Way-Out Mummy...

When Marvel's first stab at boiling up their own line of horror books fizzled, the Bullpen reverted to a variant of what it did best.  Instead of superheroes with problems, it would be - monsters with problems.  Their candidates - a Marvel variant on the Universal monsters - Frankenstein, Dracula, a werewolf, and a mummy (actually, there was a zombie, too.  We'll get to him another time) (oh and a golem, and some others.  We'll get to those another time, too).

The Living Mummy made his entrance in Supernatural Thrillers, for my money, the best of Marvel's short-lived anthology titles.  ST, instead of the usual watered-down EC riffs trotted out in most other titles (DC, Marvel, Gold Key or anyone else), published full-length adaptations of classic spooky stories and novels - Classics Illustrated - with monsters.  Most of them were pretty damn good, too.

But, I'll get to that too another time.  For now, we're here to talk about The Living Mummy.

The Living Mummy was N'Kantu, chieftain of the Swarilis, an African tribe enslaved by the Egyptians 3,000 years ago.  For leading a slave revolt, N'Kantu finds himself mummified alive and buried in a sarcophagus.  He ends up breaking out and running on a brief rampage through Cairo, where he encounters Dr. Skarab, a descendant of the Egyptian sorceror Nephrus, who was responsible for N'Kantu's mummification.  This was followed by another rampage in NYC, before N'Kantu found himself spirited off to the alien dimension of The Elementals, godlike beings with elemental powers who enslave N'Kantu and send him back to Egypt to retrieve a mystic ruby scarab that has power over them.  N'Kantu ends up rebelling and, with the help of Dr. Skarab, uses the scarab to destroy them.

In truth, N'Kantu was one of the least interesting of the Marvel monsters, story-wise.  After a couple issues helmed by madman Steve Gerber, the series was taken on by the more workman-like Tony Isabella, and later, newcomer John Warner.  Val Mayerik drew all but the first and last stories, and his scratchy, erratic art was sometimes very effective, and sometimes not.  

Despite a decent start, and a few good issues (8,9, and 10, bascially), Isabella didn't really exploit the atmospherics of the mummy milieu, instead letting the whole thing devolve into a rather weird superhero title (a common problem with the Marvel monsters).  In the end, its a small footnote of the brief Marvel Horror Bust.  But I had issue 9 as a kid, and it remains a sentimental fave.