Articles with the Tag Man-Thing

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 37: Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02


Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02
Steve Gerber, Michael Fleisher, Chris Claremont and friends
Reprints: Man-Thing #15-22, Giant-Size #3-5, Man-Thing v2 #1-11 (March 1975 – July 1981)
Get this for: The second part of Gerber’s run — four stars

The Marvel Essentials series is meant to sell you characters, rather than creators — buy a volume and you get a big slab of Spider-Man’s adventures, or the Fantastic Four’s — but with some series this approach just doesn’t work. Man-Thing is one such series. Only one writer ever got a handle on the muck monster and nobody before or after him really knew what to do with him. That writer was Steve Gerber of course, whose work dominated the first volume of Essential Man-Thing. The second volume collects the remainder of his run on the first Man-Thing, but also the complete second, 1979 series, written by Michael Fleisher and Chris Claremont. It’s clear neither of them got the Man-Thing as Gerber got him.

Man-Thing is after all a difficult character to write. He’s completely passive, with no motives of his own, solely responding to the emotions of the people around him. You can’t have the usual Marvel soap opera with Man-Thing, it’s difficult to get him to fight recurring villains and really the best thing you can do with him is to use him in morality tales. Which both Gerber and his successors did, with the difference that Gerber had his finger on the pulse of the seventies and the talent to make use of it. He was also able to see the absurdity in his stories, which helps a lot when reading much dated relevant stories. But he also moved people with his stories, especially “the Kid’s Night Out” from Giant-Size Man-Thing #4, as witnessed in this remembrance by Fred Hembeck. In it Man-Thing is the avenger of a fat kid who died of exhaustion during gym class, while the people that tormented him mouth platitudes at his funeral, lashing out in anger when his one friend challenges their lies. It’s dated yes and I’ve read hundreds of such stories, but I can see the power it must have had on people like Hembeck back then

For an example of how not to do a Man-Thing story, we need look no further than Giant-Size Man-Thing #5 and a Len Wein story. Wein, who created Manny’s counterpart at DC, Swamp Thing, should’ve been able to handle him, but his story of two young lovers running away into the swamp to get away from their feuding parents is a) cliche and b) very very dull, a sort of third rate EC Comics shock story. That’s the mistake in many of the non-Gerber stories, taken it all too seriously and going for shock rather than creativity, upping the death count along the way. It doesn’t make them any better.

On the art side, most of it is by dependable Marvel veterans like Jim Mooney, Ed Hannigan and Don Perlin. None of them are bad and some like Hannigan do their best work here, but it’s not as good as the art in the previous volume, which of course boasted Mike Ploog, who is hard to improve on. It’s the standard seventies Marvel house style on display here, when Manny really needs something special.

Not a bad volume and Chris Claremont at least tries to do what Gerber does seemingly effortlessly, but in the end it shows that some characters can only be handled by one specific writer.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 02: Man-Thing v1

books and books review, Comix
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essential Man-Thing Vol. 1


Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1
Steve Gerber, Roy Thomas, Val Mayerik, Mike Ploog and Friends
Reprints: see below
Get this for: Gerber, Gerber, Gerber! — five stars

Right. Day two. Essential Man-Thing Vol 1 collects Savage Tales #1, Astonishing Tales #12-13, Adventure into Fear #10-19, Man-Thing #1-14, Giant-Size Man-Thing #1-2 (don’t snigger) and Monsters Unleashed #5, #8-9. It features writing and art of Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, Tony Isabella, Mike Ploog, Val Mayerik, Gray Morrow and others, but is dominated by one man: Steve Gerber.

Man-Thing made his debut in May 1971, only two months before that other muck encrusted swamp monster, Swamp Thing over at the Distinguished Competition, more a case of tapping into the same zeitgeist as somebody copying somebody else. Whereas old Swampy still had a human intelligence under all that muck, Manny was less fortunate, with the man he was, Ted Sallis, yet another genius-scientist who became the victim of his own weapons, completely submerged, leaving him to react purely by instinct. In the first few stories this leaves Man-Thing to function as a deus ex machina, to pop up at convenient times to drive the plot. Once Gerber takes over the writing this role doesn’t change much.

The real difference is what kind of stories Gerber has Man-Thing resolve. He mixes in horror, absurdity, superheroes and a generous helping of seventies politics and soulsearching. At its worst this becomes an incoherent mess, but at its best this made Man-Thing one of the best things Marvel had during the seventies, something that was genuinely in touch with the times. This was of course also the series that introduced Howard the Duck to a largely befuddled world and you can see part of what Gerber would perfect with Howard already here.

With Man-Thing, what you have are stories that are only slightly more absurd than what you’d get in a normal Marvel series, with villains who are largely buffoons: a corrupt businessman called F. A. Schist (subtle Gerber ain’t), a Cult worshipping Entropy, a Suicided clown replaying his life using Manny and co as his puppets and so on. They’re not that different from the fools you’d see fighting Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four elsewhere, just slightly more amplified. With Manny himself a mute, mindless observer of what’s going on in his own book, only reacting to what people are doing to him, it’s the normal people in his supporting cast who are the real protagonists, especially one Rich Rory, somebody Gerber would uses elsewhere as well.

Absurdity in superhero comics has a bad reputation, because most writers just go for mindless parody. With Man-Thing, you have the absurd (having a warrior prince from another dimension metamorphose out of a peanut butter jar for example) dealt with matter of factly, without the wink-wink nudge-nudge of lesser titles…

Most of the artwork in this volume is by Val Mayerik, somebody I’ve always liked. Unfortunately the lack of colour seems to have zapped some of the vitality of his art here; it all looks a bit pedestrian. But then Mike Ploog takes over and his slightly cartoony yet slick style works quite well in black and white. There’s some great work by other artists as well, including John Buscema and Gray Morrow.