4 out of 5

Spotlight on… Son of Satan!  As we know (you and me), Gerber did a full circuit on Marvel books in the early 70s, his popularity seemingly exploding and his unique prose and insights garnering deserved praise for being notably literary for the genre.  Steve was a fixer – put him on the book to get some weird ideas going – and then soon enough he’d be elsewhere, roping in his Gerberverse characters or somehow turning random ideas into totally coherent and weighty plots.  His run on Spotlight – shaping up Daimon Hellstrom into a less typical half-demon half-man antihero – falls moreso into his comic pop writing, a la Marvel Two-in-One, but whereas even that book would get feverish with its rolling themes, Steve does right by Daimon and actually plays it mostly straight, putting more efforts into getting his occult references correct than forcing some external weirdness on the man.  After all, there’s already plenty of oddity in the world of the occult, so it follows to keep all the action insular…  Followed to Steve, anyhoo, making his almost 10-issue run get the distinction of being one of his most easy to read and straight up FUN (and, yeah, goofy) books.  Sometimes things get dark, sometimes they get bleak, but they’re never a drag to read.

In part, this was because Gerb very quickly wanted to flip-flop several aspects of the character – inverting the birthmark on his chest to be a proper pentagram, merging the character’s “demon” and “human” sides, and ditching a lot of the ‘Daimon goes to Hell!’ set-ups that had been unfortunately scripted by the character’s creators and, rightfully pointed out by the readers, severely limited Daimon’s ability to evolve or be separate from the other supernatural demons haunting the Marvelverse.  So almost every issue carries with it some part of Hellstrom that’s being added or shed to better the stories, as every issue also would carry a new foe or theme to prove that ‘Son of Satan’s team was doing its research on the occult – culminating, in the middle of the run, in some truly amazing issues that fully revolve around tarot, sounding and looking informed without seeming silly or overt in their need to ‘explain’ the cards.  The letters pages are a constant fun back-and-forth of people praising and critiquing the details applied, and it makes for a fun environment of audience participation, where the success of the book didn’t solely rely on just thinking up cosmic events, but could make for a built-in following of lovers of the strange by being true to its subject matters.

And I guess the opposite side to this is that the issues don’t really get the chance to build to much.  Whereas Man-Thing, Defenders, etc. do require gathering up all the issues and picking through to fully appreciate getting from A to B, each book on Gerber’s Spotlight run (excepting some two-parters) is rather independent; any given issue is fairly representative of the run.  And, typically, Steve left after so many stories, so the last issue has the sense of bringing it back to a status quo for another writer… but it’s still fun.  There’s an inherent silliness to the whole setup (‘There’s something off about Daimon,’ his compatriots thing, while he flies around with a pitchfork and wears a red cape and talks about Satan) that may have influenced the decision to not try to wrangle it into a more cosmic thought experiment… which is never quite spoken to satisfyingly, but it gets breezed past with enough action to keep us smiling at the goofiness and not questioning it.  Art-wise, we get some regular match-ups with Jim Mooney and Colan – Colan’s issues being especially strong – before Buscema takes over.  Buscema is classic and reliable, and gives Daimon and classic and reliable look, but Mooney’s fancifulness in the earlier issues did give things a bit more of an ‘exciting’ look.

I don’t know if this stuff’s collected… if you have the chance to read ’em all, totally worth it.  But you should at least hunt down one, so you can have a reference point when I proclaim ‘By the Hadean chimes!’