The Fractal Hall Journal

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.

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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.

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