A follow-up from the stories that were published in the two previous issues, this episode features the son of the couple in those stories. Here, he has himself locked into a cell so that he doesn’t cause mayhem when he changes into a monster. Meanwhile, a woman he rescued earlier has to fend off three attackers who tried to rape her.

The action scenes are the real attraction here. Corben sets up the sense of place almost effortlessly and cuts back and forth from the static shot of the cell door to the very real life-or-death struggle to great effect.

The punchline at the end of the story doesn’t add much to the story as a whole, but that seems to be par for the course for many of these features – almost as if they artist didn’t know what else to do at the end.

(Heavy Metal issue #38, May 1980 – Page 38&39 Spirit of the Beast by Corben)