The brief run of the "Son of Satan" feature in two Marvel magazines, MARVEL SPOTLIGHT and THE SON OF SATAN, followed the pattern of Satanic films that became more popular following the success of 1968's ROSEMARY'S BABY. Daimon Hellstrom, the son of the Devil and a mortal woman, is first seen as an adult who has renounced his paternal heritage but undergoes periodic werewolf-like transformations from a super-powered devil's spawn to a Catholic priest. The priest angle was quickly dropped, and when writer Steve Gerber took over the series, Hellstrom became sort of a combination superhero/exorcist. Gerber also brought in some non-Christian elements into the mix, but during the MARVEL SPOTLIGHT run the whole never exceeded the sum of its parts.
John Warner became the writer for the series when SON OF SATAN became a solo title. The first three issues delve heavily into the opposition of Hellstrom and his father, but this sequence ends with Satan foreswearing any more involvement with his son's life. Warner almost certainly took this tack in order to ground the feature within the Western tradition of ceremonial magic. The arc from issues #4-7, however, were Warner's last hurrah on the series, and the title was cancelled following the publication of an inventory story, reviewed here.
In this essay, I observed that certain stories, such as the Golden Age HAWKMAN origin, might be fairly simple with respect to their dialectic overthoughts, but complex with respect to their symbolic underthoughts. "Cloud of Witness" follows the same pattern. Starting with issue #3, Warner and his assorted artists (mostly Craig Russell and Sonny Trinidad) set up a new direction for Hellstrom, including a new job (occult instructor at Georgetown University) and a new support-cast. The first new addition to the Hellstrom cast is a fellow teacher (and inevitably romantic interest), Saripha Thames. She's later revealed to be a practicing witch who doesn't believe in Hellstrom's father, thus refuting the common conflation of witches and Satanists in American pop culture. To some extent Hellstrom finds himself alienated from this hotbed of occultism, since in his earlier exploits he rarely interacted with large groups, as he does when he's obliged to teach a course to a roomful of students. Thus Warner uses the standard revising of a serial character's setup to delve somewhat into the character's lack of socialization.
But since he's also a superhero as well as an occultist, he has to meet a new villain. although his introduction to this foe comes through a hieratic dream. Once he arrives at his university apartment, the hero falls asleep and finds himself beholding a procession of Egyptian votaries. There's also a "cloud" of incense-vapor that the dreaming Hellstrom likens to "ambrosia," the food of the Greek gods, and inhaling this shifts him to another dreamscape. He meets the image of his mother, who claims that she's about to enter a convent. Hellstrom is never less than aware than he's in a dream, not least because in life his late mother only talked about becoming a nun.
However, the Christian piety is immediately undercut when this "bride of God" greets and embraces her "demon lover" Satan, and Hellstrom is repulsed by his mother's acceptance of this unholy union.
As the dream-parents fade, Hellstrom encounters the puppet-master of the dream: an androgynous, satyr-horned being named Proffet, who claims to be an oracle. Despite the satan-son's attempt to escape the dream, Proffet keeps propelling the hero into more dreamscapes, not least being a confrontation with the two parts of his own soul, the destructive "darksoul" and a normal-seeming Hellstrom who's able to wield a cross to subdue the evil "dark half." Finally the dream ends and Hellstrom wakes up in his apartment, but his next conflict is signaled by a mysterious explosion from the apartment neighboring his own.
Though Hellstrom never met the other apartment's occupant, it's plain that the latter was involved in occultism, because the explosion throws his corpse against a wall in the posture of the Tarot "Hanged Man." Hellstrom reads the "symbolic allegory" of this supernatural manifestation, interpreting the body's posture as that of "a pyramid surmounted by a cross-- or an ankh." Warner does not mention that this opposition of images duplicates that of the dream-fight between the two Hellstroms, where a symbol of life (an Egyptian ankh) transcends an image of death (a pyramid, which is, of course, a glorified tomb, and thus reflective of all the death-imagery in the dream).
To be sure, Warner's beginning is more mythic than his resolution. The villain who caused the occult student's death is a megalomaniac who's taken the supervillain name "Mindstar," and he was attempting to capture the student, for very involved reasons, to turn him over to his divine perceptor, the Egyptian god Anubis. Because Mindstar screws up his mission, he attempts to confuse the issue by convincing the god that the Son of Satan is Anubis's quarry. This proves a rather weak plotline, largely setting up Hellstrom's superheroic battles with Mindstar. Still, at least Anubis conforms to the representation of both death and destruction, the negative elements with which Hellstrom regularly contends. Indeed, Saripha, though not yet romantically involved with Hellstrom, invokes the pagan powers of life to help Hellstrom against the Egyptian god of death.
Had the series continued for a time, Warner probably would have come up with some inventive takes on Marvel characters with an esoteric edge. As things stand, the short run of the SON OF SATAN comic merely hints at some tantalizing possibilities.
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