Who, or what, is the Misfits’ ghoulish mascot?
Right up there with Motörhead’s snarling Snaggletooth and Iron Maiden’s festering Eddie in the canon of hard rock mascot is New Jersey horror punk’s Misfits’ grimacing, ghostly skull.
A mainstay of the metal landscape, Misfits’ hooded skeletal evil stamps a keen visual identity across all their merchandise and various record covers across their nearly 50 years together.
There are two essential chapters to the Misfits’ oeuvre. One is the founding street-level dungeon punk fronted by the panda-eyed and devilocked Glenn Danzig, conjuring gloomy hardcore coloured by a love of B-movie horror and EC Comics tales of dread.
The other is the late 1990s rebirth, powered by respective bassist and guitarist Jerry Only and Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein and proffering a more anthemic metal attack behind new singer Michale Graves’ gusto-filled bellow.
Whether it’s the ‘Die, Die My Darling’ era or the Famous Monsters age that takes your fancy, underneath it all is the creepy, hooded ghoul and his bony hands crossed across his chest like the undead. The spooky emblem first saw light on a flyer for a Max’s Kansas City show in March 1979, when Danzig and Only were on the hunt for a suitable silkscreen image for a T-shirt run.
Digging its distinctly arresting haunted insignia potential, the ghost face was slapped on the artwork for the third single, ‘Horror Business’. Before long, the sneering spectre would stand as a perennial member of the band’s ever-evolving line-up, standing alongside Only as an enduring Misfits staple.
The source of the image, however, may have been lost on the Misfits initially, the evil entity belonging to an age long before the Misfits were even born, let alone walked among us.
So, what is the Misfits’ eerie emblem?
The ghost skull mascot doesn’t even come from horror at all. Hailing from the old film serial tradition, the robed fiend is in fact the costume of the villainous evil mastermind of 1946’s The Crimson Ghost.
A crime series in 12 parts and directed by Fred C Brannon and William Witney, the episodic adventure concerns the Ghost’s efforts to acquire the Cyclotrode X, a device that can repel atomic bombs and disable electrical equipment. After many scrapes and mishaps involving death rays and killer neck collars, Professor Duncan Richards finds out to his shock and horror that the costumed Ghost is in fact his colleague Professor Parker all along.
It could all seem a little lacklustre considering how eerily cool the villain looks, seemingly owing more to Lon Chaney’s silent horror collection than a forgotten crime serial, but the costume stands as an effective and unforgettable image of eldritch clobber. Copyright was never seriously entertained, Republic Pictures never legally chasing the Misfits due to woolly asset changes over the years, and the property had entered the public domain eight years previously.
Still, it’s most likely that The Crimson Ghost enjoys an infinitely greater level of interest and exposure from the Ghost villain’s plaster on punk T-shirts all over the world, owing its pop cultural presence to the Misfits’ DIY punk embrace of the eternally cryptic, skeletal doom merchant.
