Stephen King isn’t just a prolific author, he is a ravenous reader. These two qualities imply that he has a powerful sense for, amongst different storytelling abilities, what makes an important antagonist. (King’s favourite villains embody Depend Dracula and Anton Chigurh.)
King’s personal books have loads of memorable dangerous guys: Pennywise, Randall Flagg, Greg Stillson, Cujo, and many others. One among his extra obscure villains resides not within the “Kingverse,” although, however the Marvel Comics universe.
Stephen King would not watch or like Marvel Studios films, however he is been a comic book ebook fan for a very long time. A few of King’s earliest tales, he is mentioned, have been ones he copied out of the comics he was studying as a child. The love has endured since he turned an expert author. King’s novel “Firestarter” feels just like the superhero and horror genres converging, whereas “The Darkish Tower” sequence options werewolves dressed like Physician Doom (“the Wolves of the Calla”).
His son Joe Hill (additionally a author, whose work consists of “The Black Cellphone”) has likewise written a number of comics (most famously “Locke & Key”) and oversees the “Hill Home” horror comedian imprint at DC.
In 1985, Marvel printed the super-sized challenge “Heroes for Hope: Starring the X-Males,” with proceeds from gross sales being donated to African famine aid efforts. The ebook has dozens of credited contributors, together with each common comedian writers (Stan Lee, Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson) and prose writers (Harlan Ellison, vocal Marvel fan George R. R. Martin, and sure, Stephen King).
King’s addition to the problem will be seen in how he makes the X-Males face a villain proper out of his novel, “Thinner.”
The Hungry is a Marvel Comics villain proper out of a Stephen King ebook
“Heroes for Hope” was a “comedian jam,” or a difficulty that tells a single story with pages crafted by totally different writers and artists. The premise of the ebook (a psychic entity assaults the X-Males one-by-one) lends itself to this unconventional writing type.
Alan Moore wrote pages 16-18 (drawn by Richard Corben), the place the entity assaults Magneto. In an apocalyptic world the place he received his anti-human campaign, Magneto is surrounded by the corpses of his victims. Wanting into his previous helmet as his personal horrified gaze glares again, Magneto declares: “The palms of the lifeless are upon me, and I don’t even have the appropriate to scream.”
The one pages in “Heroes for Hope” almost as scary as Moore and Corben’s are those written by King (pages 10-12). When the entity assaults Kitty Pryde, it seems as a black-cloaked determine that causes Kitty to really feel painfully hungry. The determine holds out a scorching dinner plate that rots as soon as Kitty grabs it, whereas her personal physique quickly decays to only pores and skin hanging on her bones. The Entity boasts, “I am pestilence and desolation, Kitty, however my associates simply name me hungry!”
Marvel Comics
King’s pages in “Heroes for Hope” have been drawn by Bernie Wrightson, a horror comedian grasp. (He co-created Swamp Factor and drew a gorgeously illustrated model of “Frankenstein.”) The pages earlier than King and Wrightson have been drawn by members of the standard X-Males artist steady: John Romita Jr., John Byrne, John Buscema, and Brent Anderson. Wrightson’s artwork shifts away from the “X-Males” home type to one thing extra detailed and horrific, simply because the story itself makes such a flip.
“Thinner” is about Billy Halleck, an obese man cursed to waste away (irrespective of how a lot he eats) after he unintentionally kills a Romani lady. The ebook was printed in 1984, beneath King’s pen identify Richard Bachman; it appears the thought of “Thinner” was nonetheless on his thoughts the next yr when he created Hungry in “Heroes for Hope.”
Due partly to its poor film adaptation, “Thinner” just isn’t usually ranked as one among King’s finest works. Nonetheless, these three terrifying pages that he and Wrightson crafted in “Heroes for Hope” show the vanity of “Thinner” can nonetheless be scary in a visible medium.