MYTHCOMICS" "THE GAME KEEPER" (GHOSTLY HAUNTS #57, 1978)

In THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS VOL. 3, I remarked that the Golden Age Hawkman story was an example of a story in which there was a simple overthought, that of "good vs. evil," and a underthought consisting of complex symbolic associations. This 1978 story-- reprinted in toto here-- boasts a similar disparity, in which the overthought is a basic "terrible doom befalls new wife," while the underthought is-- more involved.

The title itself is rather puzzling. Wikipedia defines a "gamekeeper" as a person who manages an area of countryside to make sure there is enough game for shooting, or fish for angling and who therefore is implicitly an employee of whoever owns the land. But in the story the only person that the title can apply to is Jan Van Drood, the lord of "Drood Castle," somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. There's no sense of when the story's events take place, though since there are no signs of modernity, the 19th century is a likely candidate. Viewpoint character Avis is the new bride of Jan Van Drood, who claims that his family has dwelt in the castle for eight centuries. Avis believes that she is Jan's first wife, but a hunchbacked servant, Salic, makes the odd remark that "There is but one mistress here, and she is neither young nor beautiful."

Jan attempts to dismiss Salic's words as meaningless drivel. On the same page, though, Avis, whose name means "bird," learns another fact about Drood Castle: that it seems to be swarming with diverse animals, all calling to each other at night. Avis momentarily romanticizes the sounds as "love," while Jan cynically demurs without explanation. Then Jan warns Avis never to leave the castle at night, even though he himself is in the habit of walking forth at night. This seems to be the only way in which Jan is a "gamekeeper," in that he claims that the local game is "familiar" with his presence because he is a Drood. Then, both of them hear weird sounds, and Salic tells his master "It is she, master." Neither Salic nor Drood explain the source of the sounds, but Drood departs on one of his night-time walks. Apparently on the same night, Avis's curiosity about the mysterious "she" makes her equally curious about a particular castle-room that's always locked.

Naturally, Avis gains entry, but she doesn't get a grand revelation a la the wife of Bluebeard. It's just a painting-gallery, and every painting shows a Drood ancestor posing with various animals.

On the same night that Avis observes the peculiar gallery that she decides to follow Jan when he goes on his nightly walk on the grounds, apparently believing that she's going to see him meet with the mysterious "mistress" of Drood Castle. Avis finds the woods outside the castle thronging with savage beasts-- wolves, snakes, bats, and maybe even a lion or two. The beasts chase Avis, but a caption remarks that they seem to show "an intelligence beyond the ken of mere animals."

The final page then gives the big, if less than pellucid, reveal.

There's no big shock in finding out that Jan is a werewolf, for werewolfism is a standard enough revelation for weird-acting Carpathian noblemen. But Sutton takes things a little further, claiming that the line of the Droods "departed from the mainstream of human development; we never became entirely human. On the nights of the moon, we reject to our animal selves; a race of were-creatures." And then, without further explanation, the "camera" pulls back to clarify that werewolf-Jan is caught in a giant spider-web, and that a giant black widow spider is crawling down, presumably to bite Jan's head off. Avis turns away, not because of her husband's death, but because the Big Spider is a being with whom Avis cannot compete: "Now you know how futile it would be to compete in her world... Now you know how inadequate your love is compared with her timeless passion." (The word "timeless" seems fortuitously chosen, since the spider's species is shown by its marking, resembling that familiar time-piece, the hourglass.)

So what the hell is the Big Spider? By the fragmentary logic of Sutton's story, it must be another Drood, and therefore a relative, though not necessarily a "first wife" after the manner of Bronte's JANE EYRE. Salic has told Avis that the real mistress of the castle is "neither young nor beautiful," so she's implicitly older than Jan. I theorize that Sutton knew a lot of the maternal symbolism that appears in Gothics or Gothic-leaning works like JANE EYRE and REBECCA, even both of these involve "first wives" rather than "mothers." I further theorize that Sutton decided to sucker Charlton Comics into printing a comic-book story, aimed at a kid-audience, in which a married man got his head bitten off his own monstrous mother, in the embodiment of the "devouring female." (To be sure, it's been stated that real black widows don't engage in sexual cannibalism like other spider-species, but the abused arachnid will probably never live down this reputation.)

An interesting side-note: the name "Jan Van Drood" bears a strong resemblance to the titular character of Charles Dickens' unfinished novel, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. Edwin Drood is mysteriously slain, and though Dickens died before he revealed the killer's identity, the author apparently told a friend that the novel was about a nephew being slain by his uncle. The uncle in question, one John Jasper, is a respectable fellow with dark secrets, one of which is his illicit desire for Edwin's betrothed, a woman young enough to be Jasper's daughter. Did Sutton know about the quasi-incestuous content of the Dickens novel, and channel a little part of it into his Bronte-pastiche? I cannot but say, "I think it so."