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More strips over at the Toybox, which will start back on its Tuesday/Thursday schedule tomorrow.
From the memoirs of Ieuan “\/4LL3yB01″ Thomas; poet, raconteur, and Gold-medalist in the Halo IX Capture The Flag event at the 2020 Olympics.
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the Spa shop on the corner. I can never remember if we had sixteen systems linked in the Christmas LAN party when I was fifteen, or fifteen linked when I was sixteen, or whether by that point we looked old enough to get into one of the big clubs in Cardiff with IDs run off on Jack Richards’ uncle’s laser printer.
All the Christmases run down towards the Darkshore, because we didn’t have school in the morning so we could really concentrate on leveling up our Night Elves.
It was raining. It was always raining at Christmas, except for that one time when everything froze and Dad had to take Mrs Gregory to hospital after she slipped outside the Station Inn. Mam always had that grim look on that face whenever someone brought it up.
Times were hard, but we never went without. Not a Christmas went buy where we children didn’t have food from M&S, or at the very least Tesco Finest, while Mam and Dad made due with Value brands. The season could be tough, especially for the working men. I remember one Boxing Day where Dad was nowhere to be found, and when I asked Mam about it she said he’d been called out because the Council’s servers had been buggered again.
“The budget’s been tight, bach,” she said to me. “He had to go into work. Those poor souls have had to make do with Google Maps ever since they took satnav off the gritters.”
My brother Dai would always take me to Blackwood high street in the evenings of the school holidays. We’d sit there, lit up by the warm blue glow of the neon tubes he’d installed under the chassis. We’d watch as the multi-coloured cars would drive up and down in endless procession, occasionally pausing in the Asda car park. Dai’s eyes would mist over with sadness, the deep cerulean Subaru Impreza WRX forever beyond his grasp. I missed the nuance of his melancholy, as I was trying to read his old Uncanny X-Mens by the tiny light cast by his dashboard dials. Mam disapproved, of course, believing she’d forever lost her eldest son once his father had let him install a spoiler on the Punto.
Always on Christmas night there was music. Dai would roll his eyes as Dad put on his Springsteen records and dance around with Mam. My brother could bear it for perhaps half an hour before sneaking upstairs to a crafty fag and happy hardcore on the iPod. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the Blossom Hill (three bottles for a tenner), sang a song with words I couldn’t follow; and then everybody laughed and Mam ushered me quickly out of the room and off to bed.
Looking through my bedroom window, out into the unending drizzle, I could see the flashing colours that covered the houses of all the people who tried to out-do each other with ever more elaborate Christmas light dioramas. I turned the monitor on, slumped into my favourite chair. I typed some words into the password field, and then I logged in.
To this day, these incidents remain barely reported. There was a flurry of news coverage in the British media during the time, but curiously almost no-one in the media picked up on the alleged occult connections, or even the rumours regarding a possible relationship between Agosto and Winfield.
What is known for certain is that following an ill-fated second week of filming and facing the inevitable abandonment of filming, Winfield did not show up to the final day on set, and it was the early evening when Agosto found him hanged in the cottage where she had been staying. Several days later, on Christmas Eve, Agosto herself was killed in a collision on the M25. She had been returning to London, and was found with several boxes of research material on Daniel Morgan that had been collected by Harry Grant and passed on to Winfield.
The story that later emerged indicated that the two had been having an affair. Both were married, things had likely gone sour, no doubt exarcebating an already stressful production. As a result Winfield took his own life, and though the coroner found no intoxicants during post-mortem it was generally accepted that Agosto’s accident had probably occurred while she was under the influence.
The timeline of events preceding their deaths is unclear for several reasons. Many of the crew were never interviewed during the short inquiry that followed, several refusing point blank to talk to investigators. It remains a mystery why this was never pursued up by anyone in authority. Much footage had been rendered unretrievable. Mirroring the earlier accidental destruction of White Ship Films’ negatives, most of the tape used degraded during transport back to the company’s offices in London. Quality control may have been an issue for one set of tape, but the documentary segments of the shoot had been recorded on a different type and different brand. It seemed an odd coincidence that both would types degrade within the same narrow time frame.
From the few written accounts available, it’s clear that the incidents on the set increased in severity over the final week. The predicted bad weather caused most of the delays, and contributed to the damage that continued to happen to the crew’s equipment. During the daylight hours no apparitions were reported, but items would go missing and more than one person reported hearing strange banging noises coming from the empty buildings they worked around.
Towards the end of the week, a replacement generator had to be brought in after an engineer was injured by the equipment they had been using. The injury he received was never specified. The new item arrived in time for the last session of night shooting.
The final night was the worst for the production. Many of the crew who were present that night did not return the next day, contributing to the delay in discovery of Winfield’s body. No records remains of the exact events, but several strange things were seen, and much audible phenomena was recorded. Needless to say, everything captured on tape was lost when the storage media degraded.
To date, no-one has attempted to adapt any of Daniel Morgan’s work. The rights are still available, though both White Ship and Conrad Media are no longer ongoing concerns. Most of the crew involved in both attempts at filming have since left the industry, and the ones who remain are clear in their belief that another attempt should not be made. They are not alone in believing that Morgan’s work is cursed.
Time, I think, for a Christmas ghost story.
During the winter of 1996, Conrad Media began filming a television series and documentary based on various pieces of Daniel Morgan’s short fiction. The BBC had subcontracted the work to them following the acquisition of the licence from Harry Grant.
Conrad were a dependable firm made up of veteran film and television producers, and were seen as a safe and budget-conscious option for a production with an already disastrous history. Filming was almost stopped due to the somewhat superstitious views widepsread at the BBC. Corporate gossip had tagged the endeavour as doomed from the outset.
Bad luck was one thing, the prospect of financial failure another. Not one of the naysayers came close to predicting the extent of the tragic events that followed.
Principle photography started on December 9th, and was to continue until the weekend of the 21st. Various locations had been chosen in and around the Rhondda and Rhymney Valleys, not far from the colliery where Morgan had once worked. Particularly convenient for the production was an extensive plot of land that sported a disused textile factory in surprisingly good order and various buildings, including a modestly-sized farmhouse. The land had once been owned by an industrialist who had made his fortune in the area, before losing it all following the Second World War. The reason it had remained relatively untouched by local vandals soon became apparent.
Filming proceeded to plan during the first week, despite several significant technical glitches. Equipment malfunctioned on-set, and a number of different vehicles were unable to be restarted after parking outside the factory. Despite the hitches, the crew were just about able to keep schedule. A forecast of poor weather in the following week convinced Adam Winfield, the director and one of the main stockholders in Conrad, to bring the night shoots they had planned to do during the final couple of days forward to that weekend.
Delyth Agosto, the actress playing the main character in the series, was the first person to report seeing strange activity on set. Within minutes of beginning the first scene, outside the ground floor of the factory, she complained of seeing people inside staring out through the windows at her. Winfield sent several people inside, but they found nothing. Throughout the first couple of hours, Agosto became more and more agitated, certain at first that the crew were playing a practical joke. Matters became worse after the production manager convinced her it wasn’t their doing, as it was at this point that she started to believe that the events were of unnatural origin. The shoot ended when the portable generator that powered the camera set-up shorted out.
The next day Agosto told Winfield of her intention to quit. She had endured a restless sleep during what was left of the night, convinced that a presence had followed her back from the set to the holiday letting that had been provided for her, an old miner’s cottage not far from the shoot. Winfield was able to talk her round by agreeing to limit the rest of the filming she would have to do at night, and putting it back to the end of the following week.
On the Sunday night, the crew had prepared to shoot without Agosto at the old farmhouse. Whether provoked by her previous behaviour or due to an actual increase in unexplainable activity, this time others reported seeing movement within the house, and in the surrounding area. Winfield struggled to keep order during the long night, as piece after piece of equipment failed and more people claimed to see figures watching them. Winfield was able to cap the rising levels of panic until the end of the scheduled shoot, an achievement made all the more impressive following his admission the next day to his DoP that not only had he too been seeing indistinct figures throughout the site, but had also heared someone whispering behind his shoulder more than once during the night, when there was no one there to be making a noise.
The downtime wasn’t completely wasted with watching the idiot box. Well, it mostly was. But when it wasn’t, Brother Paul and I were engaged in setting up a new venture. Head over to the Toybox of Solitude, updated Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
Harry Grant was a Scottish television producer, who started his career working on popular dramas during the 1970s. He had scripts filmed for episodes of Hammer House of Horror and The Professionals, and was briefly a producer on Doctor Who. In the early 90s, Grant started a production company, White Ship Films, with a view to producing low-to-mid budget horror movies.
Grant’s plan was to create a movie based on Daniel Morgan’s Uni-Mortal strip, anticipating that it would be a straightforward matter to secure funding for a superhero film in the wake of the worldwide success of Batman and Batman Returns. With Uni-Mortal, he would also be able to explore the subject matter via weird fiction, a genre he was fascinated with.
The initial attempts to buy the film rights were a disaster. Believing that White Ship were clear to begin production after paying a fairly large sum to an American media conglomerate, Grant sank a substantial amount of time and money into developing the Uni-Mortal feature. He was forced to put his plans on hold after a Swedish company claimed they held the rights to the character outside of the US. As soon as the first matter was put to rest, it became clear that the legal issues were far more complex than initially suspected. A competing interest was declared by “Universal Adventure Holdings”, causing Grant’s production to once again come to a halt. Facing the possibility of having to wait for the outcome of years of litigation, Grant pulled the plug, almost bankrupting himself and his company in the process.
His last-ditch plan was to make a minimal-budget feature out of what could be salvaged from the Uni-Mortal debacle, using Morgan’s early pulp stories as a source. In the course of the legal maneuverings, White Ship had ended up owning the copyright to a fair amount of Morgan’s prose work when it became easier to buy them outright rather than negotiate a licencing fee. Grant saw an opportunity to avoid ruin.
Instead, he sailed right into it.
Additional filming was never started due to the small crew Grant had hired all falling ill with food poisoning. No other crew could be hired due to the union dispute that followed, and much of the material that Grant hoped to re-use was rendered useless after being stored incorrectly at the office facility where White Ship were based.
Deciding to cut his losses, Grant licenced the property to the BBC. Though Daniel Morgan’s work was not widely known outside of cult fiction devotees, Grant still had friends at the corporation willing to help him who saw potential in the pre-production work already work, and the possibility of an accompanying documentary series that would illuminate an otherwise obscure individual.
The events that followed are a tale for another time, at the next of the spirit nights. For the moment, it’s worth noting that despite the failures to bring Morgan’s stories to the screen, it would have been a medium that the writer would have been more than happy to see his work translated to. And when we consider the global reach of the cinema, perhaps we also see the form which Morgan’s final prophecy will take. Perhaps this is how Morgan will finally open the doors between worlds.
Daniel Morgan found himself unable to find further work after Universal Adventure Press ceased publishing. The stories he wanted to tell had become too lurid and obscure to be used in other comic titles, and he had long since burned his bridges with previous employers such as Weird Tales.
During his time working as a comic creator, he had been involved in several drunken altercations with other pulp writers. His mental state had declined sharply during 1940 and 1941, evidenced by long rambling letters he would send to people he barely knew, and incidents where he would turn up at the homes of magazine editors to rant at them about the state of the publishing industry. Police records show that they had been informed of Morgan’s behaviour, though they considered him harmless.
In Morgan’s view, pulp magazines had fallen from the lofty pedestal he had once elevated them to. Comic books had replaced them as the medium that held the key to unearthly power, should the stories reach a wide enough audience.
Needless to say, following a period of near-destitution, Morgan was committed to psychiatric care, where he remained for the rest of the decade. Accounts suggest that he was released in the early 50s, although many records from that period have since been lost. It is likely that Morgan had suffered from a post-traumatic disorder for a long time, his illness rooted in survivors guilt from not one but two incidents: the accident at the Windsor Colliery, and the sinking of the ship that brought him to America.
During the voyage to New York, Morgan was once again the victim of the hideous luck that plagued him throughout his life. He travelled aboard the SS Zennor, which sank in rough seas fifty miles off the coast of Massachusetts and a hundred miles off-course. Dangerous weather conditions, including severely limited visibility caused by thick fog, delayed the rescue attempt. Morgan was one of several dozen people who escaped the shipwreck in the Zennor’s lifeboats, and following treatment for dehydration and exhaustion suffered no further ill effects from his ordeal. Of the others rescued, a high proportion later reported an unusually high incidence of bad dreams, dark moods, and other symptoms identified at the time with a marked similarity to shell shock.
The cause of the wreck is still unclear. Many of the surviving passengers reported that the Zennor had been struck by another ship, though no other vessel was known to be in the area at the time and has never been subsequently identified.
Morgan died on April 23, 1952, during a fire at his apartment building. He was the only fatality, with the other residents escaping easily. The reason he did nothing to save himself is unknown. Of all his previous acquaintances, only Jacob Hoffeman attended his funeral.
In the years following his death, there have been many reports of individuals passing around copies of the original artwork for the final Uni-Mortal story, despite Hoffeman’s claim that work was never started on it. From time to time, reports have surfaced of instanced of vandalism at the site of Morgan’s grave, and at the office building that stands in the place of the building where Morgan lived.
Most intriguing of all is the curse attributed to Morgan’s work, in particular the incidents that occurred during the filming of a BBC series based on his stories.
Daniel Morgan was born in the town of Rhydaman, Carmarthenshire, on June 30th, 1908. He was born into a large family, the fifth of seven children. Little is known about his parents, William and Rose, or what became of his siblings. His father was known locally as Bill Pengam, the meaning behind the nickname unclear. It could indicate he was originally from the village of the same name, or it could be derived from the Welsh word for “wrong-headed”. Some sources have claimed that Daniel was in fact the product of an affair between Bill and an unknown woman, and that his father forced his wife to raise Daniel as her own.
At the age of 13, Morgan moved to Abertridwr, in the South Wales Valleys, to work underground at the Windsor Colliery where several of his cousins were already employed. Some time later, on January 3rd, 1925, Morgan was trapped by a cave-in following a localised gas explosion. Five other miners were killed instantly, with Morgan and one Thomas Jones the only survivors. Jones later died of his injuries.
In 1926, Morgan was involved in industrial action related to the General Strike, but along with his comrades was forced back to work in November of the same year. This event provided the impetus for him to leave Wales for good, emigrating to the United States in January 1927. America wasn’t an unusual destination for the Welsh during that era, or for any other nationality for that matter. But Morgan’s motives were fairly unique.
During 1925, the barely-educated collier began what became a long series of correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft, author of some of the most influential ‘Weird Fiction’ of the 20th Century. How exactly Morgan discovered Lovecraft’s work is unclear. Contemporary records from the Abertridwr Miner’s Institute Library, where Morgan was known to spend the bulk of his free time, show that they stocked little if any of the pulp magazines that carried Lovecraft’s writing. Lovecraft’s biographers frequently disagree on whether Morgan could be considered one of the author’s inner circle; the former was famous for the amount of letters he sent to various people, and despite Morgan’s later claims there is no convincing evidence that Lovecraft placed any special weight on the Welshman’s communication with him.
After several years of living and working in New York, Morgan had gained a reputation as a solid, though not particularly brilliant writer. Despite a series of humble day jobs, he spent the rest of his time creating short stories for pulp magazines. He became known for lurid, grotesque tales with a distinctive, pessimistic tone, though he was employed more for his ability to meet deadlines than storytelling skill. As with many of his contemporaries, his work has been better appreciated by later readers than audiences of the time.
Perhaps his most influential work, however, wasn’t anything he had published, but a kind of manifesto that circulated amongst the pulp community. It was unclear if it was purely a deliberate work of fiction, or whether Morgan honestly believed what he had written. The document set out a belief that should enough people become exposed to the ideas and themes of power and horror in the tales writers like Morgan told, a doorway would be opened between this world, and the world that lay beyond.
The end of October approaches, bringing us closer to the day the Welsh call “Noson Calan Gaeaf,” the night before the first day of winter. It’s traditionally remembered as a Celtic spirit night, a time of ghosts and visitations, of lighting fires to ward off the coming darkness.
In short, it’s an appropriate time to speak of a controversial but little known Welshman who had a small role in the development of modern popular genre fiction, first during the pulp era, and later at the dawn of the superheroes.
By the end of the 30s the early superhero comic books were selling at a rate unthinkable by today’s standards. Within a short space of time following the introduction of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman, the market was flooded with dozens of different titles published by companies eager for a piece of the profits. In many cases, publishers turned to the writers of pulp magazines in order to keep up with the demand for new material.
Comic books owed a lot to the inexpensive, disposable form of entertainment they would later replace. Many of the pulp sensibilities of characters like Zorro and Doc Savage were transplanted to the likes of Batman and Green Lantern. Comics were easy to dismiss as children’s entertainment, but even so some people saw a great potential in them. Daniel Morgan was one of them.
Morgan had emigrated to the United States in the late 1920s. He worked various menial jobs, never holding one down for any long period of time. He was a fairly nondescript individual, and researchers would later find very few people who remembered working with him. Those that could recalled him only as a quiet man of low intelligence. He showed no sign of literary skill or ambition.
Yet during his free time, he wrote for several different magazines and publishers. His work was exceptionally dark, with many editors turning down some of his more grotesque stories. He was known to be in contact with various creators of ‘weird’ fiction, although it’s telling that even they weren’t overly keen on him.
Universal Adventure Press was one of the many short-lived ventures that were birthed by the initial comics boom. Jacob Hoffeman was employed as Editor-in-Chief, following decades-long experience in the pulps. He had worked with Morgan in the past, and offered the Welshman work on the new company’s titles. Morgan jumped at the chance.
It transpired that Morgan had become obsessed with these superheroes, collecting every single comic he could find since buying a copy of More Fun Comics at random from a newsstand. Despite never showing any previous interest in illustration, Morgan created, wrote and drew the character “Uni-Mortal” for Hoffeman, starting in Universal Adventure Comics #6. Morgan became preoccupied with Superman, idolising his creators, and poring over all the stories that featured the character. In later interviews, Hoffeman would recall that Morgan was particularly interested in his mysterious origin, of powers derived from elsewhere, and of parents and civilisations that, at that point, had never been shown.
His Uni-Mortal work followed the same template, with a child discovered in unfortunate circumstances (in this case, discovered adrift in a boat in icy seas by an Antarctic expedition) who grew up to develop superpowers. His adventures became increasingly odd, and less than altruistic. Morgan decided to finish the series once and for all with a sinister, down-beat ending, with Uni-Mortal driven mad and turning evil upon the return of his monstrous father from a distant plane of existence. It was a direction Hoffeman attempted to talk him out of, and according to the editor’s account Morgan never started work on it. The matter was made irrelevant when the company folded in 1942, leaving the character’s story unfinished and the rights tied up in various legal complications.
These stories are of considerable interest to scholars of the period, though Uni-Mortal has over time faded into the background as one of many heroes whose adventures never continued past the 40s. Morgan’s odd, atmospheric style has proved more influential in terms of technique, with the horror titles of the 50s and 70s and the work of the ‘British Invasion’ in the 80s following in the footsteps of both his comic and prose stories.
