31 Witches | Sally and Gillian Owens

"You should come round here on Halloween. You'd really see something then." -- Sally Owens, Practical Magic (1998)

31 Witches | Katrina Van Tassel

"The pickity witch. The pickity witch. Who's got a kiss for the pickity witch?" -- Katrina Van Tassel, Sleepy Hollow (1999)

31 Witches | Tia Dalma

"Now, don't tell me you didn't enjoy it at the time." -- Tia Dalma, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

31 Witches | Alex Russo

"These forbidden spells are so super user friendly." -- Alex Russo, Wizards of Waverly Place

Done!

We did it!

I really wanted to get through the Bond films before October and we totally did it. Now it's time to be like Bond and Melina, quiet down, and have a little rest.

At least until tomorrow when we start the Countdown to Halloween. After all, that's why we had to be done by October in the first place.

Skyfall (2012) | Music

During production of Skyfall, regular Bond composer David Arnold was working on the music for the 2012 Summer Olympic ceremonies, but he contends that it was something else that lost him the Skyfall job. And he's probably right. Director Sam Mendes had worked with composer Thomas Newman on every one of his films except Away We Go, which used original songs by singer Alexi Murdoch. It made sense that he'd want to work with him again on Skyfall, and indeed Newman has also written the score for Mendes' SPECTRE.

For the theme song, Sony recommended Adele to Eon Productions. They agreed and Adele wrote the song with Paul Epworth, who'd produced her 21 album. The music is oh so cool and sinister, but Adele's voice and the lyrics turn it into a positive song about two people - Bond and M, in the film - who help each other overcome their obstacles. It's cool, it's sexy, it's uplifting. I've been dreading the decision about whether to let it bump "View to a Kill" from Number One on my list, but now that I'm here, I have no problem doing that.

Daniel Kleinman is also back in top form after a lackluster credits sequence in Quantum of Solace. As Bond - wounded in the teaser - goes over a waterfall and sinks to the bottom of a river, the theme song starts and a hand grabs Bond. It then becomes a giant hand, pulling Bond into a hole of swirling sand.

The rest of the credits could be a dream Bond has as he's dying. There are images of him as a shooting range target with blood pouring from a hole in his shoulder. Later, the same Bond-targets are on fire, burning into nothing.

But there's a cool narrative through the credits sequence, too. Image leads to image, so we're underwater with some women and guns are falling around us, then we move through the cloud-like sand and the seaweed becomes a forest of trees with a cemetery and falling daggers. The cemetery leads us to the gate of the Skyfall estate, which leads us to the house, which has a crack in it, which is filled with Bond's face, and then we zoom into his eye. And on and on. The whole thing is weird and beautiful with some images - like the targets and the Skyfall house and gate - reappearing as the drowning Bond's mind returns to them.

I can't quite explain why he's hallucinating about Chinese dragons, but that country does figure heavily into the movie and the dragons look great, so who's complaining.

I loved most of Arnold's stuff on the movies he did, but Newman is great too. He's certainly a lot more free with the Bond Theme than Arnold was on the last two films. That's appropriate though, since Skyfall is getting the series back to basics.

The fanfare to the Bond Theme pops up by itself a couple of times: when Bond catches the train during the cold open and again at the end when Silva blows up the Aston Martin. There's also a nice, acoustic guitar version playing as Bond leaves the casino in Macau.

The first time we hear the full Theme is when Bond's air support shows up at Silva's island. That seems like a curious place to put it, since Bond isn't doing anything cool at the time. But then I thought about how Skyfall is reintroducing the idea of any kind of support to Bond's world. After lone-wolfing it for two movies, Bond now has a team to work with: particularly Moneypenny and Q. Playing the Bond Theme as he's being rescued then becomes a subtle way to reinforce the idea that he's really not Bond without his friends.

The other two times we get the full Theme are total nostalgia blasts: When Bond takes the Aston Martin out of storage and when he faces his new M in the new (old) office. That last time leads into the closing credits which feature a David Arnold remix of the Bond Theme that then leads into a medley of Newman's various pieces for the film.

Sadly, the gun barrel sequence is at the end again for the second film in a row. I don't have really strong feelings about that, but I also don't see the point in moving it. It's starting to annoy me.

Top Ten Theme Songs

1. Skyfall
2. A View to a Kill
3. "Surrender" (end credits of Tomorrow Never Dies)
4. "You Know My Name" (Casino Royale)
5. The Living Daylights
6. "Nobody Does It Better" (The Spy Who Loved Me)
7. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
8. Diamonds Are Forever
9. You Only Live Twice
10. From Russia With Love (instrumental version)

Top Ten Title Sequences

1. Casino Royale
2. Skyfall
3. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
4. Dr No
5. Thunderball
6. Goldfinger
7. GoldenEye
8. From Russia with Love
9. The Spy Who Loved Me
10. Die Another Day

Skyfall (2012) | Villains

Raoul Silva has some henchmen, but they're not memorable or important. He's all the villain Skyfall needs. Other movies have given us anti-Bonds before, but one cool thing about Bond's changing with the times is that his evil opposites change too. As Bond grows more complicated, so do they. Roger Moore's cartoonish Bond got Scaramanga, who was nothing more than another womanizing assassin. Since Brosnan's Bond was commenting on and questioning his role in the world, Alec Trevelyan provided a voice for that, challenging Bond with tough, thoughtful questions. The major focus of Daniel Craig's Bond has been his relationship with M and his trust issues in general, so Silva shows us what happens if that gets out of control. Silva is the proto-Bond, at least of Craig's version. He got too close to M and it drove him mad.

M tells Bond that Silva's sin was "operating beyond his brief." That doesn't sound too serious, especially considering all the times that Bond's done that himself. Silva's only crime was hacking the Chinese government without orders, and for that M gave him up to them in order to retrieve some other agents and ease the transition of power from Britain back to China. It seems totally harsh for his crime, but that's the point. Silva's obviously unhinged, but that's the result of his being betrayed by M, not the cause of it.

Javier Bardem does great things with Silva. He's crazy, but Bardem isn't just playing him as a generic madman. There's a reason for Silva's insanity and Bardem lets that shape the choices he makes playing the character. He's unpredictable, interesting, entertaining, and constantly goes right to the top without ever going over it.

The only thing I don't like about him is his escape plan. It's just not believable, because Silva's accounted for too many random variables that he could neither control nor predict. There's no way he could know the exact time that Q would plug in Silva's laptop, for example, which starts the perfectly timed chain reaction.

Not that any of it matters anyway. The whole point of the elaborate escape is to put Silva in the courtroom with M, which he could've orchestrated in countless other and much simpler ways. The escape is just a way for the movie to show off a big, but sadly unnecessary set piece.

Top Ten Villains

1. Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
2. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Never Say Never Again)
3. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (From Russia With Love and Thunderball)
4. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
5. Maximilian Largo (Never Say Never Again)
6. Francisco Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun)
7. Dr. Kananga (Live and Let Die)
8. Le Chiffre (Casino Royale)
9. Raoul Silva (Skyfall)
10. Doctor No (Dr. No)

Top Ten Henchmen

1. Baron Samedi (Live and Let Die)
2. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
3. Grant (From Russia with Love)
4. Nick Nack (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Zao (Die Another Day)
6. Gobinda (Octopussy)
7. May Day (A View to a Kill)
8. Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker)
9. Naomi (The Spy Who Loved Me)
10. Oddjob (Goldfinger)

Skyfall (2012) | Women

Returning to form for the movie series, Bond has sex with as many women in Skyfall as he did in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace combined. The first one almost doesn't count though, because she never speaks and doesn't even get a name. The credits just call her Bond's Lover.

But her namelessness is the point. She's not an important person to Bond. She is however important to illustrating his frame of mind when he's shot by Eve and goes missing in southwest Turkey. He goes at it like crazy with her up against a wall, but afterwards he's totally distracted; drinking a beer and staring into the distance as she cuddles him. It's the same with his drinking right after that. He throws himself into it to the point that he's drinking with literal scorpions, but is totally empty once the experience is over.



I like Eve Moneypenny a lot. Naomi Harris is a great actress and brings a lot of nuance to a role that needs it. A small part of me wishes that Moneypenny hadn't tried field work before becoming Mallory's permanent assistant, because the temptation is to think that she failed at it. That's not really it though. She tried it, had a horrible experience in the teaser, then tried it again and had a better time. But she ultimately decides that it's not for her and there's no shame in that.

Harris and Craig sell this. There's no judgment in him when he says that field work isn't for everyone. And there's no judgment in herself when she decides that she agrees. She's confident in her decision and has found her niche.

I love that the flirtation between them is already there and that it's mutual. They're friends. They might have become more than that, but her new job eliminates that possibility. It's a great relationship and I'm excited to see more of it.



Séverine kind of breaks my heart. The first time I saw the movie, it took me a while to warm up to her. There's something wrong about her confidence when she meets Bond, like she's obviously posing. Which of course she is. The more she talks, the more terrified you realize that she is. As Bond says, she's doing her best to hide it, but isn't succeeding. Bérénice Marlohe is amazing in the role and it kills me that Bond isn't able to save her.

He doesn't even give saving her a real try. He's in full-on blunt instrument mode by the time he gets on the boat with her. He knows he's very close to the person behind the MI6 bombing and doesn't bother trying to sneak onto the island. He just lets himself get captured as usual and never mind any collateral damage. It would be interesting to go back and watch earlier films when Bond's allies are killed and see if there's a way he could have saved them had he not been so focused on the villain.



I could've talked about M in any of the "Women" posts for the last five movies, but chose to discuss her in the "Allies" section instead. With Skyfall though, there's an effort to explore her not just in relation to Bond, but as a full character.

Bond's apparent death hits her hard and the first shots of the movie after the credits are of her in shock. Then she feels even worse after the deaths of eight people in the MI6 bombing. Her confidence and trust in herself are severely shaken. She's lost the control that she tried to hard to hold onto in the cold open.

It doesn't help that others are questioning her too, starting with Mallory, the chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He offers her a GCMG (Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George) if she retires quietly, but she's not biting. Her pride won't let her. "I'll leave when the job's done."

The rest of the movie is largely about her trying to regain her trust in herself, but the tragedy is that she really doesn't. Silva pokes at her big time, but she's confronted with even more failure concerning Bond. She's always recruited orphans because they make the best agents, but by going to Skyfall, she has to face the reality that orphans aren't just convenient demographics or advantages for training. Bond's losing his parents was a serious tragedy in his life that deeply haunts him. When she tells him with her last breath that "I did get one thing right," it's meant to encourage him, but it's also her way of acknowledging the many things that she didn't.

My Favorite Bond Women

1. Tracy Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
2. Vesper Lynd (Casino Royale)
3. Melina Havelock (For Your Eyes Only)
4. Camille Montes (Quantum of Solace)
5. Kara Milovy (The Living Daylights)
6. Wai Lin (Tomorrow Never Dies)
7. Paula Caplan (Thunderball)
8. Tatiana Romanova (From Russia With Love)
9. Natalya Simonova (GoldenEye)
10. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)

Skyfall (2012) | Bond

Actors and Allies



Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) accuses M of being sentimental about Bond at one point. He's not wrong. We've seen this over and over again in all three of the Craig movies so far. And as becomes clearer in Skyfall, M has a habit of becoming deeply connected to certain agents. It happened with Silva and it's happened again with Bond.

And, also like Silva, she's willing to sacrifice Bond for the greater good. It reminds me of her comment to Brosnan's Bond in GoldenEye about having the balls to send him to his death. She totally does and she proves it in Skyfall's cold open. That shakes Bond. His apparent death shakes M, but her willingness to toss him aside for a mission really affects him.

The first time we see Bond after Eve shoots him, he's in the tropics. He's deeply indulging his hedonistic impulses, but none of it is satisfying him. He's distracted and aimless. He can't leave his job in the past. So as soon as he hears about the MI6 bombing, he's back on a plane and headed home. And the first place he shows up is M's house. It's reminiscent of Casino Royale. He's falling back into old, inappropriate habits, because he's not sure where he stands anymore. He accuses her of distrusting him on the train and though she defends it, he's right.

She knows it, too. That's why she puts him back on duty when he's not ready. Silva spins it as a reason for Bond to distrust M, but that's not it. She's trying to prove - to herself as much as to Bond - that she does trust him. That's what her last words are about. Whatever else they've been through together, she trusts Bond.

It's just that trust is fickle. It's not something that's earned and never questioned again. Our trust in each other depends on a lot of different factors, many of which have nothing to do with the trustworthiness of the person in question. Because M had failed to trust Bond, he now has reason to doubt her. Which is why she confesses to him her history with Silva. Trust is such a tricky, fragile thing and it's cool to see it handled that way in these movies. (Though, having said that, I'm totally ready to move on to a new theme.)

Speaking of new, I like Bond's relationships with his new colleagues. This is the first Craig movie to show him interacting with anyone else at MI6 besides M. And though he and Q argue when they first meet, they're smiling by the end of the scene. His relationship with Moneypenny is also cordial and light. I mean, of course he likes her, but he's remarkably patient with her and I don't get the sense that it's just because he wants to sleep with her. They seem like friends. Hard to imagine the Bond of Casino Royale treating her that way.

One final ally to mention is Kincade, the gamekeeper on the Skyfall estate. It's obvious to me that the screenwriters at least hoped that Sean Connery might come back to play him. He's not needed for the plot, so putting an elderly Scot character in the 50th anniversary movie is totally a stunt. The screenplay hasn't been released, so I don't know for sure, but the way Kincade is introduced - a creak of the floorboards, then we see his rifle, and finally his face - it looks like it's building to a reveal that Albert Finney doesn't pay off. It feels like there's supposed to be something bigger going on there. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. I agree with Sam Mendes' assessment that having Connery in the movie - while fun and cool - would have also been a little sad and a lot distracting.

Best Quip



"What makes you think this is my first time?"

Worst Quip



"Put it all on red. It's the circle of life." Honestly, I don't know what's going on here. It sounds like a Lion King joke, but the reference to roulette right before makes me wonder if that's the circle Bond's talking about. But how is that the circle of life? No idea. Don't like it.

Gadgets



Since we have a Q again, we also finally have some gadgets, though they're relatively low tech. The fanciest is a Walther PPK/S with a palm-print reader so that only Bond can fire it. Besides that, there's just a radio transmitted tracking device.

Of course, the Aston Martin DB5 does show up again and it's tricked out with (at least) an ejector seat and machine guns like the one in Goldfinger.

Top Ten Gadgets

1. Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me)
2. Aston Martin DB V (Goldfinger and Thunderball)
3. Jet pack (Thunderball)
4. Iceberg boat (A View to a Kill)
5. The Q Boat (The World Is Not Enough)
6. Aston Martin V8 Vantage (The Living Daylights)
7. Glastron CV23HT speed boat (Moonraker)
8. Acrostar Mini Jet (Octopussy)
9. Crocodile submarine (Octopussy)
10. X-Ray Specs (The World Is Not Enough)

Skyfall (2012) | Story

Plot Summary

Later in Bond's career, trust issues again arise with M when an agent from her past predicts a tragic end to Bond's future.

Influences

After the close connection between Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, Skyfall was surprisingly unrelated to those films. There's some thematic carryover with continuing trust issues, but the Quantum organization makes no appearance, nor do any other plot threads from those two movies.

Skyfall was released on the 50th anniversary of Dr. No, though, and draws most of its inspiration from the overall series. Like Die Another Day (the 40th anniversary film), there are a lot of things in Skyfall that possibly reference earlier movies. Some - like the Aston Martin DB5 - are very clear, but others are less certain. When Q jokes about not giving Bond an exploding pen, is that just an allusion to outlandish gadgets in general, or is it a specific reference to GoldenEye? What about Bond's hopping on a Komodo dragon's back to escape a pit? Convenient step-stool or purposeful quotation of Live and Let Die?

Moment That's Most Like Fleming



Bond's being an orphan from Scotland is right out of Fleming (although Fleming didn't make Bond from Scotland until after Sean Connery had played him). Other than that though, Skyfall isn't a very Fleming-like movie. In fact, its goal is to move the Daniel Craig movies away from Fleming and back towards Eon Productions.

Moment That's Least Like Fleming



Sometimes I've used this section to talk about negative aspects of the movie. "Ugh! Fleming never would have done that!" An example from Skyfall would be Bond's digging out some bullet shrapnel that's so unique It Could Only Have Been Used By One Person. It's a tired trope and Daniel Craig's Bond deserves better.

But there's often nothing wrong with a movie's being un-Fleming. They're their own thing and that's good. I was super excited when the end of Skyfall promised a return to the traditional movie Bond in the next one. As much as I've enjoyed the Craig movies, I'm also eager for the nostalgia of returning to the "old ways."

That's another big theme in Skyfall and it's not especially Fleming-esque. The literary Bond never struggled with whether or not he needed to keep up with the times. He always knew that one day his time would be up and that he'd become irrelevant. If that happened before he died, he'd simply be put out to pasture like so many agents before him. In contrast, Skyfall not only has people questioning Bond's age and ability to do his job, but questioning MI6 itself and whether or not it's still relevant in the modern world.

I'm not totally on board the questioning of Bond, because there's too big a leap from the starter spy of Casino/Quantum to the aging agent of Skyfall. But I do like the commentary on the whole concept of a spy organization and M's defense of it. It's not the most interesting theme of the movie to me - that would be the wrap-up to the Bond/M relationship and their trust issues - but I'm glad it's in there.

Cold Open



This is a good one because not only is it action packed with some excellent stunts, but it also sets up the major relationship for the rest of the movie to resolve. Bond shows up at a murder scene, looking for a hard drive and with M in his ear via microphone. It's weird for her to be there and I don't like it. I'm used to Bond having autonomy on his missions. But that's the point. This isn't some kind of new status quo for missions; M is just super invested in this one. She's pushing Bond to move on and try to recover the hard drive, even resenting the time he takes to stabilize a critically wounded agent. Her impatience becomes even more of a problem very shortly.

Back in the street, Bond's picked up by a girl in a car (shades of Quantum of Solace, where Camille did the same thing after a similar scene in a hotel room). We'll call her Eve for now, though her name isn't mentioned until the end of the movie when we learn that her last name is Moneypenny. The car chase turns into a motorcycle chase with M's still screaming to both Bond and Eve about the importance of recovering the drive and the list that's on it. (I'm tempted to be uncharitable about the NOC list plot's already being used in the first Mission: Impossible movie, but it's more than just a MacGuffin in Skyfall, so I'm cutting the script some slack.)

The pursuit moves to a train with Eve still pursuing in her car. Naomi Harris is doing great work as Eve, showing that she's frightened and clearly out of her depth, but absolutely determined to succeed. M's constant demands for reports are getting really annoying at this point, but there's still a reason for this. As the fight continues, M quits talking to Bond, partly because he's fighting, but mostly because the film is increasingly putting us in Eve's point of view. She's the one whom M is pressuring to keep up, so that when we get to the climax of the cold open, the success or failure of the mission really seems to be up to Eve.

If we step back from it though, of course that's ridiculous. That's Bond on the train. He's going to beat that enemy agent and take back the list. The fact that he and the bad guy are about to disappear into a tunnel has nothing to do with it. The only thing the tunnel affects is Eve's involvement in the chase and M's control over the situation.

And that's the big problem. M orders Eve to "take the bloody shot." It's not really that she trusts Eve over Bond; it's that she only trusts herself and her own ability to manage the mission from London. When Eve hits Bond by mistake, M loses the list because she didn't trust Bond to get it back.

Top 10 Cold Opens

1. GoldenEye
2. Casino Royale
3. The Spy Who Loved Me
4. Moonraker
5. Thunderball
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
7. A View to a Kill
8. Goldfinger
9. The Man with the Golden Gun
10. The Living Daylights

Movie Series Continuity



Like I said above, a lot of time seems to have passed since Quantum of Solace. Bond is considered a veteran now and is perhaps aging out of his job. M says he's been playing the game "long enough" to know the rules. And then there's the tricked-out Aston Martin. Is that something that Bond received on a previous mission like Goldfinger? Or is it supposed to be the same vehicle he won in Casino Royale? If it's the one from Casino, he's moved the steering wheel to the right-hand seat. M doesn't seem surprised to see it, so it's another element that implies a great passage of time.

M was established in previous films to be married with kids, but mentions that her husband has passed away some time before Skyfall. We also learn of course that she was stationed in Hong Kong at some point before receiving her current assignment.

[UPDATE: I questioned in another post if this M is supposed to be the same woman as the one who gave Brosnan's Bond his orders. I think Skyfall makes it pretty clear that she's not. Silva tells Bond that he was stationed in Hong Kong from 1986 to 1997. And M confesses that she turned Silva over to the Chinese government as she was transitioning out of Hong Kong, so she had to have been there in '97 as well. That means that if Craig's M lived in Brosnan's world, she would have been stationed in Hong Kong at least during the events of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and probably of GoldenEye (1995) as well. There's no way Judi Dench is playing the exact same character in both the Brosnan and Craig eras.]

As a result of the bombing, MI6 decides that its headquarters are too public and moves to a less conspicuous location. First they go into bunkers that Churchill used in World War II, but by the end they seem to have moved again. The new M's office is above ground, at least.

Tanner is back, still played by Rory Kinnear. He mentions Q-Branch early in the movie, setting up the appearance of the new Q. Ben Whishaw's version has a different relationship with Bond than previous versions, but there's still a nod toward the old conflict when he tells Bond, "Good luck out there in the field. And please return the equipment in one piece."

Bond tells Eve at one point not to touch her ear when she's talking into her microphone. That's a pet peeve of his as revealed in Casino Royale.

And speaking of Eve Moneypenny, I couldn't help noticing that there's a hat rack in her office at the end. There's no hat toss, but she does call attention to it by hanging her coat there. Keeping my fingers crossed for SPECTRE.

Skull the Slayer: Polemic or Pulp? [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

1975 saw two things happen almost simultaneously. Marv Wolfman came to Marvel comics and he created Skull the Slayer. Who? Yes, Skull was not the runaway success that Tomb of Dracula was. But it was a project that Marv had thought about for four years before getting to write it. What he wanted to do was take an entire skyscraper full of people and put them in the dinosaur-haunted past. The series would focus on a different character each issue. That idea is at least as old as Murray Leinster's "The Runaway Skyscraper" (Argosy, February 22, 1919), but Wolfman's version was a little closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Leinster's early pulp tale has the skyscraper arrive in Manhattan before Columbus.

A couple of things changed Wolfman's original idea. First was the popularity of von Daniken's The Chariot of the Gods (1969) and Charles Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle (1974). The second was Gold Key's Tragg and the Sky Gods, beginning April 1972, which featured cavemen and dinosaurs with aliens. Thirdly, Stan Lee liked the idea, but insisted on dropping the anthology part for a central character. Wolfman accepted the challenge and created Jim Scully or "Skull," an ex-Viet Nam hero who has been branded a murderer. Encountering the left overs of a UFO, Scully finds an alien belt that gives him super strength.

When the comic finally appeared August 1975 it was named Skull the Slayer. (There had been some trepidation around the name because Marvel also had Robert E Howard's Kull. That title folded, removing any difficulties.) Set in the Bermuda Triangle, Skull the Slayer features dinosaurs and cavemen and all things Edgar Rice Burroughs. It also has a cast of four, with Skull being the lead. The other three are Dr. Raymond Corey (a black professor of physics and Skull's ideological antagonist), Ann Reynolds (spokeswoman for the female side), and Jeff Turner (the son of Senator "Stoneface" Turner). Between these four viewpoints, Marv found his anthology of characters, making the comic not only a pulp for fourteen year olds, but also a venue for political discussion, a polemic for issues of the mid-1970s.

That's up to Issue 4 (March 1976) when suddenly Marv's no longer writing this strip, but acting as editor. Steve Engelhart takes over and changes everything. First he kills off the supporting cast in a scene that cuts counter to everything that has gone before. Jim Scully, who has dived in feet first in every other fight, suddenly abandons his friends to death. From hero to zero in one page! Also, Engelhart turns the storyline from ancient Egypt to the days of King Arthur, bringing in Marvel's former character the Black Knight.

And if you don't like it... don't worry, because by the next issue (May 1976) Bill Mantlo is driving the bus and he brings back the three friends (Hey, this is science fiction. We can do anything!) and after an aerial battle in which Jeff, Ann, and Dr. Corey fight against Skull's side in the robot battle, they all make up and the team is back together. Mantlo confesses that when he was approached to take over the comic, he insisted on going back to Marv's original ideas. This meant as quickly as possible bringing back the dinosaurs and blowing up Slitherogue and his time tower, erasing them from the storyline.

For the last two issues (September and November 1976), the revolving door took Marv from the editing post and replaced him with Archie Goodwin. Mantlo's writing improves things with the team back together and finding an Incan city of gold run by another person from outside. The back-biting polemic is gone, with Skull and Dr. Corey co-existing under a truce. Mantlo heats things up by having Senator Turner send Scully's arch enemy from Nam, a Southern boy named Lancer, into the Bermuda Triangle after them. Despite the improvements, the flip-flopping took its toll. Issue #8 was the last. Skull and his friends remained in the power of a new villain, The Children of the Night, introduced via pterodactyl riders.

In the art department, the lead on Skull the Slayer had been Steve Gan; sometimes inking his own work, sometimes with Pablo Marcos. The look was good, feeling a little like Joe Kubert and a little like Alfred Alcala. With Issue #4 Sal Buscema took over, having his work inked by Mike Esposito, Steve Gan or Sonny Trinidad. The inconsistency on the inking made some issues better than others and hurt the over-all feel the book.

But Marvel, having many comics to play with, did not have to leave Skull and his friends in limbo. The big finale appeared in Marvel Two-in-One #35 (January 1978) and #36 (February 1978). Ben Grimm and even Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards, show up to finish this saga off. Written and edited by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Ernie Chan, the two parter follows Ben and the Skull crew as they encounter dinosaurs while looking for the old crash site so they can fix Grimm's plane. They eventually get out of the Bermuda Triangle but bring Baldy, the priest of the Children of the Night, and his pet pterodons with them. After one last fight, the crew is finally home and Jim Scully decides to turn himself in and face trial for his brother's death. (You can almost feel Marv Wolfman sigh in relief. The saga is over and he can get on with other things.) Despite being mostly retread, Wolfman does have fun by referring to currently popular people and events such as the changing of the name of Cape Kennedy and the election of Jimmy Carter to point out that the characters have been lost in a time warp for two years.

And so the saga of Jim "Skull" Scully ends on a landing strip in Miami. Marvel could have resurrected him, given him a new comic set in the regular Marvel world but this never happened. And it isn't surprising. Skull the Slayer still had his magic alien belt that gave him super strength but so what? Marvel had plenty of strong men on their backlist: Luke Cage (Power Man) and the orange gorilla himself, Ben Grimm, for example. One more muscle man with no dinosaurs to fight just didn't scream out as a bestseller. A slayer with nothing left to slay. He quietly went into comics oblivion, facing a self defence trial, with his girl Ann Reynolds declaring she'd wait for him and his two friends Dr. Corey and Jeff Turner ready to stand up and testify in court to his character. The polemic was long gone. No arguments were left.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.