Black and White Wednesday: Gene Day's Scream-ing Psycho Nightmares

What it is, Groove-ophiles! Today we're gonna dig on some stunning and scary art by none other than the late, great Gene Day. Day was best known during the Groovy Age as an awesome Marvel Comics inker, making an indelible mark on Master of Kung Fu, as well as Marvel Two-In-One and elsewhere. Post Groovy Age, his penciling talents were allowed to shine, again on MoKF, as well as on Star Wars. But seeing art both penciled and inked by the amazing Mr. Day was usually seen in the b&w mags and the "ground-level" comics from companies like Star*Reach. Day's earliest U.S. work, however, appeared in the waning days of Skywald's wild n spooky Horror-Mood mags, Nightmare, Psycho, and Scream. Day did ads, spot illos, and pin-ups from late 1973-early 1975, and Ol' Groove's dug up most (if not all) of those pages for your perusal! Enjoy!

Black and White Wednesday: The Origin of Gabriel the Devil Hunter

Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Today's post is not only a Black and White masterpiece, but a Famous First, as well! Check it out! Marvel's last ongoing b&w horror mag was the short lived Haunt of Horror (not to be confused with the pulp-style mag with the same title) which ran five issues during 1974. The first issue had no regular features, but with the second issue (May 1974), Marvel moved Satana over from Vampire Tales and added their Exorcist-inspired new hero, Gabriel the Devil Hunter. Written by Doug Moench and drawn (only in his first appearance, sadly) by Billy Graham, Gabriel is a very different and quite far-out character, once you get past the fact that he sports Nick Fury's eye-patch and Jason Blood's hairdo, that is. His origin hits all the right cool and creepy notes. Dig it!


Fans dug him enough that Gabe appeared in all the rest of the issues in HoH's run, an issue of Monsters Unleashed (#11). After that he pretty much hunted devils in obscurity until he made a guest appearance in the Fantastic Four #'s 222-223 in the summer of 1980. In the early 90s, during Marvel's "Midnight Sons" phase, Gabe was a semi-regular character in their Hellstorm comic.