Barnacle places a call to Central Casting and adds a new character to the show -- Quinine Crawlins, who refers to himself as glamorous, youthful and sexy. At Barnacle's suggestion, Quinine puts on a werewolf mask -- but it's not enough to boost the ratings. Desperate, Barnacle recruits just about every movie monster who'd ever stalked across the screen -- including King Kong (the DS writers never went quite that far....). But in the end, Darn Shadows is no match for its competition -- the network news, with its reports of actual terrifying events. Overall, the Spoof story is a fun, though brief, parody. Its six pages contain a few dead-on jokes (like Barnacle paging through a book of classic horror plots looking for ideas -- which, let's face it, the DS writers did do), and a comment from Daybed about actors flubbing their lines (again...once in a while it happened...). I'd like to have seen a few more actual DS characters spoofed -- the only ones in the story are characters based on Barnabas, Quentin, David, Amy and Elizabeth. Where's Julia? Magda? Prof. Stokes??? These are characters begging to have affectionate fun made of them. Still, it's an interesting collectible, and one I highly recommend. Spoof had a brief run. This issue came out in October 1971, and the second issue didn't hit the stands until a year later -- November 1972 -- then the series only lasted three more issues: Number 5 was published in May 1973. |