What do you get when you bring together two of comedy’s greatest legends and one of television’s most beloved monster slayers? If writer and publisher James Aquilone has his way, the answer will be a whole new era of horror-comedy comic books. Aquilone, who has already helped revive Carl Kolchak through a series of crowdfunded graphic novels and stories, has now secured a license to bring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello back to comics. The initial project consists of three stories, beginning with a crossover that sends the legendary comedy team into the world of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, the 1970s television franchise starring Darren McGavin as a newspaper reporter investigating supernatural mysteries.
For Aquilone, the combination isn’t nearly as unlikely as it sounds. After all, Abbott and Costello helped pioneer the horror-comedy crossover with 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, sharing the screen with Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man. More importantly, those monsters were never reduced to jokes, which is precisely the tradition Aquilone hopes to continue.
The secret to mixing Abbott and Costello with Kolchak
JAMES AQUILONE: “If you go back to the original Abbott and Costello Universal stuff, it was a little wacky, but it was also a serious horror movie. They blended the horror and the comedy really well. They didn’t go really silly with the horror elements. Abbott and Costello could be silly, but the movie wasn’t silly overall. So that’s my approach: try to make it humorous, but also, when we have the horror elements, make it a legitimate horror story, too. You’ve got to play the horror elements straight, and then their reactions to it will probably be exaggerated.”
He believes comedy and horror are more closely related than audiences might realize, largely because both depend upon provoking an immediate emotional response.
JAMES AQUILONE: “I feel like horror and comedy are really two sides of the same coin. They’re very similar in that both of them play to a specific reaction. You watch a comedy, you have to laugh. You watch a horror movie, you have to be scared. Those are the only two genres, really, where you’re working toward a very specific reaction or result. I think that’s what makes it interesting, but I think you can also get a lot of laughs in the horror as well. It’s a fun thing to play with.”
The challenge, he acknowledges, is deciding how much of each ingredient belongs in the finished story. Aquilone compares the process to a DJ mixing different sounds, adjusting the balance until everything works.
JAMES AQUILONE: “I think I just go with it more naturalistically. How does it feel, and does it feel right? You might see the silliness lessened a little from what you would’ve seen in the movies, because back then, with those types of movies, the plot wasn’t really that important. A lot of Abbott and Costello movies were just bits strung together. Here, there’ll be very strong plots. I’m not too worried about hitting you over the head with the comedy. You can’t really do a bit for 10 pages in a comic. It’s going to be much more fast-paced.”
A lifelong love of Bud and Lou
Aquilone’s affection for Abbott and Costello goes back to childhood, when the team’s movies were a staple of weekend television. He remembers watching them with his grandmother, alongside old Tarzan adventures starring Johnny Weissmuller.
JAMES AQUILONE: “I’ve been a huge Abbott and Costello fan since I was a little kid. That was really my introduction to horror and comedy, watching Abbott and Costello on Sunday mornings and afternoons when there was nothing else on TV, probably sitting on the couch with my grandmother. The first album I ever bought when I got my Walkman in the 1980s was Abbott and Costello’s Greatest Hits on cassette. I didn’t even buy music. The first thing I bought was Abbott and Costello.”
Beyond the routines themselves, Aquilone has always been fascinated by the peculiar relationship between the two comedians.
JAMES AQUILONE: “I always loved that dynamic between Bud and Lou. I just love these two people who were somehow together, and it’s never clear why. They’re not brothers, they’re not even business partners, but whatever, they’re friends. They seem to hate each other, but they also seem to love each other. For some reason, they’re stuck together. It’s basically an old married couple. After you’re married for 30-something years, you’re just together for whatever reason, and you’re always bickering, always fighting. That’s Abbott and Costello.
“I’ve always loved that relationship, and I’ve been exploring that in a lot of other stuff I’ve written. I write a lot of horror comedy, too, and really Abbott and Costello are the originals when it comes to horror comedy.”
How Kolchak entered the picture
Aquilone’s relationship with Kolchak began with reruns in the 1980s, followed by renewed interest during the popularity of The X-Files, whose creator, Chris Carter, acknowledged Kolchak as an inspiration.
Years later, he was looking for a comic-book project when he realized the 50th anniversary of the original Night Stalker television movie was approaching. He contacted Moonstone Books, which then held the Kolchak comic-book license, and proposed an anniversary graphic novel.
JAMES AQUILONE: “I’d done a Kickstarter called Classic Monsters Unleashed. I’ve been doing monsters for a while, and it was pretty successful. Then I said, ‘I’ve got to do a comic book,’ because I’d always wanted to do one. I realized the 50th anniversary of Kolchak was coming up in about eight months. I thought, ‘That’s perfect. Let’s see if we can do a 50th anniversary graphic novel of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.’
“Moonstone had the rights at that time, so I reached out to them. I pitched the idea, and they said it sounded great. We did the graphic novel, it was super successful, it won a bunch of awards, and basically we were off to the races. Then I ended up getting the license for Kolchak. I started getting more licenses, and here we are with Abbott and Costello.”
Aquilone says subsequent Kolchak Kickstarter campaigns have each raised more than $100,000, although he cautions that crowdfunding success doesn’t necessarily translate into profit. The original anniversary project, he recalls, was particularly expensive because of its size, printing and shipping costs.
Sending Abbott and Costello through time
One of the more intriguing aspects of the new comics is that Aquilone doesn’t intend to keep Bud and Lou permanently anchored in the era of their original films. Instead, he’s introducing a time-travel element that will allow them to encounter monsters and characters from different periods.
JAMES AQUILONE: “The Kolchak one will be in the ’70s, so we had to create a time-traveling element to get Abbott and Costello into all these different eras. I didn’t want them just doing Frankenstein and Dracula and being stuck in the ’30s or ’40s. We wanted to explore other, especially newer monsters. It’s comics, so we want to be able to explore every possibility. They’ll be traveling through time. We can get them to the Morlocks, so they’ll be traveling well into the future. They’ll be traveling to the ’70s. They’ll be traveling to today. If we get the license for Jason, we want Abbott and Costello to meet Jason. We want Abbott and Costello to meet Michael Myers. We don’t want to be restricted by reality.”
Those potential encounters are ambitions, not announced licensed crossovers, but he sees the new project as the beginning of something much larger.
JAMES AQUILONE: “There will be more Abbott and Costello comics every year for as long as we have the license. We’ll start with these three, and this will be considered Volume One. We can also do Abbott and Costello: Who’s on First?, which we most likely will be doing, hopefully next year. We really want to do a baseball comic. But there’ll be more Abbott and Costello after this, and who knows where they’ll go? I’m sure they’ll go into space at some point. Abbott and Costello Go to Hell—everything!”
Abbott and Costello have appeared in comic books before, including titles published by Charlton Comics in connection with their animated television series. But Aquilone sees an opportunity to introduce them to a new generation while appealing to longtime fans.
JAMES AQUILONE: “Dave Acosta is doing the first issue, so the interiors will be more realistic. He does a lot of the Elvira comics, so it kind of looks more like that type of artwork and style. We also have that animated-series-style cover. I thought, ‘People are going to love that.’ And to throw Kolchak into that Hanna-Barbera style would be really cool. Wouldn’t you love to see that as a Hanna-Barbera animated series with Kolchak? Even Kolchak and Abbott and Costello have that Scooby-Doo type of vibe.”
“We’re going to do a page of comic strips at the back of each comic, as if Abbott and Costello had comic strips in the 1950s, which they never did. I always loved comic strips, too, so I thought, ‘Let’s see them.’ Each issue will have new comic strips, at least a page, and I’m hoping that at some point we’ll have enough strips to put together an Abbott and Costello comic-strip book.”
For Aquilone, the appeal of Kolchak extends beyond the vampires, zombies and other supernatural threats he investigates. There’s something personally meaningful about a hero who fights monsters with both his courage and his typewriter.
JAMES AQUILONE: “When I was growing up, the reporters were the heroes. You had Clark Kent, you had Lois Lane, you had Kolchak. It seemed like a really fun, interesting job for a writer. That’s the awesome thing about Kolchak: he’s a hero, but he’s also a writer. He goes and slays the monsters, but then he goes down and sits in front of his typewriter and writes the story. For a writer, that sounds great, right? I can be a hero and I can be a writer.”