Issue(s): Monsters Unleashed #11 (Gabriel the Devil Hunter story only)
Cover Date: Apr 75
Title: "An angel felled"
Credits:
Doug Moench - Writer
Sonny Trinidad - Penciler
Sonny Trinidad - Inker

Review/plot:
Gabriel the Devil Hunter is looking at a photo of a woman named Andrea (who we'll learn is Gabriel's wife) and with a signature saying "I have seen you and you have closed my eyes to all else". Desadia comes in and Gabriel throws the picture to the floor in a huff, not realizing Andrea is beginning to shed tears. Instead Desadia and Gabriel start talking about the "filth"...

...and exchange knowing glances while Gabriel takes his shirt off.

The case Desadia has involves a woman too frightened to call anyone (including priests). But she's seeing a ghost of her dead husband. As they leave, the photo's tears continue.

They go to the lady's apartment and find that she's still got her dead husband's corpse inside.

And when Gabriel gets there, the corpse is possessed by a demon, Belial (or is that just another name for Satan in the context of this story?).

Gabriel gets more physical than usual this time.

While Gabriel is performing the exorcism, Desadia provides some background on Gabriel (and it looks like i was right about what Father Artemis did to him).

During the exorcism, the demon becomes an image of Andrea, repeating what was written on the photo.

Meanwhile, Desadia reveals that she has all of Gabriel's dead wife's memories, and none of her own.

Back to the exorcism. It turns out that the body in the apartment isn't really the woman's dead husband. So Gabriel has to go to the cemetery to compete the exorcism. And things get particularly, er, holy while they are there.

So far Gabriel's exorcisms have been pretty low key. This is the first to really show mystical or spiritual happenings.

In the fracas, the woman winds up having a heart attack, so it's a bitter victory for Gabriel.

At the end, Gabriel invites Desadia into his study because he wants to be alone with his wife. And with that we see a book turn to a page about death being a beginning as well as an ending.

It's all a little confusing. Not particularly intriguing since there hasn't been much in terms of character development in Gabriel and Desadia's few appearances so far. But it's possible it might have led to something if this wasn't the final Gabriel story for a long time.

Gabriel, Devil Hunter was one of the last Marvel characters created before i started reading comics that i didn't really have any firsthand experience with and didn't know much about, so i was happy to see him included in the surely misnamed Essential Marvel Horror vol. 2. I am glad that his stories were reprinted, but the truth is there's not much of interest to the character. He doesn't fulfill anything that we can't get from Daimon Hellstrom, and his stories are basically straightforward horror plots without very much about the character himself until this final story where a bunch of weirdness about his wife gets dumped on us. Most of the previous stories work ok as standalone horror stories, but the info dump on this one bogs down the exorcism plot while giving us more questions than answers about the main characters.

Quality Rating: D+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Essential Marvel Horror vol. 2

Moench's horror was truly terrifying, although not the way he intended. Between Werewolf By Night, Frankenstein and this, he showed he couldn't write horror. I don't know why Marvel didn't get Wolfman or Gerber, for example, to try to write those books.
If you think this Essential is misnamed, wait until you get to Essential Ghost Rider 2-3, which more truthfully could have been titled "Horrible Ghost Rider stories by Michael Fleisher".

At the time, Gerber probably had too much on his plate already, and Wolfman was only ever able to do maybe 2-3 books a month at best.