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Cursitor Doom
Cursitor Doom is a fictional British comic book character who debuted in a self-titled comic strip in the 15 March 1969 issue of the anthology Smash!, published by IPC Magazines. Created by Ken Mennell, Cursitor Doom is a powerful mystic who protects Earth from supernatural threats.
Odhams Press had been the original publisher of Smash! as one of their short-lived line of Power Comics, an ambitious series of British weekly comics that had briefly prospered and then crashed due to a flooded market and an over-reliance on Marvel and DC Comics reprints. The latter, stripped of their colour and otherwise edited to fit the format of an anthology serial (seeing the 18-page American issues split up into episodes of around six pages), failed to find a lasting audience, and were further compromised by the devaluation of the pound making the once-cheap American licences prohibitively expensive. Odhams were taken over by IPC, putting them under the same umbrella as rivals Fleetway. With the Power Comics collapsing in a series of mergers until Smash! was the sole survivor, the decision was made to turn the comic into a more traditional boys' comic in the Fleetway mould. As such, Smash! received a number of stories intended for a planned horror anthology called Blackjack which IPC management had vetoed, with "Cursitor Doom" among them.
The 15 March 1969 issue introduced "Cursitor Doom", "The Incredible Adventures of Janus Stark", "His Sporting Lordship" and "Master of the Marsh" to the comic. Cursitor Doom was written by Ken Mennell, a long-standing editor with a reputation as the comics division's "ideas man", and drawn by veteran Eric Bradbury on the strength of his work on "Maxwell Hawke" in Buster. Initially Bradbury only drew the opening arc; Geoff Campion took over for the second before Bradbury returned to handle art duties for the remainder of the run. Scott Goodall and Chris Lowder later wrote the strip. However, sales of Smash! continued to fall, leading to a rapid turnover of strips as the editorial team tried to find a winning formula, and "Cursitor Doom" ended after 31 January 1970.
Demobbed British soldier Angus McCraggan answers an advertisement that leads him to the home of Cursitor Doom, a portentous mystic who claims to fight mystical things beyond the comprehension of men and lives with a raven called Scarab. He hires McCraggan as his driver and muscle. The pair are soon called into action when a London journalist called Sneed carelessly frees evil sorcerer Karnak the Dwarf from imprisonment and begins to work with the villain. Thanks to Cursitor Doom's encyclopaedic knowledge of the occult and McCraggan's bravery, Kalak was vanquished - though the investigator warned his assistant this was likely to be only the first sinister and mystic foe they faced.
Sure enough they were soon called in to investigate sightings of the ghost of highwayman Black Patch. Later the pair thwarted the return of the Snake-Mummy of Samotoya, saved South American president Velasquez from the influence of the ancient sorcerer Scorpio, Dominic Devine's attempts to release an unspeakable evil from the Door with Seven Locks, preventing a deranged cult from resurrecting the dark mage Mardarax, freed scientist Brice Talbot from sinister influences, and halted the maniacal rival sorcerer Attagory.
Cursitor Doom is a psychic and has some telepathic abilities, being able to detect McCraggan's thoughts from considerable distance when the latter was in distress. He has extensively studied magic and the occult; thus he can carry out various rituals and spells, and his vast working knowledge allows him to rapidly devise counters to his foes' powers.
The character was subsequently revived in by Quality Communications in 1986 after they signed a deal with Fleetway to handle repackaging material for the American market. In 1986 the "Cursitor Doom" stories themselves were modified and coloured for inclusion in Spellbinders, an anthology of supernatural stories that also included of "Sláine" and "Nemesis the Warlock" from 2000 AD. The character featured in a new framing sequence (drawn by Garry Leach) for coloured reprints of "The Steel Claw" from Valiant as an ally of Lewis Randell. For these appearances the character was renamed Amadeus Wolf.
Another short-lived revival came in the 1992 2000 AD Action Special, which saw several classic British characters updated by 2000 AD creators. Cursitor Doom's strip was written by John Tomlinson with art by Jim Baikie. However, any chance of further new adventures were killed off when the 2000 AD staff belatedly discovered the pre-1970 IPC characters had been sold to Danish publisher Egmont Group. In 2006 the Egmont library was licensed to DC Comics, and the Albion mini-series was created by the DC subsidiary WildStorm. The comic combined numerous Amalgamated Press/Fleetway/IPC Magazines characters; Cursitor Doom's appearance was low-key but important as he spent most of the series unnamed and comatose before being revealed as the father of main protagonist Danny (based on the previously unconnected Valiant character Danny Doom) in the final issue.
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Cursitor Doom AI simulator
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Cursitor Doom
Cursitor Doom is a fictional British comic book character who debuted in a self-titled comic strip in the 15 March 1969 issue of the anthology Smash!, published by IPC Magazines. Created by Ken Mennell, Cursitor Doom is a powerful mystic who protects Earth from supernatural threats.
Odhams Press had been the original publisher of Smash! as one of their short-lived line of Power Comics, an ambitious series of British weekly comics that had briefly prospered and then crashed due to a flooded market and an over-reliance on Marvel and DC Comics reprints. The latter, stripped of their colour and otherwise edited to fit the format of an anthology serial (seeing the 18-page American issues split up into episodes of around six pages), failed to find a lasting audience, and were further compromised by the devaluation of the pound making the once-cheap American licences prohibitively expensive. Odhams were taken over by IPC, putting them under the same umbrella as rivals Fleetway. With the Power Comics collapsing in a series of mergers until Smash! was the sole survivor, the decision was made to turn the comic into a more traditional boys' comic in the Fleetway mould. As such, Smash! received a number of stories intended for a planned horror anthology called Blackjack which IPC management had vetoed, with "Cursitor Doom" among them.
The 15 March 1969 issue introduced "Cursitor Doom", "The Incredible Adventures of Janus Stark", "His Sporting Lordship" and "Master of the Marsh" to the comic. Cursitor Doom was written by Ken Mennell, a long-standing editor with a reputation as the comics division's "ideas man", and drawn by veteran Eric Bradbury on the strength of his work on "Maxwell Hawke" in Buster. Initially Bradbury only drew the opening arc; Geoff Campion took over for the second before Bradbury returned to handle art duties for the remainder of the run. Scott Goodall and Chris Lowder later wrote the strip. However, sales of Smash! continued to fall, leading to a rapid turnover of strips as the editorial team tried to find a winning formula, and "Cursitor Doom" ended after 31 January 1970.
Demobbed British soldier Angus McCraggan answers an advertisement that leads him to the home of Cursitor Doom, a portentous mystic who claims to fight mystical things beyond the comprehension of men and lives with a raven called Scarab. He hires McCraggan as his driver and muscle. The pair are soon called into action when a London journalist called Sneed carelessly frees evil sorcerer Karnak the Dwarf from imprisonment and begins to work with the villain. Thanks to Cursitor Doom's encyclopaedic knowledge of the occult and McCraggan's bravery, Kalak was vanquished - though the investigator warned his assistant this was likely to be only the first sinister and mystic foe they faced.
Sure enough they were soon called in to investigate sightings of the ghost of highwayman Black Patch. Later the pair thwarted the return of the Snake-Mummy of Samotoya, saved South American president Velasquez from the influence of the ancient sorcerer Scorpio, Dominic Devine's attempts to release an unspeakable evil from the Door with Seven Locks, preventing a deranged cult from resurrecting the dark mage Mardarax, freed scientist Brice Talbot from sinister influences, and halted the maniacal rival sorcerer Attagory.
Cursitor Doom is a psychic and has some telepathic abilities, being able to detect McCraggan's thoughts from considerable distance when the latter was in distress. He has extensively studied magic and the occult; thus he can carry out various rituals and spells, and his vast working knowledge allows him to rapidly devise counters to his foes' powers.
The character was subsequently revived in by Quality Communications in 1986 after they signed a deal with Fleetway to handle repackaging material for the American market. In 1986 the "Cursitor Doom" stories themselves were modified and coloured for inclusion in Spellbinders, an anthology of supernatural stories that also included of "Sláine" and "Nemesis the Warlock" from 2000 AD. The character featured in a new framing sequence (drawn by Garry Leach) for coloured reprints of "The Steel Claw" from Valiant as an ally of Lewis Randell. For these appearances the character was renamed Amadeus Wolf.
Another short-lived revival came in the 1992 2000 AD Action Special, which saw several classic British characters updated by 2000 AD creators. Cursitor Doom's strip was written by John Tomlinson with art by Jim Baikie. However, any chance of further new adventures were killed off when the 2000 AD staff belatedly discovered the pre-1970 IPC characters had been sold to Danish publisher Egmont Group. In 2006 the Egmont library was licensed to DC Comics, and the Albion mini-series was created by the DC subsidiary WildStorm. The comic combined numerous Amalgamated Press/Fleetway/IPC Magazines characters; Cursitor Doom's appearance was low-key but important as he spent most of the series unnamed and comatose before being revealed as the father of main protagonist Danny (based on the previously unconnected Valiant character Danny Doom) in the final issue.