Menace of the Man-Mummy

SCOOBY-DOO — Issue no. 4, January 1978

Book: Scooby-Doo

Issue No.: 4

Published: January 17, 1978

Title: “Menace of the Man-Mummy” (plus two other stories)

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Digital scan

As a long-time fan of the classic Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! TV show (and someone who has long wondered why that title ends with an exclamation point instead of a question mark), my biggest gripe with Marvel’s Scooby-Doo comic book is it adopts the same format as most of Marvel’s other licensed Hanna-Barbera comic books of the late 1970s — instead of a single, seventeen-page story (or a multi-issue story arc), each issue of Scooby-Doo contains multiple short stories. In this case, there’s a ten-page Scooby story and a four-page Scooby story, plus a three-page teaser story for the next issue of Marvel’s Dynomutt book.

My assumption is these Hanna-Barbera books were aimed at younger readers, and those readers could more easily digest shorter stories. But Scooby-Doo stories are traditionally mysteries, and limiting them to ten pages (or less) means they’re basically solved before they have time to get interesting. I realize that I, a middle-aged man reading these books 45 years after they were originally published, am most definitely not their target audience. But! Two letters from readers published on the “Scooby-Doodles” fan-mail page of this book are also requesting longer stories. So I’m not the first person to have this opinion.

That said, the longer story here does feature a nice twist on the classic Scooby-Doo plot formula. Scooby and the rest of the Mystery Inc. gang get hired to capture a “Man-Mummy” in the (apparently fictitious) “Kolbian Desert.” After they capture the Man-Mummy, it gets crated up to be shipped back to the U.S. But Scooby and the gang find out there was a bait and switch, and what was actually crated up was a bunch of jewels and a tape recorder playing Man-Mummy noises. Basically, Scooby and his friends were hired to be unwitting accomplices in a smuggling scam. They would have figured that out sooner if they hadn’t skipped their traditional end-of-case unmasking of the “monster.”

One of my favorite thing about Marvel’s Hanna-Barbera books is they generally feature a “Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera” text article that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how H-B’s cartoons are made (or at least how they were made in the late 1970s). This one is appropriately titled “Zonks and Bonks” and is about cartoon sound effects.

Next time — Iron Fist gets promoted to co-star of Power Man’s comic book!