I’m a big fan of Universal’s original 1954 monster movie The Creature From The Black Lagoon and Skybound Entertainment has revealed a new story that they are going to tell with Gill-Man titled The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives!.
This is the second Universal Monster horror comic that they’ve produced. The first was Dracula from last year, and they also have a Frankenstein comic in development from writer and artist Michael Walsh, which is coming this summer.
The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives! follows the events of the original film and even includes characters such as Dr. Edwin Thompson (Whit Bissell) who is still in pursuit of the Gill-man. This new story will shift the focus, though, on Journalist Kate Marsden.
Marsden finds herself in the Amazon rainforest hunting down a serial killer named Darwin Collier, and on her adventure, she finds a different monster than what she’d expected.
The comic comes from writer Ram V (Detective Comics, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr), who says he envisioned the story as Creature From The Black Lagoon meets True Detective, which sounds great! He wasn’t able to write the comic due to his contract with DC Comics, so they hired writer Dan Watters (Home Sick Pilots, Coffin Bound) to take it on.
Watter told /Film in an interview: “I’m always a bit cautious and careful with what I agree to. Overall to begin with, but also particularly with co-writing. It can be thorny. But you know, Ram and I are part of the same writing studio. […] Because I trusted the team I was working with, I was happy to jump on board and just the elevator pitch was so juicy that I couldn’t really say no.”
Watter admits The Creature of the Black Lagoon isn’t a favorite movie of his, so he approached the material as an outside, which he enjoyed.
He explained: “I love all sorts of old horror. I came in at ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ and went from there. ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon,’ I don’t know that I could honestly say it was my favorite and the most stand out one, but that was also part of the appeal of being presented it as, ‘Hey, what would you do with this? Where would you take this?”
He continued: “And I think that can be more fun and more rewarding than something that you feel particularly precious about. You can come a little from the outside and say, ‘What works about this? What is interesting about this and what can I break about this?'”
When asked about how he makes scary comics, Watter shared: “Coming into a medium which is hamstrung in ways that almost no other is in terms of creating horror is a really fascinating thing because it’s hamstrung by limitations, which are not a bad thing.”
He added: “They just make you have to come up with creative responses. Have the page turn and stuff like, yeah, fine, but it’s never going to be as effective as a jump scare, which relies on sound [and] movement. Which comics just don’t really have that going for them. So you have to create it through atmosphere and you have to unnerve your reader before you can scare them with anything visual.”
I’m looking forward to reading this. It could end up being a great comic! I like the concept of the story. The art for it comes from pencils by Matthew Roberts and colors by Dave Stewart. You can see a preview below.
The Creature From The Black Lagoon Lives #1 releases on Wednesday, April 24 at physical and digital retailers.
