“F
or whatever knows fear, burns at the Man-Thing’s touch.” And thus, with a simple yet ominous tagline, was the foundation laid for a simple creature in a decidedly less-than-simple, highly influential comic book. Riding a wave of resurgent interest in macabre comics (horror-themed
titles had been all but snuffed out in the 1950s, mostly via self-censorship), Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway’s chronicle about an experimental scientist who drowns in a bog in the Florida Everglades, only to fuse with it and re-emerge as a hideous, hulking, muck- encrusted, plant-based swamp creature, oozed onto newsstand shelves in May 1971 and the non-bog world has not been the same since. At a time when comics were almost never viewed as art and were seldom seen as
a legitimate arm of popular culture (much less as a vehicle for conveying deep ideas), Man-Thing, and in particular Steve Gerber’s visionary three-year run at the helm, con- sistently took this mainstream comic into a more adult and literary realm long before the term “graphic novel” had ever been conceived. One didn’t often open a 25-cent comic book to read: “The emotional current crackling in the air between Andrea and her mother proves too much for Man-Thing’s empathic nature. He takes his leave, having understood nary a syllable yet intimately aware of certain resonances, nuances, which neither woman dares discern or acknowl- edge. Pity the poor murk-dweller, who cannot ratiocinate, or conceptu- alize, or keep his clinical distance. Distressing as their convoluted emotions may be to contemplate, they are worse by far to feel.”
Alongside inserting full pages of text, actual short stories, and famously closing the
series with a meta-narrative in which he writes himself into the storyline claiming that he’d simply been recounting actual events, Gerber also examined issues such as sui- cide, insanity, spousal abuse, murder, racism, environmental exploitation and Aboriginal land rights long before it became fashionable to do so. Unlike most comics, in which no one ever seemed to freakin’ die, many people
died in Man-Thing. As in life, there was often an ambiguous morality to the proceed- ings; prices were routinely paid – even by innocent people. Although usually a force for good, as long as you felt fear in its presence, the Man-Thing’s burning touch was not above – nor below – disfiguring a beautiful face. Making all of Gerber’s exquisite work doubly impressive was the fact
that the main character never once uttered so much as a single word. Conventional wisdom has it that Man-Thingwas Marvel Comics’ attempt to pig-
gyback on the success of DC Comics’ own malformed monstrosity, Swamp Thing (another tale about a star-crossed scientist who fuses with a murky marsh only to re-emerge as a hideous, hulking, muck-encrusted, plant-based swamp creature). However, the miry Man-Thing debuted a full two months before Swampy did. And while both brutes shared rather uncomfortable similarities, Marvel resisted pursuing any legal action, as the two beasts had obviously borrowed heavily from – if not owed their entire existence to – a 1940s Air Boy Comics character called The Heap, which just so happened to be a hideous, hulking, muck-encrusted, plant-based swamp creature that had built up around the remains of a drowned fighter pilot. Interestingly, The Heap was itself most likely based on “It,” Theodore Sturgeon’s seminal short story (that Ray Bradbury deemed “one of the finest weird tales in the genre”), written around 1940 about a, well, you guessed it. Curiously, Marvel also published a comic book adaptation of Sturgeon’s tale in December 1972, that, due to the protagonist’s somewhat striking resemblance to Man-Thing, later trans- mogrified into a series called It! The Living Colossus. Aside from influencing icons such as author Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, The
Graveyard Book), who wrote that Gerber was one of the three people who made him want to write comics, it’s also arguable that without Man-Thing the comics industry might not have been as open to the inspirations that Alan Moore (From Hell, V for Vendetta, Watchmen) had to offer in the pages of Swamp Thing more than a decade later. Man-Thing’s gnarly roots have since spread into a 2005 straight-to-video eponymous film, collectibles, video games, and he continues to appear in comics titles such as Tomb of Terror, Monsters Unleashed, Super Hero Squad and Marvel Zombies. His enduring influence can also be seen in other brack- ish comics characters such as The Sludge, Bog Swamp Demon, Muck-Man and a new Heap. Encircled by mainstream titles that were generally overly melodramatic, naïve
and anodyne, somewhat tasteless, lacking in merit and/or cliché-ridden, Man- Thing consistently proved that it isn’t the medium, but the quality of perception and expression, that determines the significance of an artistic endeavour. MICHAEL MITCHELL
RM70
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72