Not a joke, nor a spoof! ‘The Horror of the Seas’, a genuine, published comic story where Captain America channels H P Lovecraft and faces the perils of Satan’s Reef. We came across this by accident the other night, and we just had to delve in – with reference and deference to the original HPL novella ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’.
So, let’s set the scene. A lone traveller takes a bus ride to an almost derelict town on the Eastern US Seaboard, where it is rumoured that government investigators have disappeared. There, they book a room in a crumbling hotel, following which shambling figures attempt to seize them. Under threat from malformed humans and batrachian horrors, they discover that there is a city beneath the reef outside the town, and a history of men breeding with the monsters they have seen…
Sound familiar? In ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, HPL’s Robert Olmstead took a bus from Newburyport to that dubious, titular place, and things started to go rather wrong for him as well. This time it’s not a chap, but one Betty Ross (friend of Steve Rogers/Cap) on the road, who has travelled to the ‘ghost town’ of Valley Port. A huddled half-ruined place, Valley Port seems to exist around the same geographical area as Innsmouth (not that any of HPL’s locations or terms are explicitly named in the comic) and has ‘tales’ about it:
“It’s been whispered for a hundred years, there’s a legion of devils living under Satan’s Reef in the harbour.”
Typical for Captain America Comics of the time, there is, in addition, a fiendish (and unlikely) Nazi plot involved, but they all had those, and we’re pretty much ignoring that aspect. Should you want to know, here’s the marvel.fandom summary of the rest:
“Bucky, who has followed Cap, tries to rescue Betty but is captured, and both are taken to an underground city. Cap finds the captive Laison King, freeing and accompanying him to prevent the Laisons from sacrificing Bucky and Betty. When the King reveals the Nazis’ deception, the High Priest declares all humans must die. Although Cap and company escape, the Laisons and Monsters massacre Hooded Horror’s Nazis. The King directs Cap to dynamite the underwater city, but when Cap departs, reveals that the blast will kill Cap as he abducts Betty for his Queen. Bucky defeats the King, alerts Cap, and they escape as the city is destroyed.”
We’d initially assumed that this was written by Stan Lee, nicking a few Lovecraftian ideas, but on investigation, it turned out that ‘The Horror of the Seas’ came from the pen of none other than Manly Wade Wellman, the creator of John Thunstone, John the Balladeer and others, and author of many weird tales. Blimey. This may be the only comics story written by Wellman for Marvel, as well.
The story, which is admittedly silly in the way that many of the 1940s Captain America adventures were, deviates from ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ a number of times, but there can be no doubt at all that Wellman was deliberately drawing on HPL’s plot. So, bus journey, lost investigators, decrepit East Coast port, city under reef, non-human religious rites etc. Betty is even forced to take a hotel room on the third floor in an apparently otherwise empty establishment. Remember your HPL, where the narrator goes “up three creaking flights of stairs.”?
And some of the creatures from the reef, whilst being greenish, are fairly humanoid, often cowled; others are wide-mouthed frog-like monstrosities. The link with humans goes back centuries, when sailors met with the People of Sea, and in exchange for gold and strange ornaments, mated with them.
Wellman then throws in a few looser aspects – the sailors are earlier than in HPL’s version, possibly Medieval; after mating with the non-humans, the men ran off with the gold and had to be pursued; the underwater city is a relatively accessible place (for sea people) with an entrance from the exposed top of the reef. The miscegenation aspect is played down a bit, although the ruler of the sea people does still try to take Betty Ross away to be his mate, so it hasn’t disappeared entirely.
In this story, both the far-off island origin of the sea people and their goddess are called Lai-son, or randomly, Laison. The only obvious link in the name is to Lại Sơn, a Vietnamese island in the Mekong Delta – unless Wellman was playing with ‘liaison’. How many US fantasy writers were even aware of this isle in 1942, we cannot say. Nor do we know why Wellman chose to draw so heavily on ‘Innsmouth’ specifically, but there was plenty of friendly borrowing and even outright plagiarism going on in those days:
“In 1936, Wellman’s story “Outlaws on Callisto” earned the cover of Astounding and Julius Schwartz began to represent Wellman, getting him frequent appearances in the magazines published by Better Publications. Another side effect of Schwartz’s representation was that Wellman wound up writing for comics, including the first issue of Captain Marvel Adventures, which led to him being called as a witness for National Comics in their plagiarism lawsuit against Fawcett. Wellman admitted that the Fawcett editors had encouraged their writers to use Superman as a model for Captain Marvel.”
https://www.blackgate.com/2019/05/22/the-golden-age-of-science-fiction-manly-wade-wellman/
H P Lovecraft was five years gone when the Captain America story came out, but Wellman’s writing circle had brushed Lovecraft’s, though we don’t believe that MWW and HPL were especially close, and they both had multiple appearances in Weird Tales magazine. Wellman did, however, write a piece, ‘The Terrible Parchment’ (Weird Tales August 1937), which had as its dedication:
(To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft, with all admiration)
‘The Terrible Parchment’ is a tongue-in-cheek tale and also a vignette of Mythosian horror, which includes mention of Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft himself – and the Necronomicon. Although we doubt that old Providence would have appreciated the sprinkling of holy water near the end…
Anyway, there you have it – “The Horror of the Seas”. Writer Manly Wade Wellman. Penciler Al Avison. Captain America Comics 1.16 (July, 1942). The entire issue with this story is also available in Marvel Masterworks – Golden Age Captain America Vol. 4.
By coincidence, we note that Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth did one of their tor.com read-throughs of ‘The Terrible Parchment’ only a few weeks ago:
https://www.tor.com/2020/05/20/cribbage-and-elder-gods-manly-wade-wellmans-the-terrible-parchment/
QUICK KICKSTARTER UPDATE
One of the campaigns we mentioned the other day is now live, and includes old greydog‘s Mamma Lucy story ‘Whiskey, Beans and Dust’ – some conjure-work and scariness set in 1920s America. Plus lots of great Lovecraftian/Mythosian stuff… so do take a look.