I love the way he portrays the ghost there, that scratchy overlay gives it a gauzy look that I don't think you could convey any other way with black and white art.

That was my impression as well, I don't think you could have created that look any other way, it would be easy to do now digitally but what he did took way more time and effort and the look is fantastic.

You might be right, the etched line in the previous panel look much straighter and more uniform while the latter panel is more erratic.

It's not impossible that Moench stole or inadvertently borrowed the idea from an earlier source. He grew up on '50s horror titles.

"The Proverbial Killer" (from Nightmare #10, December 1972)

art by Francisco Javier González Vilanova

my grade: B+



plot synopsis: A hen-pecked husband is informed by his wife that she believes he is cheating on her since he goes away for two days out of every month and informs him that this is grounds for divorce, which suits her fine since she married him for money anyway. Astonished and hurt, he leaves for his monthly two day trip, while the wife entertains the detective that has been snooping on him, plotting to marry him while we learn that the detective is just using her for the money too. This insidious tapestry of lies and deceit continues as the detective brags to his best friend about his plan, who then reports all this back to the husband, who returns to confront them, drunk, enraged, and turning into a werewolf on the full moon.


Moench is back to experimenting again, not submitting one of his more traditional scripts to Skywald for once, and the experiment mostly works. The visual premise this time is the delivery of the visuals themselves, which are painfully boring and almost awkward for most of this painfully boring and awkward story that feels far more like a tedious soap opera premise than that of a horror story.



Note that in the title page of this story, the primary focus is a couch pillow, which the artist's eye finds more fascinating than the clashing characters. In the second scanned panel, it's a wine bottle.

Even this third image, in which Villanova chooses to find something striking in the protagonist's eyes, is upstaged by the awkwardness of his facial expression and the random focal presence of his drinking glass.




Of course, the layout are equally uninterested in the story unfolding.


Worse yet, it's not even hard to guess why our protagonist is taking those two day trips each month, leaving us to suspect this entire story will be ho-hum.

Yet, in that last panel, when the husband finally gives himself righteous permission to become the wolf, the page explodes with an energy that Villanova had been purposefully holding back all along, as primary focus locks onto the rage of the werewolf while secondary focus falls on the terrified reactions of those seeking to exploit him. Balance is visually restored.




If this is the first review you're reading in this thread, your assumption would likely be that this is all Villanova's doing and not Moench's, but we've seen a plethora of evidence that Moench considers his scripts primarily in terms of visual delivery and offers a lot of (arguably excessive) direction to his artists. This story would appear to be no exception.


My one qualm with this story is the narrative technique Moench employs. We've seen him experimenting a lot, as of late, with utilizing a theme in his narration (most recently and disastrously with "Thrill of the Hunt", published just this month), and that trend continues here as literally every panel is accompanied by a proverb that somehow relates to what is occurring (thus the double meaning of the title, I suppose). This gets very old very fast, but, even worse yet, the ones Moench employs at the beginning while the wife is threatening to divorce the husband and take all his money, are extremely misogynistic:




Ouch, Doug.

One thing that was unique about Moench was that he often provided those references himself, sometimes in the form of full breakdowns (especially, I'd imagine, when paired with a non native English speaker), sometimes as detailed written descriptions. We know he began at Warren providing full breakdowns and that, by 1976, he was relying more on detailed descriptions when communicating with artists at Marvel.

One of these days, when I'm not posting from my phone, I'll have to provide a scan of some of the scripts Moench submitted while writing the Planet of the Apes magazine. The extent to which he describes and explains the visuals is truly surprising.