though Barnabas wanted to be human, during those periods of the show in which he was (temporarily) cured, he was far less effective against supernatural adversaries. The super-powers (for that is what they were) he possessed as a vampire came in handy. And clearly the audience preferred watching Barnabas as a vampire: when ratings declined, his curse would invariably return.

In each novel so far, Parker seems to find particular pleasure in writing dialogue for one of the original Dark Shadows characters. In Descent it was Roger, an irascible, old money New England WASP, who, as performed by the late Louis Edmonds, was reminiscent of movie characters played by George Sanders and Clifton Webb. The makers of the 1991 revival and the unsuccessful recent DS pilot for the WB Network clearly didn’t fathom this character type, but Parker gets it. In Salem Branch the standout is Carolyn, the Collins heiress, whom Nancy Barrett played as a young woman of wry intelligence and spirit who was frustrated by the ingenue role to which life (and the writers) had condemned her. Parker captures this, as well as justly depicting Carolyn as too spoiled to go out and get a real job, or go to college, or just leave town; after forty years of feminism, Carolyn’s insistence on living idly at home with mom no longer seems acceptable.

I am not sure what I feel about the ending of Salem Branch; perhaps I’ll have to reread it to clarify my opinion. I will say that Parker has an insightful take on the relationship between Barnabas and his closest ally, Dr. Julia Hoffman, the physician who succeeded in curing his vampirism. A career woman before the rise of feminism, Julia was written on the show as a middle-aged spinster, pathetically in love with Barnabas, who rarely seemed to notice. Following the lead of DS writer Sam Hall, Parker has Barnabas engaged to Julia, but Parker makes clear that Barnabas is acting from a sense of duty and gratitude to her, not out of any real passion. In the conclusion to Salem Branch, Parker shows just how far Julia’s self-sacrificing love for Barnabas would take her, and I hope she gets to write a third Shadows novel so we can see where Barnabas and Julia go from here.

The high point of the 2003 Dark Shadows Festival was the live performance of Return to Collinwood, a play written in the style of a radio drama by Jamison Selby, the son of David Selby, who played Quentin Collins in the original series. Enacted onstage by members of the original DS cast, Return to Collinwood showed what had happened to the show’s familiar characters in the early 21st century. Return was subsequently released on CD. Jamison Selby wrote a sequel, in which the ghost of Reverend Trask returns, for the 2004 convention.

Now the British company Big Finish Productions has obtained the rights to produce new Dark Shadows audio dramas into the year 2009. The first two CDs, The House of Despair and The Book of Temptation, were unveiled at this year’s “40th Anniversary Celebration Weekend.” Both feature four members of the original cast–David Selby as Quentin, Lara Parker as Angelique, Kathryn Leigh Scott as Maggie Evans, and John Karlen as Willie Loomis–as well as familiar examples of composer Robert Cobert’s music for the original series.

Listening to the first CD, at first I found the story meandering and worried that it diverged too far from the feel of the show. But as Quentin, returned from years of wandering, ventured into a mysteriously abandoned Collinwood, I was hooked. Dark Shadows has been shown on British television, and, listening to the CDs, I gained confidence that the people at Big Finish had a good grasp of the spirit of the original series.

I was even pleased by a detail that many might overlook: ominous birds roosting at the deserted Collinwood. Dark Shadows aficionados know that the show was a postmodern pastiche of reworkings of elements from past horror classics. Could the birds in House of Despair be a nod to director Alfred Hitchcock’s and novelist Daphne DuMaurier’s The Birds (1963)? The TV show did a homage to Hitchcock and DuMaurier’s Rebecca (1940) but never got around to this.

One element of the CDs definitely doesn’t work. On Big Finish’s “Dark Shadows Reborn” website (http://www.darkshadowsreborn.com/news001.htm) producer Stuart Manning says, “To preserve the soap opera tradition of the original series, each disc is split into three episodes, with a cliffhanger at the end of each episode.” But since each CD runs continuously for about an hour, there’s no point to this arbitrary division, and the recurring, seemingly purposeless use of Cobert’s opening theme music becomes increasingly annoying. (Cobert’s celebrated “Quentin’s Theme” and his jaunty background music for Collinsport’s tavern, the Blue Whale, make welcome appearances on the CDs, and I hope Big Finish uses still more of his Shadows score on future CDs. Just don’t wear out the opening theme’s welcome!)

What does work very well indeed are the performances by the four original Dark Shadows cast members, returning to familiar roles from their youth, but now bringing considerably more experience as actors to those parts. Scott’s portrayal of Maggie is especially interesting. Some of Scott’s best moments on the original show came when she displayed a strong will from behind the facade of the stereotypical ingenue victims she was assigned to play. The Big Finish writers depict Maggie as resentful and embittered by her harrowing past experiences with the Collins family, and Scott brings this off without losing the sense of the endearing heroine that won her fans in the first place. Interestingly, this jaded Maggie is reminiscent of the character’s first appearance on the show, when she was written as an irreverent waitress, like an Eve Arden role, warning the show’s original heroine Victoria Winters to steer clear of the Collinses.

Return to Collinwood and the Big Finish DS dramas faced the same dilemma. Many significant members of the original cast have passed away, and others are unavailable for other reasons. Most significantly, Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas, went into semi-retirement in his native Canada in the early 1990s, and has not even attended one of the DS Festivals since then.

In the first of their DS CDs, The House of Despair, Big Finish comes up with a clever way of writing out most of the familiar characters while leaving the door open to their eventual return. Further, Big Finish bites the bullet and casts a new actor as Barnabas. Big Finish even comes up with a rationale within the story for Barnabas having a different voice. I won’t give away their explanation here, but it’s not surprising considering Big Finish’s experience with the Doctor Who mythos. The new actor is acceptable in the part, but he has a long way to go to match the Big Four from the original show. I don’t think I’m reacting simply out of nostalgia here. Karlen, Parker, Scott and Selby exude such authority and charismatic presence in these roles that it would be hard for most newcomers to measure up. The Book of Temptation isn’t as good as House of Despair, but admirably further explores the “new” Barnabas’s character.

With so many other characters having been written out, it is Barnabas, Quentin and Angelique, the three immortals, who take up residence in Collinwood in the Big Finish CDs. In the original show I had the impression that there were two communities: the “normal” people, who lived at the Collinwood mansion, and Barnabas and his allies, who were based at the Old House on the Collins estate, and who either secretly possessed supernatural abilities or guarded Barnabas’s secrets. Originally, Dark Shadows was about the “normals,” but it was the outsiders, like Barnabas and Quentin, who became the dominant characters. (This is indeed a 1960s show.) So it is appropriate that now this trio–a vampire, a werewolf and a witch–have finally taken possession of the main house.

But now don’t we have three different series of sequels to the original Dark Shadows: Lara Parker’s novels, Jamison Selby’s plays, and the Big Finish audio dramas?

On the aforementioned website Stuart Manning asserts that the Big Finish stories “take place between the end of the original series, and before Return to Collinwood. . . . We’ve deliberately avoided stating a specific timeframe, so that fans can decide a place for the new stories to take place. We could say they take place in 1975, 1982 or whenever, but I think that makes things less engaging. For us, these stories are happening now, in their own present, and they can be enjoyed more thoroughly if approached in that way.” That’s a fair approach. Parker’s novels are explicitly set in 1971, so the Big Finish CDs could take place afterwards.

It would be advisable if everybody working on Shadows sequels adheres to a consistent continuity. With some effort the Parker novels, Selby plays and Big Finish CDs can be made to fit together, although it looks as if Angelique’s reincarnation will have to die and be resurrected twice to fit the continuity of Return and House of Despair. (Well, for Angelique this is no big deal: she could compete with X-Men‘s Jean Grey for most deaths and resurrections.) Parker burned down the Old House in Descent but rebuilds and restores it in Salem Branch, which is a good thing, since Willie Loomis lives there in Return to Collinwood!

It’s strange that these sequels to the original Dark Shadows series are more successful creatively than Dan Curtis Productions’ own attempts to reboot it from the beginning. The 1991 revival lasted only two months and does not seem to have inspired enduring affection in DS fandom. Curtis tried again in 2004 with a pilot he and John Wells (of ER and The West Wing) produced for the WB Network. Dark Shadows was a forebear of Buffy and Angel; wouldn’t it have been appropriate if a revival become their successor on the WB? But the pilot, directed by P. J. Hogan, who also helmed the 2003 Peter Pan movie, bombed, and the WB lost interest in Dark Shadows.

The pilot was shown publicly for the first time at last year’s Dark Shadows convention in Los Angeles, and was shown again at this summer’s New York “Celebration Weekend.” I found the pilot an interesting variation on the events that have already been depicted onscreen three times (in the original series, House of Dark Shadows, and the 1991 revival), but as a friend observed, you can see why it wasn’t picked up.

The pilot opens with DS‘s traditional opening scene: Victoria Winters riding a train to Collinsport to begin her new job as the Collins family governess. But already the pilot gets things wrong. The new Vicki has short blonde hair, which makes her look too modern: her predecessors in the role had long, dark hair, which helped make them look the part of the heroine of a Gothic romance. As creator Dan Curtis stated, that’s what Dark Shadows is, so it’s also wrong when the new Vicki abruptly sees a grotesque living corpse appear on the train. The apparition turns out to be part of a dream, but Dark Shadows rarely dealt in such horrific sorts of shock effects. The train ride should instead set a quietly eerie mood as this isolated young woman travels into the unknown. But then, there is a nice touch: when she gets off the train in Collinsport, Vicki notices that her cell phone no longer works. That is right in keeping with the way the series avoided such tokens of contemporary times.

That opening sets the pattern for the rest of the pilot: there are interesting new ideas here and there, but also dreadful errors in tone, and overall the pilot fails to awaken the dramatic power that Shadows aficionados know, from previous versions, these familiar events hold. The early episodes of the 1991 revival were virtually scene-by-scene remakes of House of Dark Shadows; the new pilot does not fall into this trap, but does not find a different way to bring the same basic storyline to effectively dramatic life.

Since this pilot was intended for the WB, various principal cast members are (or at least look) younger than their counterparts in the original series. Blair Brown, as the family matriarch Elizabeth, looks and acts younger than Joan Bennett and Jean Simmons, both veterans of Hollywood’s Golden Age, did in the role in previous versions. But then Elizabeth, another old school WASP aristocrat, shouldn’t come off as vivacious and outgoing. As noted earlier, the pilot gets Roger wrong, though it gets Carolyn and Roger’s troubled son David right. Rather than the scruffy ne’er-do-well that John Karlen played on the original series, the pilot’s Willie Loomis seems more like a young, bespectacled slacker; that’s surprising at first, but it’s an interesting variation. What’s really strange is that Dr. Julia Hoffman is played by Kelly Hu, who portrayed Lady Deathstrike in the second X-Men movie. (As Dark Shadows aficionado Richard Howell pointed out, this makes her Doctor Hu.) Even apart from the fact that the name “Hoffman” doesn’t suggest an Asian-American background, casting the young and gorgeous Ms. Hu misses the point that Dr. Hoffman is supposed to be middle-aged, lonely, and rather drab. (Then again, one of the big surprises for me at this year’s convention came from the biographer of the late Grayson Hall, the original Julia, who said that Mike Nichols had originally intended to cast Hall as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate!)

The 1960s and 1990s versions of Willie Loomis would repel most women, but since the 2004 pilot was for the WB, its more presentable Willie has a girlfriend, and together they make the fateful expedition to the Collins crypt, hunting the family’s legendary treasure, where the chained coffin imprisoning Barnabas is concealed in a secret room. Here too there are some interesting new touches. Instead of lying conscious within his coffin for nearly two centuries, this Barnabas is a decayed corpse, truly dead, who is inadvertedly resurrected by a drop of blood. In this version of the scene of Barnabas’s release, we finally see the treasure: a torrent of gold coins fall onto the floor. But the pilot muffs the pain point again. This Barnabas holds Willie down while killing his girlfriend. There’s too much going on at once: the scene misses the iconic simplicity of the original version, with Barnabas’s hand thrusting from the coffin and seizing Willie around the neck.

By following too closely the template of House of Dark Shadows, in which Barnabas is clearly a villain, the 1991 revival failed to make clear early enough that Barnabas is a reluctant vampire, tormented with guilt over his curse. To its credit, the pilot establishes this early on in a scene in which Barnabas cannot bring himself to bite the sleeping Vicki. (As in the 1991 revival, Vicki is the apparent reincarnation of Josette; this is a distinct improvement on the original series.)

Dan Curtis originally intended Barnabas to be a villain who would be killed off within several weeks, and so he cast Jonathan Frid, a middle-aged actor with a background playing Shakespearean roles like Richard III. For the revivals, Curtis and company knew that Barnabas was the star role and cast more conventional leading men. In the 2004 pilot Barnabas becomes a young hunk, played by Alec Newman, who starred in the Sci-Fi Channel’s recent remake of Dune. Newman didn’t make much of an impression on me, except in a lengthy scene, set in Josette’s room in the Old House, in which he recounts the story of Barnabas’s doomed relationship with Josette to Vicki. During the “Celebration Weekend” we were also shown screen tests for the 1991 series, including Ben Cross’s performance of this same scene. I hadn’t liked Cross’s portrayal back in 1991, but I was impressed with him here; perhaps I should take another look at the 1991 revival.

This points to the biggest problem with the attempted DS television revivals. The original Dark Shadows was a highly theatrical show, drawing its cast from the New York stage. It created drama and characterization through extended scenes that could have been enacted onstage. The scripts for pilot, and to a lesser extent the 1991 series, were constructed more cinematically, with scenes consisting of only brief dialogue exchanges. In contrast, the scene in Josette’s room stands out for giving its characters enough time to express their personalities, to establish a bond, to create the correct romantic mood, and to draw the audience in.

What made Frid’s Barnabas work was his Shakespearean background, which enabled him to make his character larger than life, iconic, nuanced, and even tragic rather than merely melodramatic. Newman’s Barnabas is none of this, but perhaps he could have been had the pilot given him more room to breathe before rushing onward to the next plot point.

Before the pilot was shown, convention head Jim Pierson, who has long worked for Dan Curtis Productions, warned the audience that “the last scene is not in the character of the Dark Shadows that Dan Curtis created.” It certainly wasn’t. Driving a car along a dark road, Vicki collides with Angelique, who is not killed, but maniacally roars at Vicki, who screams in response. Like I said, cheap shock effects. That last scene convinced me that we’re better off without this revival, although I wonder, now that Curtis is gone, whether any future attempt to resurrect Dark Shadows on television will have any real fidelity to the original.

I could write a lot about this year’s “Celebration Weekend,” but I have time only to mention a few things . For example, in the 1980s I was present at the Festival’s annual auction when a portrait of Angelique that was used on the original series went up for sale. In a suspenseful round of bidding, a friend of mine purchased it for nearly three thousand dollars. (I got to help him carry his prize home!) At this year’s auction the portrait of Barnabas from House of Dark Shadows sold for $13,000!

Autobiography took very different dramatic forms. Cast member Christopher Pennock performed a bravura reading of his latest comic book, turning his past and present into phantasmagorical black comedy. (I wonder why other comics authors don’t do dramatic readings of their work.)

Nancy Barrett further reworked her cabaret act, using both familiar and obscure songs to tell her life story, including her initial fears of pursuing her career, allusions to unhappy failed relationships with men, and finally achieving self-realization in later life. All this and tap dancing too. (“I don’t have to be a really good tap dancer,” she told us modestly, “just really loud.”

Broadway legend Donna McKechnie, a member of the original cast of A Chorus Line, made her first Dark Shadows convention appearance since 1981 (!), in order to promote her new autobiography Time Steps: My Musical Comedy Life. She read us the section about how she was written out of Shadows when she had to leave to start rehearsals for the original production of Company. In a reworking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, her character and Quentin were attempting to escape from the underworld when she was buried beneath a sudden avalanche. McKechnie said she had not been warned that the stagehands were going to use “ten times” more “peat moss and Styrofoam rocks” than they had in rehearsal. She said she was “knocked down” and had peat moss “in my mouth, in my ears,” and then the lights went out: the whole crew had moved on to shoot the next scene, leaving her under all the peat moss and Styrofoam. “It seems funny now,” she told us, “but at the time it seemed an ungracious way to say goodbye.” And then we got to watch her infectious delight as she saw her death-by-avalanche replayed on the convention’s big screen.

McKechnie and Pennock weren’t the only authors there; almost every one of the original cast members who were present at the “Celebration Weekend” had recently written a book. (Nancy Barrett hadn’t, but she was selling a CD of her cabaret show instead.) I found this inspiring: these people were acting forty years ago and still find creative outlets, whether as performers or as writers; I hope as the decades pass I will continue to write books myself.

On the “Cast Reunion” panel actress Betsy Durkin told us, “I don’t think you’re ever too old to expand yourself and grow,” and was seconded by McKechnie. Lara Parker declared, “We have not stopped reinventing ourselves.” Kathryn Leigh Scott marveled, “And almost everyone up here has a book. That is extraordinary. I’m so proud of everyone.”

Then John Karlen, beloved by the fans for his irreverence, took the opposite view. “Fifty-one weeks a year I do nothing. And I wait, and I wait for this moment now.” (At this point, David Selby was bent over, breaking up with laughter.) Karlen continued, “At this stage of the game I’m smart enough to throw in the towel. I threw in the towel ten years old and I walk the beaches of California with an orange.” And that’s a reasonable option, too.

But the high point of this “40th Anniversary Celebration Weekend” came at the beginning of the annual “Cast Reunion” panel, when Jim Pierson surprised the audience and cast by taking a phone call. The voice of the man on the other end of the line came over the sound system: “This is Jon Frid speaking. Jonathan Frid,” he continued, as if none of us would realize who it is, finally adding, “Or Barney.” The audience, of course, exploded with joy: Frid, now in his early 80s, had not appeared at the Festivals in over a decade.

Frid mentioned his new hobby, using a digital video camera. “I know nothing about technology,” he told us, but said this might lead to a “whole new career for me, who knows?” To the audience’s affectionate amusement, Frid confessed that he hadn’t been sure that this phone call would go through because I “haven’t paid my bill. Bell Canada has been trying to reach me for weeks,” apparently through a recorded phone messages, but he “thought it was a commercial.”

Frid noted that so many of the original cast members have passed away, whereupon Pierson told him the names of all his former castmates who were there listening to him. Frid then assured us, “I feel I’m going to be living forever,” and the audience clapped and cheered. There were even shouts of “I love you.”

Later during the panel, Kathryn Leigh Scott told the audience “When I heard Jonathan’s voice, I had tears in my eyes.”

And that evening, before the showing of the 2004 pilot, we got to see an example of Frid’s work with his video camera: a short video in which he not only sent his greetings to us on the show’s fortieth anniversary but performed Shakespeare’s famous scene in which Richard III seduces Lady Anne beside the coffin of her husband, whom he had murdered. Frid played both parts, and, to my surprise, he poured his passion not into Richard , whom he has acknowledged as an influence on playing Barnabas, but into the anguished Lady Anne. There was the emotional fire that Jonathan Frid can still conjure at his best, a display of the acting prowess that young Boomers like myself famously rushed home from school each weekday to watch on Dark Shadows.

Kathryn Leigh Scott observed twice during this year’s “Celebration” that the same month that she had attended Dan Curtis’s funeral and memorial , “suddenly we’re in a studio all working together again” on the Big Finish audio dramas. “There is an ending and there is a beginning,” she told us, and “it is all quite amazing.”

ADDENDUM
I would be remiss if I did not direct readers’ attention to a comic book series that should interest Dark Shadows fans. Claypool Comics’ Deadbeats, written and drawn by Richard Howell, is another ongoing serial about a small New England town beset by vampires. Howell acknowledges Dark Shadows as one of his major inspirations in doing the series, though Deadbeats has a distinct creative identity of its own. Deadbeats is still available in comics shops, but it will be moving to weekly publication on the Internet in early 2007. Aficionados of vampire fiction should follow it there.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson