Wicked Horror interviews James Aquilone about the new Abbott and Costello series, Kolchak the Night Stalker, H.P. Lovecraft and more!
Bram Stoker Award-winner James Aquilone brings together great monsters, modern faves and classic comedians in his new Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters comic book series.
The new comics are from Aquilone’s Monstrous Books. That’s his independent comics publisher that’s already delivered new and classic adventures of Carl Kolchak aka The Night Stalker.
According to Monstrous, the new series continues a tradition stretching back to Abbott and Costello’s classic monster comedies, most famously 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which brought the comedians face-to-face with Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man. Inspired by those classic films, Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters pairs the duo with creatures and characters they never had the opportunity to encounter on screen.
Titles include Abbott and Costello Meet the Night Stalker, Abbott and Costello Meet the Morlocks and Abbott and Costello Meet Cthulhu.
In addition to the three new comics, a Kickstarter campaign offers exclusive merchandise, such as T-shirts, trading cards, original artwork, and more.
As a long-time fan of all of the elements in the mix, James recently shared some thoughts with Wicked Horror about developing the new stories and staying true to the beloved style of Bud Abbot and Lou Costello.
WH: Wicked Horror interviewed you last about a Kolchak: The Night Stalker project. Welcome back to discuss Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters, which sort of involves Carl Kolchak too as we’ll get to. You’ve mentioned Abbott and Costello served as your introduction to comedy and horror. Do you recall which of their monster pairings that you saw first?
JA: It was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The perfect movie to fuel a lifelong love of horror and comedy. I’ve been hooked ever since.
WH: Happily the monsters were treated generally with respect in those films with Bud and Lou’s reactions to the incredible providing the laughs. Were you scared when you first encountered their horror adventures?
JA: Absolutely. That’s what made those movies work so well. The monsters weren’t jokes. Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., and Glenn Strange played it as if they were in a horror movie, not a comedy.
WH: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein today really seems like getting one more Universal Monsters film. Now you’re taking things a little further, extending Bud and Lou into other franchises. How did you decide where to send them for these new comic adventures?
JA: The idea was to take the formula that worked so well in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and expand it into other corners of the horror universe. I started thinking about what other monsters and characters would be fun to throw Bud and Lou up against. Carl Kolchak was an obvious choice because I’ve been working with him for years, and I thought the interaction between him and Abbott and Costello would be a blast to write. The Morlocks are so underused and I think there’s a lot of potential to make them scarier. In the original Time Machine, they weren’t the most imposing monsters. And then there’s Cthulhu. There’s so much we can do with Bud and Lou and cosmic horrors that I couldn’t pass that up.
WH: Much of the Abbott and Costello humor, especially in horror, revolved around their actions and expressions. How did you go about adapting that to the comics form?
JA: That was probably one of the biggest challenges. So much of Abbott and Costello’s comedy came from their timing, their physical performances, and especially Lou’s facial expressions. You can’t simply put their dialogue into word balloons and expect it to work. You have to think visually. The artists — Dave Acosta, Zac Atkinson, and George Quadros — have done a fantastic job capturing those expressions and gestures that made Bud and Lou so funny. And, of course, you have to get their voices right. You want readers to hear Bud and Lou in their heads when they’re reading the dialogue. I watched and re-watched the movies to get things right.
WH: What was it like putting Bud and Lou alongside Carl? He has a distinctive style and set of reactions rooted in Darren McGavin’s performance as well. Did you do a lot of rewatching for that mashup?
JA: I’ve watched The Night Stalker so many times over the years that I practically know it by heart. But I did go back and revisit it while working on this story. You have three characters who are all dealing with something completely unbelievable, but they react to it in very different ways. We actually send Bud and Lou back to 1972 Las Vegas, where they become part of the original Night Stalker story. So they’re not just meeting Kolchak. They’re getting mixed up in his investigation of the vampire Janos Skorzeny. It was a lot of fun finding ways to insert them into that story without losing what made the original so great.
WH: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine is known to many via the George Pal film, though it got a great Classics Illustrated adaptation. Did you go back to the novel and what did you work to distill to send Bud and Lou to the land of the Morlocks?
JA: The George Pal movie is such a classic, and I think it’s probably how most people picture the Morlocks. But the original H.G. Wells novel is fascinating because there’s a much darker idea underneath the adventure. You have humanity evolving into these two very different species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. For our story, we wanted to capture that sense of wonder and danger while putting Abbott and Costello right in the middle of it. The Morlocks are perfect adversaries for Lou because they’re creepy, they live underground, and they’re always lurking in the shadows. There’s also something inherently funny about Bud and Lou trying to make sense of a world hundreds of thousands of years in the future.
WH: And what about Cthulhu? Where did you look in the H.P. Lovecraft universe to find something suitable for a Bud/Lou/Cthulhu mashup?
JA: I’ve always loved Lovecraft’s mythology, and I thought it would be hilarious to drop Abbott and Costello into that world. Lovecraft’s stories are filled with these ancient, incomprehensible horrors that drive people insane just by looking at them. Now imagine Lou Costello encountering one of those things. He doesn’t need an ancient cosmic horror to drive him crazy. Bud already does a pretty good job of that! We wanted to play with the atmosphere of Lovecraft’s stories, the strange towns, the sinister cults, the sense that something terrible is lurking just beneath the surface. The Call of Cthulhu and The Dunwich Horror are natural touchstones.
WH: Tell us a little about the artwork that will bring these stories into the comics realm. Are you excited about the results?
JA: I’m incredibly excited about the artwork. We have some fantastic artists working on these books. Dave Acosta is drawing Abbott and Costello Meet the Night Stalker, George Quadros is handling Abbott and Costello Meet the Morlocks, and Zac Atkinson is drawing Abbott and Costello Meet Cthulhu. Each artist brings something different to the project, but they all understand the importance of capturing the personalities of Bud and Lou while delivering some genuinely great horror imagery.
We also have an amazing lineup of cover artists, including J.K. Woodward, Zac Atkinson, Russ Braun, Robert Hack, and EV Cantada.
One of my favorite things we’re doing is starting the first story in black and white, just like the classic Abbott and Costello movies. Bud and Lou begin their adventure in 1943, when they’re in the Army, and wind up traveling through an experimental portal. When they arrive in 1972, the comic switches to color, almost like The Wizard of Oz. It’s a fun visual way to bridge the era of their classic films with the worlds they’re about to explore.
Check out the Abbot and Costello Meet the Monsters Kickstarter to find out more and nab copies of the new tales.
