Kolchak The Night Stalker 50 Year Anniversary Graphic Novel

Monster Of The
Week Turns 50

Kolchak The Night Stalker
50 Year Anniversary
Graphic Novel
edited by James Aquilone
Moonstone ISBN 9781946346179

Last year was the 50th anniversary of the TV movie of the week The Night Stalker (reviewed here) and there’s a reason why I didn’t put these reviews up then and felt forced to stay my hand until 2023. The reason was that, at the start of 2022 I put some money into Kickstarter towards this hardback edition of a Fifty Years Of Kolchak graphic novel, with brand new stories featuring Kolchak in different decades from the 1930s to somewhere in the 2000s.

Now, I was a little sceptical of this collection because it was put out by Moonstone. I tried to read some Moonstone Kolchak comics a few years ago because I thought they’d make a good blog review but I couldn’t get through more than about six issues. They’d tried to update Kolchak to modern times, with mobile phones and internet and, it just wasn’t working. Also, more importantly, the style of writing didn’t really seem like it quite nailed it and... I dunno... it just didn’t feel like anything more than a cash grab, rather than the labour of love I was hoping for. However, there were two things about this new collection that made me sit up and take note...

One was that one of the comic book stories to be included would be written by one of my favourite authors, Kim Newman (who lists, among his many accomplishments, the Anno Dracula novels, one of which had a kind of bizarre displaced cameo by Kolchak). The other was that one of the covers I could have chosen (and did) was by Jerry Ordway, who was doing great things with Captain Marvel a couple of decades back... and by Captain Marvel I mean The Original Captain Marvel, who is nowadays known as SHAZAM!, of course. So yeah I ordered the book and, as a bonus reward, also signed up for an extra one-shot comic signed by one of the creators. 

Alas, there was a lot of fizzle in store for me on this particular Kickstarter... although, I have to say, not so much disappointment that I quite regret buying the book in the first place. I’m glad I made the purchase because it’s at least something which is a souvenir of the year Kolchak turned fifty... well kinda.

So my first disappointment was after I’d reviewed the four other things which preceeded this review, making up Kolchak Week at NUTS4R2, when I found out that the printed hardbacks and comics wouldn’t be ready by the end of the 50th anniversary year after all. Instead, we could download a PDF of the book but, yeah, if I’d wanted a PDF I would have ordered the cheaper option. I’m a print person, I want the real deal, not a bunch of ones and zeros dressed up as coloured pixels on a screen. So I took the decision to hold the reviews and push back Kolchak Week for a year, for when I had the book in its proper form.

My next disappointment, when the book finally did arrive earlier this year, was the beautiful looking signed comic that came with it. Hmm... should I read this before or after the main book? It was while I was trying to decide when I noticed that the comic did not house an extra story at all but, was itself also included in the hardback. So, yeah, I needn’t have bothered grabbing the comic book at all... which is annoying.

Thirdly... the book is a mixed bag, to be honest. After two separate introductions... one by James Rice, the son of Jeff Rice who wrote the original novel and another by R. C. Matheson, the son of Richard Matheson, who wrote the original teleplay... not to mention a dedication to Jeff Rice, Richard Matheson and Darren McGavin... the book is split into two sections comprising 12 comic book stories in the first section, followed by a smaller, second section containing ten text short stories. It reminded me a little of the old hardback Christmas Annuals we used to get over here in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s, with a mix between strip and text stories (and occasional ‘activities’) but, yeah, it’s a mixed bag.

Let me state the positive first... all the artwork in the pages is fantastic. A whole bunch of artists, mostly utlising fully painted artwork, all in different styles (although, I think some of them owe a debt of influence from the kind of hyper-real comic artwork that people like Alex Ross used to... and still does... indulge in) and all looking really great. If you are into cool art then you are going to dig this book.

The downside is... the writing on most of the book - comic strips and text stories alike - is really hit and miss about how well they are feeling like a Kolchak tale. There are a few interesting highlights, though. For instance, Kim Newmans Interview With The Night Stalker, which starts off with a wonderful splash page parodying the old ‘Max Von Sydow under a street lamp’ The Exorcist poster, is a retelling and expanded version of the denouement of the original The Night Stalker movie. You know the stuff where Kolchak entered the vampire’s house but, in this version, the vampire Skorzeny gives a kind of interview into Kolchak’s ever present tape recorder.

Another unusual one, although I didn’t love it so much as found it extremely interesting, is the last comic strip in the book. The book starts out with an elderly Ron Updike being left Carl’s notes which make up the stories in this volume. Kind of like a found footage literature, so to speak. He ominously states that Kolchak has ‘gone missing’ but left this stuff to him. Okay... spoiler territory folks. The last comic in the volume, The Last Byline, written by James Chambers, is set in the 2000s and has the vampiric father of Skorzeny returning to bite Kolchak and turn him into a vampire. After this has happened, Kolchak discovers three vampire armies waiting to emerge to take over the city and so, he kills himself just like the lead character did in the vampire movie 30 Days Of Night (and presumably the comic its based on) , by exposing himself to sunlight... but he also deliberately takes the vampire armies up in flames with him at the same time, sacrificing himself for the city. It’s a nice little story because it remembers two characters neglected from most of the stories here... Miss Emily plus the tragic departure of his girlfriend Gail from the end of The Night Stalker but, to me, it felt like a terrible ending for Kolchak. I really wouldn’t have liked to see him go out this way.

The text section has a better hit rate, as far as I’m concerned and I especially noted a werewolf themed tale which had a passage which said... “That’s Henry Rains. He and Claude Hull make up the other pack members.” I immediately twigged that if you transposed those two names you get Claude Rains and Henry Hull, two actors who have large parts to play in famous werewolf movies. So I went back and checked some of the other character names and, sure enough, there were a couple of guys called Michael Chaney and Lonnie Landon... so, yeah, transpose their names and you get Lon Chaney Jr and Michael Landon, two other actors associated with werewolf roles. So that was kinda fun.

My biggest problem with the book is this, though. There are various stories set at different stages of Kolchak’s life, from the 1930s where he’s depicted as a reporter for his High School classes, through some time served during the Second World War, the 1950s and even the Vietnam War. With all of these supposed tales taking place before the character’s debut in 1972. And, in that 1972 movie, it’s made very clear that, until he sees the vampire Skorzeny, he doesn’t have an interest in such things as the supernatural and certainly doesn’t believe in them until he’s suddenly confronted with the evidence. But all the pre-TV movie stories featured here include Kolchak encountering some supernatural forces... a fire flinging magician, a vampire, ghosts etc. So, really, The Night Stalker more than strongly implies that Kolchak has never had a supernatural encounter before but, here, these stories certainly say the opposite. As far as I’m concerned this is kind of a glaring continuity error and I’m kinda surprised that some of the writers bought into it the way they have here... it’s pretty silly.

So, yeah, sorry to conclude my Kolchak Week on a bit of a downer but, heck, like Kolchak, I always seek to tell the truth... at least as far as I understand it. Kolchak The Night Stalker 50th Anniversary graphic novel is a beautifully illustrated and presented book and certainly a nice souvenir for the Kolchak phenomenon but, it doesn’t really have all that much substance, it seems to me.

Kolchak - The Night Stalker

Stalk On
The Wild Side

Kolchak -
The Night Stalker
USA 1974/75
Universal/Kino Lorber
Blu Ray Zone A

Okay, so after revisiting the two TV movies The Night Stalker (reviewed here), based on Jeff Rice’s The Kolchak Papers and The Night Strangler (reviewed here), it was time to take another look at the next chapter of the Kolchak legacy, the show which spun off from those two movies, Kolchak The Night Stalker. Despite the ratings smash of those first two TV movie sucker punches, the regular show only lasted 20 episodes (of around 50 minutes each) before being cancelled, for reasons I’ll get into later.

It was, however, a great show and it certainly had a much longer lasting legacy in TV history than you would expect for a show cancelled before it had even finished its first season. A number of horror themed TV shows of modern times may not have been around without this one and, as I may have mentioned before, The X Files started off with Chris Carter trying to make a new Kolchak series and then going down the Mulder and Scully route when the rights negotiations came to nothing (from what I remember). Similarly, once The X Files had gotten bigger, McGavin refused to reprise the role of Kolchak for the show but did agree to play a different character for a couple of episodes, not to mention turning up as Frank Black’s father in an episode of sister show Millennium for Carter.

Like they did The X Files, decades later, many people refer to Kolchak The Night Stalker as being a ‘monster of the week’ show in an almost derogatory manner and, yeah, okay it’s guilty as charged and is, in some ways, quite formulaic, with Kolchak stumbling onto some supernatural entity and pursuing it to get another unsaleable and unprintable story for his editor... but that doesn’t mean to say the show wasn’t any good. Quite the opposite in fact... which is why it was so influential decades later, with directors and creators who remembered watching it in their youth. Heck, future blockbuster writer and director Rob Zemeckis even sold his first script to the show... although I don’t think the episode in question, Chopper, about a vengeful, headless Hells Angel biker cutting people down with a sword, is one of the better entries in the series, to be honest.

The show kept the two main actors from the show, of course... so we have Darren McGavin as the incomparable Carl Kolchak, in his trademark seersucker jacket and straw hat, along with the wonderful Simon Oakland as his shouty, cynical and much put upon boss, Tony Vincenzo. McGavin was also unofficially co-producing the show on set, which led to friction with the two main producers on the series, one after the other. We also have, after a little while, a couple of other regulars on the show. These are Jack Grinnage as the effeminate, uptight Ron Updyke and Ruth McDevitt as Emily Cowes, or Miss Emily as she was known on the show.

Miss Emily and her character is something of an interesting wrinkle in the show in that she is a sign of the ever evolving nature of the scripts and she has an interesting development. Miss Emily is the elderly lady on the team at the INS (Independent News Service) where Kolchak now works and is the newspaper’s agony aunt, as well as crossword puzzle maker. Now, she is absent and on vacation for the early episodes but talked about as Miss Emily. And in the first episode, Ruth McDevitt plays one of the readers who sends in for advice to that character (leading to Carl going to interview her as she seems to have a clue to something he’s working on). Later, in episode five, the actress would be back as Miss Emily but, her character name is Edith Cowles. In the sixth episode she’s finally called Miss Emily properly, although for that episode she’s still called Edith Cowles on the end credits, for some reason.

Another, similar sign that the show may have had a rushed development was the fact that the title changed a little into the series. For the first four episodes, it’s only called The Night Stalker (like the original movie) before switching to Kolchak The Night Stalker in episode five. So, yeah, big changes were obviously being made while the show was shooting and in post... it certainly shows.

The episodes are all quite fun though and, for a ‘monster of the week’ show, there were actually quite a lot of different kinds of threats and mysteries for Kolchak to dig into without getting boring... although, I can see that future seasons of the show, if they’d gone ahead, may have gotten very similar, to be sure. So we have a werewolf episode, a zombie episode, a Jack The Ripper episode, a Rakshasa episode, an Alien episode and various other quirky things such as Aztec mummies, witches, sentient suits of armour, a Frankensteinien robot and even a youth killer. There’s also a vampire in a sideways sequel, in episode four, to the original The Night Stalker movie... with one of the vampire’s victims from that occasion returning to bring a new toothy threat near the vicinity of Las Vegas.

Likewise, there are a number of guest stars and a fair few ‘before they got famous’ parts scattered liberally throughout the series... such as Richard Kiel, Victor Jory, Phil Silvers (in an episode written by Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster), Julie Adams, Erik Estrada and one time Wonder Woman Cathy Lee Crosby. Not too mention a fair few shout outs to various horror institutions such as, in an episode where one of the characters is watching The Mummy’s Ghost (reviewed here), there’s also a character called William Pratt (which was the real name of Boris Karloff, of course). Actually, that specific episode has the greatest scene of any Kolchak story in it, where Ron Updyke tells Kolchak and Vincenzo about an accident with a truck carrying some animals to a zoo. “It seems some dangerous animals did escape, including two large apes, a pair of adult African gibbons, as well as a Malayan tiger, a civet cat, and a pie-cost.”, he says. “What's a pie-cost?” asks Vincenzo, concerned. “89 cents.” says Ron. I’m not quite sure why certain people of my acquaintance can’t see that it’s one of the greatest jokes ever put on screen but, well... it just is totes hilar, as far as I’m concerned.

I loved the show and I even loved the somewhat pathetic man-crocodile creature in the last episode, The Sentry, which completely nicked its whole plot idea (and a very similar setting) to one of my all time favourite Star Trek episodes The Devil In The Dark... how the company never got sued for this one when it’s so patently obvious it’s ripped off from that one is anybody’s guess.

Something I didn’t know, which explains a lot, is that Darren McGavin didn’t really want to turn Kolchak into a weekly series, although you wouldn’t know it from the quality of his and Simon Oakland’s performances in the show, which is reason enough to watch in itself. He was happy doing just a third movie but the show went ahead in the end and he and Oakland came with it... talked into it by the producing role which he was then never credited for. This meant a lot of friction with the other producers and, this eventually is what brought about the demise of the show, it turns out. Not bad ratings but, McGavin finally telling Universal that he’d had enough and wanted out. And so it came to pass and, it’s a shame but, maybe not so much of a shame in that the plots might have gotten a bit over familiar if it had gone on for too long.

Kolchak The Night Stalker is still a great show though and it’s honestly never looked better than the relatively new Blu Ray set put out by Kino Lorber. Like the two TV movies they also put out, it looks so clear and sharp it could have been shot yesterday. And I think it’s a testament to the high respect in which the show is held that, amongst the few extras on the four discs of five episodes apiece, each and every episode has some ‘guest star’ providing a commentary track for that installment... which is nice. So, yeah, again this is a highly recommended show with some nice scoring, mostly by Gil Mellé and Jerry Fielding which, alas, has not seen the light of day as yet as a commercially available recording. But, although McGavin was done with the series, this wasn’t quite the end of Kolchak. I’m not going to watch the painfully received, short lived, ‘missed the point’ modern remake of the show from 2005 (which lasted only half as long as this one did before cancellation) but the character did live on in other media... which I’ll get too in my next two reviews.