November 12, 2005
Need a Team-UP? Got a Man-Thing!
Based on the strength of Steve Gerber’s writing, Man-Thing was popping up elsewhere in the Marvel Universe as well. The best of these guest appearances was Marvel Two-In-One #1, the debut issue of the Thing’s team-up title. Upset that some fella in Florida has stolen his name, Ben Grimm takes a trip down south for some tough-lovin’ diplomacy. This story was written by Gerber and masterfully drawn by Gil Kane.
The two monsters wind up fighting Molecule Man, who zaps them both into humanity. Grimm becomes one of the few people to learn that Ted Sallis exists under all that muck. Grimm ended up feeling sorry the creature and not so bad about himself—after all, he still had a brain!
The other standout appearance was in Master of Kung Fu #19. Writer Steve Englehart had obtained permission to use the creature and he had the perfect premise. Shang-Chi, the titular hero, has been drugged while trying to escape his father, the infamous Fu Manchu. He wanders into the swamp and encounters Man-Thing.
A kung fu battle is pointless as Shang-Chi only winds up getting stuck inside the muck monster. But since he feels no fear, Shang Chi remains safe.
When a pair of assassins has Shang-Chi cornered, their fear angers Man-Thing so violently that he engulfs them in flames.
Man-Thing made an extra-special appearance in Giant-Size Spider-Man #5. Doc Curt Connors has had another self-esteem attack, turns into the Lizard, and runs down to Florida.
Spidey runs into Man-Thing on the way to catch ol’ Lizzie. Apparently Editor Len Wein couldn’t figure out why Spidey didn’t get stuck inside Manny the way that Shang-Chi did a few months ago.
Lots of heroes took trips to scenic Citrusville, Florida. Including Matt Murdock, on the trail of some dude called Death Stalker. I’d rather stay at home keeping the Black Widow warm and cozy.
Man-Thing’s guest spot in Hulk #197 was sweet justice because it connected him with the creators of DC’s rival Swamp Thing. Bernie Wrightson drew the cover, while Len Wein wrote the story—which also featured the return of the Glob.
Man-Thing and Glob subdue the Hulk in a rather novel and disgusting way by suffocating him.
The Hulk has had many appearances by Man-Thing over the years. “Hulk like muck monster even if he smells funny.” Nuff said.
See also:
Man-Thing Part I: My Man-Thing Was Very Versatile
When Giant-Sized Man-Things Walked the Earth (Man-Thing Part II)
Man-Thing Wikipedia Entry
Continue reading "Need a Team-UP? Got a Man-Thing!" »
Posted by Adam Warlock at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)November 9, 2005
When Giant-Sized Man-Things Walked the Earth (Man-Thing Part II)
Man-Thing issue #3-4 featured a great satire featuring a rogue villain called “The Foolkiller.” Believing himself to be the vengeful arm of God, the Foolkiller set out to kill three targets he identified as blasphemous fools: Richard Rory (who played awful rock music as a DJ), F.A. Schist (for draining the swamp), and Ted Sallis (now Man-Thing, for creating the serum that transformed him). As I’ve said before, Marvel’s stable of writers in the 70s loved making fun of evangelicals.
The Foolkiller was a disciple of a traveling preacher that he believes has healed his crippled legs. He figures that God has ordained him for something great and creates the Foolkiller costume. When the Foolkiller finds the Preacher having a party with booze and a loose woman, he kills his mentor, takes his money, and outfits a truck with all kinds of weapons to take down fools across the country. The Foolkiller preserves the Preacher in a tank filled with formaldehyde and has regular talks about his great mission. In a great stroke of irony, it’s this same tank that kills the Foolkiller in the end when it explodes.
Mike Ploog thundered into the world of Man-Thing with issue #5. His art style was perfectly suited to drawing the muck-monster: on the first page we were treated to a vision of Man-Thing rising out of the swamp. You could almost feel the oozing brown water sliding off of Man-Thing’s form. Ploog was the perfect visionary for Gerber’s stories, creating cinematics and fleshing out the various creatures in the swamp. The first two-parter was about Daryl the Clown, who commits suicide in the swamp. His soul recruits Rory and others to reenact key scenes from his life before a tribunal.
The Clown story is universally regarded as one of the best, but my personal favorite is the two-parter in issue #7-8. A group of Spanish warriors dressed like conquistadors attempt to capture the Man-Thing. At the same moment, we see F.A. Schist about to pack up his operation—as Man-Thing has interrupted his construction projects too many times. Schist tells Wickham (a scientist who tried to kill Man-Thing) another reason he came to the Florida everglades: to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. The warriors that Man-Thing is fighting are from the lost city of La Hacienda.
It turns out the magical waters can slowly restore Man-Thing to humanity, but it does so at the worst moment—when Schist catches up to him. In the end, the fascist F.A. Schist inevitably meets his own doom and Man-Thing becomes mired in muck again.
My other favorite Ploog-Gerber collaboration is also my favorite Giant-Sized Man-Thing, issue #1. The first in a series of comics published quarterly, the Giant-Size books aimed to give Marvelites more bang for the buck—although in this case the bang was a bunch of 1950s reprints. I have to wonder if anyone in the Marvel Bullpen thought about the implications of the title. It provides fanboys loads of laughs to utter the words “Giant-Size Man-Thing” and use them to concoct crazy, impossible pick-up lines.
This particular story pitched Man-Thing against The Glob, a monster introduced in the pages of the Incredible Hulk. Ploog drew their conflict with glee, living up to the hype of “the gloopiest, glopiest battle ever!” The cultists who bring the Glob to life worship Entropy (“Entropy, Entropy, all winds down”). Their leader resembles Richard Nixon.
Ploog’s final issue was Man-Thing #11, featuring Richard Rory and a ballerina escaping from pursuers in the swamp. Once again, there is a link to the Vietnam War, just before the U.S. pulled out of Saigon. Ploog left the series to work on Marvel’s Planet of the Apes magazine, a series I’ll have to cover at some point.
Issue #12’s story, “Song Cry of the Living Dead Man”, proved that Steve Gerber was the most experimental writer of the 1970s and Man-Thing was his laboratory. A man named Brian Lazarus goes to the swamp in a suicidal-depressed rage, fed up with the routine nature of daily life. The swamp manifests his demons in physical form and Man-Thing fights them. The most unusual thing about the story is the page full of text (Brian’s writing) accompanied by John Buscema’s illustration. This might have been the first time I had seen this done in a monthly color comic. Click the picture above to expand and read the text.
Gerber frequently returned to misanthropic characters who suffered as children. The ultimate form of this was found in Giant-Size Man-Thing #4. The story begins at the funeral of a teenager named Edmond. While the Priest paints a rosy picture of Edmond’s life, a girl named Alice speaks up and gets severely beaten by Edmond’s uncle—until Man-Thing intervenes. In the middle of the story we read an essay by Edmond—in text page form—and discover that he was an overweight boy, picked on by everyone at school. The P.E. coach made him run laps until he had a heart attack. His vengeful spirit possesses Man-Thing in the climax, dolling out punishment to everyone involved. As a fat kid who hated physical education classes, I loved this particular tale.
Man-Thing’s first series lasted until issue 22, and unlike most series that got cancelled, it had a nice conclusion. Gerber broke the fourth wall and inserted himself into the story, narrating it from his own point of view. He told Editor Roy Thomas how Dakimh the Enchanter periodically appeared in his apartment and gave Gerber the inside scoop on all of Man-Thing’s adventures.
Other writers have attempted to bring Man-Thing back at various times, with less than satisfying results. It may be a series that only Gerber could handle—or it could simply be a product of the 1970s. The original run will never be duplicated for its extreme quirkiness. Nuff said.
See also:
Man-Thing Part I: My Man-Thing Was Very Versatile
Need a Team-Up? Got a Man-Thing!
Man-Thing Wikipedia Entry
Continue reading "When Giant-Sized Man-Things Walked the Earth (Man-Thing Part II)" »
Posted by Adam Warlock at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)November 1, 2005
Man-Thing Part I: My Man-Thing Was Very Versatile
Marvel’s muck-monster appeared at nearly the same time as DC’s Swamp Thing. Even though both creatures were based on The Heap (a character from Hillman comics), both were entirely different in terms of execution. The early Swamp Thing was pure horror and science fiction; Man-Thing could change genres from issue to issue. Sorcery, horror, humor, contemporary tales of morality—it all happened in a Florida swamp and chartered the rise of Marvel’s most unique writer, Steve Gerber.
Man-Thing was conceived by Roy Thomas, Stan Lee, and Gerry Conway as a short story for Savage Tales #1—Marvel’s first entry into the black and white magazine market. As a kid, I never saw this issue, as it was poorly distributed. My first exposure to Man-Thing was in Astonishing Tales #12-13, where he met Ka-Zar. Astonishing Tales #12 had a ten page Man-Thing story drawn by Neal Adams, which seemed to have been done for Savage Tales #2 before it was cancelled.
Man-Thing took over the lead story in Adventures into Fear #10. Drawn by Gray Morrow, the origin story provided an uncanny link to the Marvel Universe. Captain America was responsible for Man-Thing’s birth—in a roundabout way.
Ted Sallis was a scientist working to recreate the super-soldier serum that transformed Steve Rogers. Betrayed by a woman in the employ of A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics), Sallis escapes in his car down a Florida road. Sensing that he will be caught, Sallis injects the serum into his bloodstream, right before his car is flung off the road and into the swamp.
The serum (which Steve Gerber later said was designed to help humans breathe pollutants) transformed his body, using the swamp’s elements to mold him into the Man-Thing. Sallis’ personality submerged completely in this new mindless form. Just as in Tales of the Zombie, we never heard the Man-Thing talk or think. He possessed dim memories of Sallis’ life and his own adventures. The Man-Thing was an empathic creature, responding to emotions of those around him. Fear was repulsive to the monster, as we discovered later: “Whoever knows Fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch!”
With issue #11, Steve Gerber became the regular scripter. His first story introduced a demon summoned by Jennifer Kale, a young sorceress who would develop as the series progressed. Jennifer Kale, Dakimh the Enchanter, and the Shred-Na cult provided a layer of sub-plots that would weave through Gerber’s stories. I didn’t really care for these tales; Gerber worked much better when he wrote about characters that he could relate to.
In issue #12, one story of this type was titled “No Choice of Colors!” Man-Thing witnesses a black man named Jackson, running through the swamp, pursued by a white racist sheriff called Corley. Jackson is wounded and Man-Thing saves him. Jackson tells us a story about Corley pursuing him because he loved a white girl. Later, when Sheriff Corley catches up, we find that Jackson has committed murder.
Unable to fathom the truth, Man-Thing turns away from both of them. Corley kills Jackson and boasts that he wants to see all black people murdered. This triggers a rage from Man-Thing, who incinerates the sheriff. A nice art job by Jim Starlin helped introduce kids to the subject of racism in a shocking manner.
The story in AIF #17 inverted the Superman myth with hilarious results. Wundarr had almost the same origin of Superman, except Ma and Pa Kent were too afraid to go to the rocket.
Wundarr sat in the rocket for twenty-two years until Man-Thing releases him…and concludes that Man-Thing must be his mother! Wundarr (who had the powers of Superman but the mind of Superbaby) would go on to become a guest-star in the Thing’s series, Marvel Two-In-One.
AIF#19 was the last appearance of Man-Thing in the anthology before receiving his own series. He left on a cliffhanger, as the Nexus of All Realities started to collapse, and Dakimh assembled a team to put it all back together. Howard the Duck was one of them, walking into the swamp, wondering who all the hairless apes were.
Frank Brunner drew the gorgeous cover to Man-Thing #1, where the realities were saved, but at the cost of Howard’s life (or so we thought). It seemed incredible to even the most faithful Marvelites that our quirky muck monster was in his own monthly title (and popping up everywhere in the Marvel Universe as well).
Man-Thing #2 introduced the final key cast member to the series: Richard Rory. Rory was a character that Steve Gerber seemed to identify with, and in some ways he seemed to resemble the pictures I had seen of Gerber. Rory claimed to be a perennial loser whose bad luck streak started at birth (see above). Although his luck couldn’t be that bad—he gets saved by Man-Thing a bunch of times and meets a hot biker chick named Ruth.
With all these elements in place, Gerber was poised to do his strongest work yet in the Florida swamp. I’ll cover that in Part Two, where you will learn about my favorite Giant-Sized Man-Thing. Nuff said.
See also:
When Giant-Sized Man-Things Walked the Earth (Man-Thing Part II)
Need a Team-Up? Got a Man-Thing!
Man-Thing Wikipedia Entry
Continue reading "Man-Thing Part I: My Man-Thing Was Very Versatile" »
Posted by Adam Warlock at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
