Punisher creator Gerry Conway's influence on Marvel horror can't be overlooked
Overview & Key Takeaways
Gerry Conway was best known for creating The Punisher, but he also was responsible for reshaping Marvel's approach to horror.
The late, great Gerry Conway was a working writer from his teen years into his retirement days, which makes summarizing his output nearly impossible. Conway was perhaps best-known for co-creating The Punisher during an Amazing Spider-Man run that he began at age 19, but there are countless other achievements in his output. Writing around 100 issues of Justice League, introducing the Spider-Clone and Jason Todd in their earliest forms, and penning the seminal “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” are other highlights that barely begin to scratch the surface of a long career.
Conway's superhero legacy is well-known, and his film and TV work is a realm of its own. Less known is that the writer got his start selling horror stories to Marvel and DC, and he played an influential role in the subgenre, primarily during the 1970s. After you get through his greatest hits, here are some standouts in his incredibly prolific work via Marvel's horror line.
It's hard to tell which horror story was Conway's first to be published. Indeed, a number of the issues he wrote are not widely available either online or in trade paperbacks. From the 1970s into the 1980s, Conway contributed horror shorts to anthology series like DC's Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, The Witching Hour, House of Secrets, and House of Mystery, as well as co-creating mainstays like Marvel's Dracula and Werewolf By Night.
Image: Gray Morrow/Marvel Comics
Though DC anthologies may be better-known, Marvel had its own horror books. Conway wrote several stories for magazines like Dracula Lives and Vampire Tales. Due to the large-scale format and black-and-white art, these books were considered to be "for adults" and featured much more grisly subject matter than most other comics on the stands. Conway told a highly entertaining exploitation-era story centering on the underrated Satana: Daughter of Satan! in Vampire Tales #3, returning for some shorts co-written with his then-wife Carla in issues #8-10.
In the summer of 1972, right around the same time his legendary Amazing Spider-Man run was kicking off, Conway and co-creators Roy and Jean Thomas, and artist Mike Ploog, introduced the world to Werewolf By Night. Now best known for the Marvel Cinematic Universe's black-and-white retro Halloween Special on Disney+, the original series was grounded firmly in the influence of 1970s grindhouse cinema. A hereditary werewolf, Jack Russell struggles with his nighttime transformations as he attempts to free himself from his curse. Conway wrote the first four issues of the ongoing series that ran until 1977, with his tightly-paced, superhero-infused horror defining much of the series.
Conway also penned the introduction of Dracula to the Marvel Universe in 1972's Tomb of Dracula. To this day, the 70-issue series remains the longest-running comic to focus entirely on an unrepentant villain. Drawing heavily from Hammer Horror films and the iconic Christopher Lee, this Dracula is over-the-top, dramatic, and more petty than a reality TV star. The first two issues are not indicative of how the series would play out overall, but they are nonetheless a lot of fun.
Much of Conway's horror work has been collected; notably, his issues of big-name titles Swamp Thing, Tomb of Dracula, and Werewolf By Night have been reprinted many times over. Other selections are more difficult to track down. For instance, series like Marvel's Monsters Unleashed are only partially available or not available at all, even through digital services like Kindle and Marvel Unlimited. As horror continues to perform strongly in the comics market, here's hoping that more of Conway's horror work will be collected soon. Meanwhile, there are plenty of worthy selections above to get you started.
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