3 out of 5

So you knew this, I didn’t, but sometime in the 60s-ish, a dude named Lin Carter wrote some books about the Conan-esque Thongor which helped to usher in a revival for that genre.  Marvel, casting around for a book to compete with DCs ‘House of Secrets’ and ‘House of Mystery’ started doing some horror stuff with a titled named ‘Tower of Shadows’, which changed to ‘Creatures on the Loose’ after ish 9, switching over to fantasy and reprints for a while while the publisher tried to nab a license to adapt, eventually settling on Thongor for issue 22, written by Tony Isabella and Gardner Fox.  Now I’m not sure why Gerber was brought in for the final two issues of this storyline – the first (and I think only) Marvel comic adaptation of Thongor – except that I think he’d already established himself as the crazy work-on-everything guy who excelled at shaping up titles which were sorta’ on the line between cancellation and success.  And in my reading experience, it wasn’t just a name – Gerber has a unique narrative style (that made him the perfect match for the thoughtless, wordless Man-Thing) that engages the reader, inadvertently, in any given panel; by not directly tying together what’s written and what’s drawn, leaving some interaction for the one beyond the fourth wall to connect the pieces.  And that happens even in these two issues of CotL, which details the tail end of loin-cloth sportin’ Thongy trying to get to some mountain to stop some dragon dudes from summoning Earth-shattering powers.

The art by Vicente Alcazar excels in the smaller moments of action, but this is a lot of story and a lot of big fantasy ideas compressed into a small space, and so when the scenes demand a splash page or something rather wacky to occur (like the emanation of demon gods or something), it’s like Alcazar gets flummoxed (or was rushed) and the work suddenly becomes sloppy and mashy.

Still, like his ‘Bloodstone’ conclusion in Rampaging Hulk, this isn’t a ‘must’ Gerber read that ties into his worlds, and maybe he was just helping out with deadlines or to bring a sprawling narrative to a close, but he steps into the story without it feeling