The Man-Thing: Marvel's literary murk lurker
Forgetting is the curse of the Man-Thing...and sometimes, his only blessing.
But I haven’t forgotten the Man-Thing. He may be a character you say haunts you. It’s those stories!
Man-Thing is the rarest sort of protagonist, in that he is chiefly an unobserved observer, until he tries to intervene and scares the carp out of the water.
In 1971, he debuted in a Marvel Comics experiment with adult material, in the form of black and white magazines. SAVAGE TALES #1 features the ill fate of chemist Ted Sallis, betrayed by his lover into the hands of terrorists who want his secret: the new Super Soldier Formula, in the manner of that which once transformed Private Steve Rogers into the apex of human fitness, Captain America. But something there in the swamp works with this imperfect formula, to render Sallis senseless, recreated as a shambling, muck-based mockery of humanity.
The experiment didn’t continue, but the Man-Thing, created by Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow, came back a couple of years later as new material for the reprint anthology, Adventures Into Fear. With issue #10, the title began featuring Man-Thing in new stories, including one racially-tense story of convicts on the run in the Everglades, drawn by Jim Starlin.
From #11 forward, the next six years nearly always saw Man-Thing written by the same writer, Steve Gerber. A Horror Comics fad took off that year, continuing with strong sales for a couple of years, before abating during 1975. Man-Thing’s writing, with terrific art by Val Mayerick, gained a following, and Man-Thing became a sort of mascot, as an original creation, for the Marvel Horror publications. A few bimonthly issues of FEAR, and Marvel crossed over Fear #19 into the premiere of Man-Thing #1. That’s also the storyline that introduces a very incidental character named Howard the Duck.
I think the character really gets swinging by the time he gets his own series. And no one issue really sets the tone for what you'll always get, for sure. I'd go in expecting something off-kilter and different. I don't think the covers were always much help telling you what's inside.
You've got three basic divisions:
1) issues with Jennifer Kale, sword and sorcery stuff 2) Richard Rory issues, always character studies 3) the mass unsortable by supporting characters, always different. One favorite, here, is actually Gerber's two-issue Man-Thing guest spot in Daredevil #113/114.
So you don't build a long-term narrative, frankly, other than maybe Richard and Jennifer growing more confident and purposeful. I think, take any three issues, and you'll know if you really want to read anymore.
I am dearly fond of the Foolkiller stories in #3 and #4. Macabre. This is where Richard joins as a series regular, stranded in the Everglades. He briefly begins a romance, even finds work. The evangelical-inspired Fool Killer is actually looking to murder Ted Sallis, as well as land developer, heh, F.A. Schist.
The Giant Size Man -Thing title is always good, but the payoff for Jennifer as a sorceress in #3 by Alfredo Alcala is maybe best when enjoyed later. It's top-notch. Jennifer’s the main human character of most of the Adventure Into Fear stories, #10=19. She doesn’t turn up much in the main title- if at all. A teenager, especially a young woman, was a decidedly modern choice, after a decade of macho Marvel heroes.
I really love the Citrusville censorship stories, too. It seems so absurd and unreasonable. Then you put down your comic book, turn on some news, and now you do know ridiculous. That's like #17, 18...I want to include the disgusting Star Spangler issue, parodying the dystopian rockers of the day, especially that Diamond Dogs/ Aladdin Sane era Bowie persona, with its futuristic despair and inescapable decadence. It sets up the Mad Viking, a nickname for the ultra-macho old dock worker, Jorgenson, who decides to pick up a battle axe and start showing the world what Strength and Manhood means, again. He starts with murdering his grand daughter Astrid’s boyfriend. He’s a big hit with the Citrusville mob, though. I know others will proffer the ghost clown play two-parter, or that sad Giant-Size story about bullied Edmund, but I like these three storylines and characters best. The issue about the advertising copy writer who’s losing his mind, in issue twelve (drawn by John Buscema, a great match), has a mini-series sequel released around 2012. Speaking of sequels, David Anthony Kraft wrote two issues of She-Hulk in 1980 that revisit the grounds of Schist’s demise, the enigmatic La Hacienda, location of the actual Fountain of Youth. So those are a few, often cited, and the ones with Dawg also feature the end of the brief, but brilliant, run by artist Mike Ploog.
I actually prefer issue fifteen, the one where Man-Thing only appears as a “A Candle for Sainte Cloud!” It’s a strange favorite, and not where I’d send a new reader curious about the quality of 70s horror comics. It’s a story about the values of the Establishment and the antiestablishment, a sad romance featuring the young artist’s flashback to her time with a government scientist named, of course, Ted Sallis.
That’s all you need to know. You’ll find just twenty-five issues of Man-Thing, and there’ve been other efforts to bring him back, and hints he’ll join the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but those, for me, are the Money. Add in five issues of Giant-Sized Man-Thing. Then, if you’re a completist, there’s nine issues of FEAR, character studies mostly, not overly-necessary to enjoying the series afterwards, narrative-wise. I actually like the two issues of DAREDEVIL more than the FEAR stories- they are two of Gerber's best efforts on Daredevil. It's a government conspiracy/ journalism story about Foggie Nelson's sister, the Super Soldier Serum, awesome DD enemy Death Stalker, and his pawn, the blade-slinging Gladiator.
And anything you want after that, might be your cup of tea, maybe not. But while they are unrepentantly weird, I find those stories to be relevant to understanding counter-culture of the day, which was quite an achievement in so stodgy a field as comic books. But fortunately, it was also low-paying, attracting hungry young talents who created the majority of the stories actually adapted, today, for movies that predominate much of the contemporary youth culture. I think everyone involved deserves a fat cut, along with those lovely movie tickets and flights out to Hollywood.
I would truly love to see someone work true to the original Man-Thing scripts and settings, because it’s one of the first comic book series that’s written in the tone of modern sensibilities. Hollywood wasn’t ready for imperial adventurist and corporate guard dog Iron Man, as he was written throughout his first years, but the youngsters like Gerber had both creativity and a vested interest in observing the emergent consciousness of the day. In the letters page, his optimism shines through, though Gerber’s stories often flirted with bleakness in a way that reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut. He’s just as wryly humorous as Vonnegut. I enjoy the way art in sequential story telling works together when paired with distinct captioning and life-like insights, in place of, say, character types borrowed broadly from outdated comedies, or lifted poorly from movies. There is a bit of a B-movie trashiness to Marvel Horror, but Gerber puts more care and genuine respect into his female characters, more verity into his Everyman, and frankly, a stout vocabulary. Some of the actual story ideas were more workable than others, yes, but there’s a refreshing, if occasionally angsty, mode that persists until his unusual exit with the last issue. I also think Jim Mooney, a more traditional comic book artist but a clear story-teller, did an admirable job with Steve’s scripts.
I don’t think Progress made it so far as its promise, but now influences such as phantasmagoric modern theater, Post-Modernism, and especially in Gerber’s case, Existentialism, were suffusing even pop culture consciousness. Comics, reflecting the male-predominance of his audience as Romance genre titles fell out of favor, were certainly tardy in developing and crediting female writers. There is an element, however inconsistent, of Progress, the maturity of expanding viewpoints in the name of more challenging, but fun, entertainment, in this era of New Journalism and Baby Boomer commercialized counter culture that is the early and mid-1970s.
I don’t think that’s so apparent in the superhero fare, cranked out largely in imitation of the formulae overseen by Stan Lee, but the themes of Man-Thing are carried by a more crisp and realistic dialogue, and new ideas about the transgressive figures and problems that inform the narratives.
But I haven’t forgotten the Man-Thing. He may be a character you say haunts you. It’s those stories!
Man-Thing is the rarest sort of protagonist, in that he is chiefly an unobserved observer, until he tries to intervene and scares the carp out of the water.
In 1971, he debuted in a Marvel Comics experiment with adult material, in the form of black and white magazines. SAVAGE TALES #1 features the ill fate of chemist Ted Sallis, betrayed by his lover into the hands of terrorists who want his secret: the new Super Soldier Formula, in the manner of that which once transformed Private Steve Rogers into the apex of human fitness, Captain America. But something there in the swamp works with this imperfect formula, to render Sallis senseless, recreated as a shambling, muck-based mockery of humanity.
I think the character really gets swinging by the time he gets his own series. And no one issue really sets the tone for what you'll always get, for sure. I'd go in expecting something off-kilter and different. I don't think the covers were always much help telling you what's inside.
You've got three basic divisions:
1) issues with Jennifer Kale, sword and sorcery stuff 2) Richard Rory issues, always character studies 3) the mass unsortable by supporting characters, always different. One favorite, here, is actually Gerber's two-issue Man-Thing guest spot in Daredevil #113/114.
I am dearly fond of the Foolkiller stories in #3 and #4. Macabre. This is where Richard joins as a series regular, stranded in the Everglades. He briefly begins a romance, even finds work. The evangelical-inspired Fool Killer is actually looking to murder Ted Sallis, as well as land developer, heh, F.A. Schist.
The Giant Size Man -Thing title is always good, but the payoff for Jennifer as a sorceress in #3 by Alfredo Alcala is maybe best when enjoyed later. It's top-notch. Jennifer’s the main human character of most of the Adventure Into Fear stories, #10=19. She doesn’t turn up much in the main title- if at all. A teenager, especially a young woman, was a decidedly modern choice, after a decade of macho Marvel heroes.
I really love the Citrusville censorship stories, too. It seems so absurd and unreasonable. Then you put down your comic book, turn on some news, and now you do know ridiculous. That's like #17, 18...I want to include the disgusting Star Spangler issue, parodying the dystopian rockers of the day, especially that Diamond Dogs/ Aladdin Sane era Bowie persona, with its futuristic despair and inescapable decadence. It sets up the Mad Viking, a nickname for the ultra-macho old dock worker, Jorgenson, who decides to pick up a battle axe and start showing the world what Strength and Manhood means, again. He starts with murdering his grand daughter Astrid’s boyfriend. He’s a big hit with the Citrusville mob, though. I know others will proffer the ghost clown play two-parter, or that sad Giant-Size story about bullied Edmund, but I like these three storylines and characters best. The issue about the advertising copy writer who’s losing his mind, in issue twelve (drawn by John Buscema, a great match), has a mini-series sequel released around 2012. Speaking of sequels, David Anthony Kraft wrote two issues of She-Hulk in 1980 that revisit the grounds of Schist’s demise, the enigmatic La Hacienda, location of the actual Fountain of Youth. So those are a few, often cited, and the ones with Dawg also feature the end of the brief, but brilliant, run by artist Mike Ploog.
And anything you want after that, might be your cup of tea, maybe not. But while they are unrepentantly weird, I find those stories to be relevant to understanding counter-culture of the day, which was quite an achievement in so stodgy a field as comic books. But fortunately, it was also low-paying, attracting hungry young talents who created the majority of the stories actually adapted, today, for movies that predominate much of the contemporary youth culture. I think everyone involved deserves a fat cut, along with those lovely movie tickets and flights out to Hollywood.
I don’t think Progress made it so far as its promise, but now influences such as phantasmagoric modern theater, Post-Modernism, and especially in Gerber’s case, Existentialism, were suffusing even pop culture consciousness. Comics, reflecting the male-predominance of his audience as Romance genre titles fell out of favor, were certainly tardy in developing and crediting female writers. There is an element, however inconsistent, of Progress, the maturity of expanding viewpoints in the name of more challenging, but fun, entertainment, in this era of New Journalism and Baby Boomer commercialized counter culture that is the early and mid-1970s.
I don’t think that’s so apparent in the superhero fare, cranked out largely in imitation of the formulae overseen by Stan Lee, but the themes of Man-Thing are carried by a more crisp and realistic dialogue, and new ideas about the transgressive figures and problems that inform the narratives.
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