Son of Satan comics I have owned.

One of the banes of my late father's life was that when he'd saunter on to the local shops, the local madwoman would often suddenly point at him in the street and shout out for all the world to hear, "It's him! It's Satan! He walks among us!"

This could explain why I've always had a soft spot for the Son of Satan. After all, if a back-story like that doesn't make him a kindred spirit, then what would?

And that can mean only one thing.

It's time for me to look at the Son of Satan comics I had when I was barely more than an imp.

It's our anti-hero's first appearance, as he goes to Hell to retrieve the soul of Johnny Blaze, in a tale blessed with the tortured looking art of Herb Trimpe.

Despite what it claimed on the cover of the previous issue, this is the issue in which we actually get to learn the origin of Daimon Hellstrom and how he got that fancy pitchfork of his.

Apparently, his mother never once suspected she might be married to Satan, despite the fact her husband was called Hellstrom and he insisted on naming their two children, "Daimon," and, "Satana."

Bored with fighting Satan, Daimon branches out and tackles a bunch of ice demons lurking in a college building.

My memories of this one are vague.

Does it involve time travel and a team-up with Dr Strange to defeat some Steve Gerberesque menace to the cosmos?

If I remember right, this is a Gene Colan drawn tale of possession and exorcism.

The SOS finally gets his own mag.

And he's back off to Hell again after he discovers there's only one thing in life worse than having your house repossessed - and that's having it possessed in the first place.

My memories of this one are fairly vague. Clearly, it continues the storyline started in the previous issue and gives us the origin of the Possessor, which may or may not have had something to do with a travelling carnival.

I genuinely have no memory at all of what happens in this issue.

It all looks very dramatic though.

Great mastheads of our time.

A wise man once told me that, "Life is the name of the game."

His name was Bruce Forsyth and he told me through my television.

But life is also a magical thing, filled with strange coincidences that test the resistance of even the hardest of sceptics.

Only last week I was going to review Marvel Spotlight #13, featuring the Son of Satan. Oh how I thrilled at the thought of raving about Happy Herb Trimpe's artwork and Daimon Hellstrom's descent into Hell to sort out his dad.

As it turned out, there was only one problem with this plan.

I'd already reviewed it.

I'd reviewed it here, way back in August 2010.

How many things have changed in the two years since then. But the one thing that hasn't changed is the one thing I didn't mention in that review.

And that's that the masthead to Marvel Spotlight #13 is almost certainly my favourite comic book masthead of all time. Not only does it feature lettering that practically curls its way out of the cover at you but, on this occasion, and this occasion alone, it shines like Lucifer himself.

My initial plans thwarted, instead of reviewing that issue, I chose to review Monsters Unleashed #11, featuring the not totally dissimilar Gabriel the exorcist. But, in one of those twists of fate that prove there're dark powers at work, in the comments section, Comicsfan said he loved the masthead of that mag and that I should ask you about your favourite comic book masthead.

And, by Captain Kremmen's well-honed beard, that's exactly what I'm doing. You know where the comments button is. Feel free to use it.

Son of Satan #1. Daimon Hellstrom gets his house repossessed.

After two years as the lead in Marvel Spotlight, the Son of Satan finally gets his own mag.

As so often with these things, his run in his own title proved less successful than his stint in another, and The Son of Satan vanished from the shelves after just 8 issues.

But this is issue #1 and no doubt hopes were high.

The first thing you notice is that the front cover masthead isn't a patch on the one used in the Son Of's first four appearances in Marvel Spotlight. Why Marvel didn't stick with that original, I have no idea, as I'm of the determined opinion it was the best masthead Marvel created in the 1970s. I mean, seriously, look at it here, and tell me it isn't better than the one used on Son of Satan #1.

But of course that's only packaging. What matters are the contents. After his latest adventure, Daimon Hellstrom returns home, to find his big creepy house vandalised, his late mother's diary stolen and a bunch of dinky little crosses hung upside down near the ceiling. As we all would, he assumes Satan's behind it and, as we all would, enters Hell through the portal in his cellar.

There, he has a quick scrap with some whingeing demons, who seem to have modelled their behaviour on the X-Men's Toad, and has an argument with Satan before returning to the house to be confronted by the real vandal; a masked cornball who calls himself the Possessor.

The Possessor is a somewhat charmless individual with a couple of demons' heads growing out of the side of his face. After doing a load of boasting, and giving us a few glimpses of  some crystals - the loss of which'll no doubt prove to be his undoing - the Possessor then disappears to randomly kill an American Indian before finishing the issue by laughing maniacally.

The obvious limitation of the series comes back to haunt it as, even when it's trying to break away from having Satan as the main bad guy, the Son Of still initially comes up against Satan. The strip really needed to ditch the Devil completely and have the fact that Daimon Hellstrom is his son as a backdrop to the strip, rather than something that constantly intruded on it. Spider-Man only existed because of the thief who killed his Uncle Ben but he didn't come up against that thief every month.

Jim Mooney's artwork's solid enough but not exceptional and his inking's far too heavy-handed in places. It also has to be said his portrayal of Satan isn't a patch on Herb Trimpe's in those first two Marvel Spotlight outings.

There's also a problem of a total lack of a supporting cast. Apart from Hellstrom, there're simply no  characters other than bad guys.

Still, as a story it at least sets things rolling and makes you wonder who the Possessor is, why he has demons' heads stuck out of him and why he wants to kill elderly American Indians. So, it does make you want to read next month's issue, even if you don't get the feeling you'll be reading anything other than a run-of-the-mill mid-1970s Marvel comic.

Marvel Spotlight #14. The Son of Satan chills out.

And there was me thinking I had it rough, with my dad never seeming to know when it was Christmas. I should've recalled  that there're those amongst us for whom it's never Christmas.

Why?

Because their dad's Satan.

I could be showing my prejudice here but I suspect that, when Daimon Hellstrom was growing up, Yuletide was never celebrated big-time in Chez Lucifer. Still, not to worry; if the Son of Satan won't get to celebrate the birth of the Lord this Christmas, at least this issue he gets to have fun with snowmen.

Returning home from his latest clash with Darkness, it's not long before the Son Of - in his daytime guise of Daimon Hellstrom - finds himself invited to meet Dr Katherine Reynolds, about a university building that's haunted by demons. The demons are Ikthalon and his hordes, a group of beings from a world of ice, and themselves made of that substance. Granted, we only get to see about five or so of his hordes but I'm sure he's got the rest  hidden somewhere. Needless to say, Ikthalon and his kin plan to overrun the planet Earth.

Fortunately the Son of Satan's on hand and after getting captured in their ice kingdom where his fiery powers don't work, he quickly contrives a return to Earth to defeat the dread Ikthalon by melting him with Hell Fire, straight after promising he wouldn't. Exactly what happens to the rest of Ikthalon's demons isn't explained. The mysterious disappearing demons aside, this is the best part of the tale as the comic's "hero" proves himself perfectly happy to lie and cheat to get what he wants. He then follows this up by giving the hapless Dr Reynolds a good old-fashioned bitch-slap before flying off in a very ungainly manner.

While it might be ungallant and unbecoming for a hero to threaten a young lady - especially one as lovely as the young doctor - it has to be said she's been asking for it. After agreeing she wouldn't enter the building that night, she promptly entered it for no good reason, standing there like a lemon while the cretinous caretaker failed to take care and washed away the ankh that Hellstrom'd painted on the front step to prevent Ikthalon and his goons from leaving the building and taking over the world.

This is the Son of Satan's third outing and, for me, the tale's not up to the standards of the first two. For one thing it's not drawn by Herb Trimpe and therefore lacks the sweaty twisted delirium Trimpe brought to the title. Instead it's drawn by Jim Mooney. I like Jim Mooney. He drew Spider-Man and he drew Supergirl and he did both with a visual charm. But his somewhat wholesome style isn't ideal for a strip that deals with demonic creatures from Realms Diabolique.

Despite this, it's an engaging if insubstantial read. Clearly writer Steve Gerber at this point was looking to move the strip away from the, "Daimon Hellstrom takes on Satan," template laid down in the first two stories, and to widen its palette, its world and its supporting cast by bringing in Dr Reynolds who keeps declaring to herself that she's "fascinated" by Hellstrom. It makes the first move towards doing that, and does it entertainingly but you can't help feeling it's a strip that's rapidly conventionalising out, and already starting to lose sight of just how dark and macabre it had the potential to be.

The Son of Satan in Marvel Spotlight #13. Families at war.

If there’s one thing we all should learn in life it’s never to read other people’s diaries. Like that mirror of the soul the Phantom Stranger was always going on about, you’ll rarely be pleased by what you see in them.

In his second adventure we learn how the Son of Satan first came to learn he was the Son of Satan. Admittedly you’d have thought that being called Daimon Hellstrom, having a sister called Satana, having a great big pentagram on his chest, pointy ears and hair in the shape of horns might have all have been pretty big giveaways but our Daimon’s clearly none too bright and it seems he only found out when he read it in his mother’s diary.

Obviously her diary was somewhat more interesting than the one I tried keeping when I was younger because it seems to carry no references to anybody’s new albums or having once seen a bloke at the local Jobcentre who looked a bit like half-forgotten Olympic steeplechaser Colin Reitz.

The plot of this issue is to a large degree a retread of Marvel Spotlight #12, in which our "hero" goes to Hell and steals something from Satan. Last time out he stole Johnny Blaze and some woman. This time he steals something far more valuable; Satan’s horse and cart. He also steals his trident whose metal is the only thing that can weaken Satan. Why Satan carries a trident made of a metal that weakens him is never explained. With a level of critical analysis I never had as a kid, it now strikes me as being like Superman carrying a sword made of Kryptonite.

But, as today’s teeny-boppers say, it’s all fab stuff. SOS hasn’t mellowed yet into being an out-and-out good guy - although he’s already more morally compassed than in his first outing - and Herb Trimpe’s overwrought pencilling’s perfectly suited to the subject matter, while Frank Chiaramonte’s inking’s perfectly suited to Trimpe’s pencilling. Virtually every character looks as though their soul’s been wrung out like an old dish cloth and their bones are about to burst through their skin.

And, if the whole thing’s totally derivative of The Exorcist, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby, somehow it doesn’t matter. All that matters is Satan’s in it and, as Samuel Johnson never got close to saying in his own diary, when a man’s tired of Satan he’s tired of life.

The Son of Satan. Marvel Spotlight #12

As the 1970s kicked in and the Comics Code had less and less clout, Marvel moved into horror. Admittedly, for the most part it was horror grounded in the super-hero sensibility they'd developed in the 1960s but it was still a widening of the company's pallette, and one of its ventures was the Son of Satan.

Supposedly, Stan Lee'd wanted Marvel to do a comic about the Devil himself but'd been talked out of it and so, instead, we got a strip about his son.

In terms of its core concept, it wasn't exactly an exercise in originality, basically stealing the ideas behind the Omen and the Exorcist and fusing them into one but it's not what ideas you have that matters, it's how you handle them and  they clearly handled it well enough for the adventures of Daimon Hellstrom to eventually break out of the pages of Marvel Spotlight and into their very own comic.

But here's where it started; Marvel Spotlight #12.

I got this from Sheffield's Sheaf Market in the early 1970s, attracted by its melodramatic cover and use of the word Satan. I mean, come on, what ten year old's not going to want to read a comic with that in the title?

What I love about this issue are the artwork and the colouring. The pictures are by Herb Trimpe. A highly distinctive artist, you wouldn't necessarily want Herb Trimpe to draw your favourite mainstream super-hero but, when it came to off-beat characters like the Hulk or the Son of Satan, he was perfect. Here, his style's so overwrought it's a thing of twisted beauty, abetted by Marie Severin's absolutely luscious colouring job.

The story itself doesn't hold up to a lot of questioning. Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, wants to find his dad, so he can annoy him, and thus interrogates various people who might've seen him, until he has enough clues to decide Satan's probably in Hell (we're clearly not dealing with the new Sherlock Holmes here), to where he promptly goes via a conveniently located cave.

There, he has an argument with daddy, who looks a bit like the Human Torch, before rescuing Johhny (Ghost Rider) Blaze and fleeing in his fiery chariot. But, of course, it's a first appearance and the purpose of the tale isn't to tell a story, it's to introduce its protagonist and show us his powers, which it does nicely. He really is a mad and threatening thing in this tale.

Clearly the strip as it was in its début couldn't work long term because Daimon Hellstrom's shown as being as unpleasant and dangerous as his dad. You're hardly going to be rooting for him in a fight. Thus, in subsequent issues, he gained a conscience and a mission to rid the world of his father's evil, traits that're totally lacking in this outing.

In truth, his first two stories are probably his best. After those, Trimpe left the strip and, though a number of accomplished artists drew it after that, none of them were as perfect a fit as Trimpe had been. Some, like Jim Mooney and Sal Buscema, made the thing feel a little too conventional for my tastes, while Gene Colan certainly had the horror chops but wasn't best suited to depicting an exorcist who was half-super-hero.

Still, even now, nothing can take away the odd pleasure I still get from reading this issue.