The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives! Is The Perfect New Comic For Horror Movie Fans
1954's "The Creature From The Black Lagoon" was the last gasp of Universal Pictures' black-and-white horror heyday. Pivoting away from literary adaptations towards something more resembling contemporary man-in-suit monster movies, "Black Lagoon" introduced one last staple of the Universal Monster line-up: The Gill-man. A missing link in the evolutionary chain, the amphibian man has the same mix of terror and lovelorn pathos as his monstrous brethren.
It's not quite the pop-culture staple that "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" are, but "The Creature From The Black Lagoon" has been reimagined many times (most famously in 2017 with Guillermo del Toro's Best Picture-winning oddball romance "The Shape of Water" — it was almost black-and-white like "Black Lagoon" too). Now a new comic book starring the Gill-Man comes forth from Skybound Entertainment, boasting a title that belongs to a forgotten Universal Horror picture: "The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives!"
Skybound (a partner of Image Comics, founded by "Invincible" writer Robert Kirkman) isn't just revitalizing "The Transformers" and "G.I. Joe." They've also been publishing a new "Universal Monsters" meta-series, of which "Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives!" is the second. Last year's "Dracula" (by writer James Tynion and artist Martin Simmonds) was the first, while a "Frankenstein" book by writer/artist Michael Walsh is due in August.
"Lives" carries on from the events of the original film (down to featuring Dr. Edwin Thompson, originally played by Whit Bissell and still in pursuit of the Gill-man), but shifts focus. Journalist Kate Marsden journeys to the Amazon rainforest, hunting serial killer Darwin Collier, and finds a different monster than what she'd expected. I was lucky enough to read the first two (out of four) issues of this mini-series and speak with writer Dan Watters ("Home Sick Pilots," "Coffin Bound").
Universal Horror fans, you won't want to miss this book.
Reimagining The Creature From The Black Lagoon
The original pitch for "Creature Lives!" came from writer Ram V ("Detective Comics," "The Many Deaths of Laila Starr"), who envisioned the comic as "Creature From The Black Lagoon" meets "True Detective." When V's contract with DC Comics prevented him from writing the book himself, he and Skybound recruited Watters.
"I'm always a bit cautious and careful with what I agree to. Overall to begin with, but also particularly with co-writing. It can be thorny. But you know, Ram and I are part of the same writing studio. [...] Because I trusted the team I was working with, I was happy to jump on board and just the elevator pitch was so juicy that I couldn't really say no," Watters told me (adding he's a "sucker" for season 1 of "True Detective").
The two writers kept collaborating, "bouncing ideas back and forth" as Watters wrote his scripts, staying true to V's outline in some places and going in different directions in others. Watters, no stranger to horror comics or licensed ones, likes to approach familiar stories as an outsider:
"I love all sorts of old horror. I came in at 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' and went from there. 'The Creature from the Black Lagoon,' I don't know that I could honestly say it was my favorite and the most stand out one, but that was also part of the appeal of being presented it as, 'Hey, what would you do with this? Where would you take this? And I think that can be more fun and more rewarding than something that you feel particularly precious about. You can come a little from the outside and say, 'What works about this? What is interesting about this and what can I break about this?'"
How to make a horror comic
The most beautiful scenes in the original "Creature From The Black Lagoon" are the underwater ones, as the Gill-man (Ricou Browning) glides beneath the river waves, circling Kay's (Julia Adams) submerged and paddling feet like a shark. The art of "Lives!" — penciled by Matthew Roberts and colored by Dave Stewart — captures the same feeling of a camouflaged predator lurking.
In two panels (I won't tell you where), as Julia walks through the Amazon's greenery, the creature is visible in the background, its skin blending in with the forest. Stewart colors the river a murky green, letting the outline of the creature fade (besides its eyes) when it dives. It helps that, while the original film couldn't get past the plasticity of Gill-man's costume, Roberts and Stewart draw it as just another organic part of the setting (without deviating from the original design).
Horror movies have an advantage horror comics don't: sound. "The Creature From The Black Lagoon" used an unnerving trumpet score to signal the Gill-man's presence. "Lives!", though, has no equivalent. I asked Watters about how he makes his comics scary:
"Coming into a medium which is hamstrung in ways that almost no other is in terms of creating horror is a really fascinating thing because it's hamstrung by limitations, which are not a bad thing. They just make you have to come up with creative responses. Have the page turn and stuff like, yeah, fine, but it's never going to be as effective as a jump scare, which relies on sound [and] movement. Which comics just don't really have that going for them. So you have to create it through atmosphere and you have to unnerve your reader before you can scare them with anything visual."
Fear of drowning in the Black Lagoon
Watters, Roberts, and Stewart set that atmosphere from the first page of "The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives!" Kate awakens from a dream of herself drowning. Some might say drowning is the most peaceful way to die, the narration suggests, a slow evaporation of life — as Kate sinks further, she realizes how wrong that is.
Skybound Entertainment
Watters confesses to me this opening may have begun with V's outline, but it affected him too much to change.
"As you go through the issues, it becomes more and more of a key idea of what it must be like to drown and what that can do to you as a person. So I started digging into accounts and reports and sort of like people's near death experiences and things. It does things to the brain. And I thought that was [a] really interesting key thing to hang the whole [book] on."
It certainly adds to the human pathos of the book, with Kate not just literally drowning but descending further on her quest to capture Collier. A human POV is a needed component in monster movies, as Universal Horror understood (and Watters does now):
"I think that's the only way 'The Creature from the Black Lagoon' would really work, because it's such a mercurial thing. It's such a mirror onto which people project their own desires. [...] Everyone is kind of circling the creature with their own idea of what it is and what it can do for them. And that, generally speaking, leads to their downfall in this book at least."
I currently have no idea of how that downfall unfolds, but I'm excited to follow along.
"The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives" issue #1 releases on Wednesday, April 24 at physical and digital retailers.