ANTI-MASHUPS (-5)

 Here are two examples of groups of allomorphic monsters who all share the same origins and are therefore "isomythic." 

The first appeared in BORIS KARLOFF TALES OF MYSTERY #12, in which a typical American town plays host to a convention of club-members who call themselves "Kreepers" and who appear to be wearing an assortment of monster-masks. Big surprise, the Kreepers are all real monsters. The unbilled writer never supplies any origin for the disparate creatures but there's a loose solution that they're some "parallel race" that's existed on Earth for centuries. 

The second appears in issue #30 of the same title, in the story "Produce Me a Monster." A reporter investigates the secret of Karlarka, a Hollywood producer who makes horror movies with incredible makeup effects on his monsters. The reporter follows Karlarka to a remote island, and finds out-- yeah, you guessed it-- all of Karlarka's "actors" belong to an isolated race of allomorphic monsters, as does the movie-maker himself. I think this is the only story in BORIS KARLOFF in which the name of the comic's "host" is transparently parodied.

ANTI-MASHUPS (-4)

 Here's another breed of anti-mashup. So far as one can tell from the cover of LAUGH #129, Archie and Veronica are about to go see a trio of rockers dressed up like "ghoul cats," not real ghouls in themselves. Included for curiosity's sake.

ANTI-MASHUPS (-3)

Just screened the 1964 FLINTSTONES episode "The Gruesomes," and decided that this one does not meet my standards for a mashup. The three members of the Gruesome Family-- pretty transparently modeled on the Addams clan-- are all the same sort of green-skinned freakazoids, so they all belong to the same species of whatever-they-are, unlike, say, the Munsters.

The family does have a menagerie of monsters-- "crocosauruses," octopi, a killer plant, and even a couple of giant furry hands that may or may not have hairy bodies attached. But all of these are just various types of animal, not monsters, and so they don't register, any more than the various fauna of Skull Island register as distinct from the monsterhood of King Kong.

ANTI-MASHUPS (-2)

As a contrast to post #21, this one offers another comics-cover which also references KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, but is not a mashup.

From what I can tell this fire-breathing dragon-like creature never appeared before, so he has a "negative value," existing only to be an antagonist to the comic's monstrous star, Konga.

Similar negative values accrue to the monster-antagonists in all of the Japanese "Gamera" films. The studio in charge of Gamera, Daiei Studios, never pit the "good" turtle-monster against more than one creature at a time, and so all of the films fail the "mashup" test.

Amusingly, one of Gamera's opponents, "Barugon," copied the name of a monster-antagonist, Baragon, who appeared in just one previous film, Toho Studios' FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD. I assume that the name-copying was nothing but a jape on the part of the Daiei moviemakers, since Baragon didn't exactly set the world on fire, even when he was revived in 1969's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS as a "team-player."

Addendum: I should add that in GAMERA SUPER MONSTER, footage from the older films is recycled to give the impression that Gamera is fighting each of his individual foes in sequence, and that all of the monsters have been sent against Earth by evil aliens. Yet I can't really call a "clip show" a true mashup, especially when it's transparent to anyone in the know that the footage has been recycled.

ANTI-MASHUPS (-1)

Here are some examples of works in which more than one monster is present in the narrative, but there's no "mashup" as such.

In the previous mashup post, I said that an issue of SWAMP THING, guest-starring DC's "THE DEMON," qualified as a mashup because both the main hero and his antagonist had once enjoyed their own features.

DC COMICS PRESENTS #8, though, is not such an example, because the formula is "good hero and good monster" team up against "monster who hasn't had his own feature," that is, Superman and Swamp Thing vs. Solomon Grundy (despite what the cover depicts)

Another example is this issue of the short-lived monster-comic IT THE LIVING COLOSSUS. The cover shows the good monster fighting bad monster "Granitor:" This too is NOT a real mashup.

Granitor is linked to another monster who did have his own one-shot story: another "living gargoyle" named "Gorgolla," from STRANGE TALES #74 (1960).

Granitor is supposed to be the father of Gorgolla, but that doesn't give Granitor any special status. Had the writer of the COLOSSUS story decided to return Gorgolla to life after the gargoyle's death in STRANGE TALES, then THAT would have been a mashup, according to my logic.

ADDENDUM: In terms of my revised position on crossovers and mashups, I would now consider the DC Comics Presents episode to be a "charisma-crossover," given that Solomon Grundy was not a regular foe of either Swamp Thing or Superman. Also, these days I don't think I would consider Grundy's lack of a series to keep him from being in a mashup with another monster.