When I wanted to stop with the Man-Thing blogging, Tucker was all like, “oh no, we can’t give up, we have to finish it.” So what does he do for his final installment?

Put it on 45 so we can shamble to it.

Man Thing Part One;Man Thing Part Two;Man Thing Part Three; Man-Thing Part Four; Man Thing Part Five; Man Thing Part Six
_____________________________

So Tucker is definitely liking these more than me, which is to say, he is liking them at all. In Man Thing 9 and 10 he provides a really reasonable defense of Mike Ploog, whose work nonetheless continues to leave me almost entirely indifferent. Tucker even has affection for the geezers in the swamp and their thwarted love affair and their hillbilly hi-jinks and the improbable and yet nonetheless totally predictable tale of jealousy and stupidity and….

Aw, fuck it. I just want it to be over. I begged Tucker…please, man, let’s stop. It’s not worth it. But he was like, no, no we can’t admit defeat. So I’m trudging on…but everyone will suffer for it, damn it.

Anyway, for this round I waded my way through Giant Sized Man-Thing #2 and Man-Thing 11, 12, and 13.

For some time now I’ve been hoping that Steve Gerber would stop writing like a putz and suddenly show me why he’s so well-beloved. It hasn’t happened though. I have come to the end of my portion of the blogging, and, if anything, Gerber has only gotten worse. Giant-Sized Man-Thing #2 is at least blessed with some nice pulp art by John Buscema; his obligatory hot female actually looks cuter than his Man-Thing, which is, as Tucker points out, something that is not really in Mike Ploog’s skill set. As far as the scripting on these issues goes though….you got your tortured scientist with a conscience; you got your wounded Vietnam vets trying to draw attention to their plight; you got your monster who behaves like a big friendly puppy dog. I guess somebody could go through and point out all the moments of egregious idiocy (A museum is going to expose its patrons to a giant monster with unknown attributes as a money-raising gimmick? Really? Their insurance company is cool with that, huh?) But it’s hardly worth the effort. Sneering at this book doesn’t even rise to the level of shooting fish in a barrel. It’s more like dropping dynamite into a fishbowl. And the lone fish was already dead to begin with.

Still, I suppore Man-Thing 12, entitled “Song-Cry…,” merits special mention. This is probably the worst effort of the book so far. Indeed, even amidst the many egregious, shambling mounds of slime that make up mainstream comics, this issue is a noticeably repulsive specimen. I know Gerber is only 25 or something here, and many commenters have promised that he gets better. But I think I’m more or less determined never to find out. You write something like this, your audience is entitled to leave and never come back.

We start off, inevitably enough, with Man Thing mooning around, a helpless slave to the contrivances of plot and the ominous, low-hanging blocks of narration. He empathically feels someone in pain and discovers a poor schlub (named Brian) writing portentous prose at a table. “The time was coming,” writes Brian, “when I’d just stop functioning like a burned-out machine…a dead computer, which was, I think, what I’d become.” Wow, man. Heavy. But Brian can’t finish his blindingly poetic effusion because he’s being attacked by ghostly bill collectors! Man-Thing is sympathetic…when he was a man, bill collectors came after him too, and he still remembers the pain, the horror, which was, after all, comparable in many ways to being betrayed by your fiance, injecting an experimental formula, being transformed into a shambling mockery of a man, and then being forced to serve as a dripping nanny to a series of self-pitying baby-men who, for reasons best known to themselves, insist on doing their whining in the middle of your swamp.

Anyway, as I said, Man-Thing feels bad for the guy, and saves him, and there’s a more or less pointless confrontation where Brian yammers on about how he needs to get down the words to stop the hurt and Man-Thing just sort of stands there, flagrantly refusing to disembowel him. Fucking Man-Thing. What good are you anyway? Jason would have killed him for me, god damn it.

So, having not been disemboweled, Brian wanders off and…

Oh, holy crap. I just realized that his name is “Brian Lazarus.” Because he’s going to be rejuvenated and rise from his “dead computerness”. That’s just peachy. Way to go Steve. No wonder everyone thinks you’re a genius.

So we cut now to loose ends from last issue. There’s this hot dancer named Sybil who you can tell is a dancer because she’s wearing leotards in the swamp. You can tell she’s hot because she’s wearing leotards in the swamp. Otherwise you wouldn’t know; all the hideous things that I’d hoped would happen to Brian seem to have spared him, and been inflicted instead upon the unsuspecting and defenseless art. Poor, sad art. Klaus Janson took John Buscema’s layouts, then hit himself in the head with a large heavy hammer, spun himself around three times, and then drew the entire issue using a pencil shoved far enough up his nose to cause brain injury.

All right, it’s not that bad. But it’s not good, either.

Where was I? Oh, right, Sybil. Unfortunate things happened to her last issue; her brother kidnapped her because the plot said so, but he seemed sorry. Still, she was stung…or maybe she had other problems. Anyway, she says, “I make it a practice not to involve myself too deeply with anyone…ever.” Ooooo. That’s so, so sad. Pretty girl like that (well, wearing leotards anyway)…that’s a darn shame. What happened to her to harden her heart like that? Thank God we’ll never know, because she’s a girl, and only guys rate extended explorations of their tragic backstories. Sexist? Sure. But if my choice is between sexism and twice as many tragic backstories, I know which way I’m going to vote.

As fate would have it, the hard-hearted Sybil and the too, too tender-hearted Brian run into each other. Sybil takes Brian in and Brian repays her by telling her about the deep meaningfulness of Beatles albums. No, he really does. Then he shows her his poetry. “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man” is the title, so you can see it’s sure to wow the chicks. Here’s just a taste: “I work for a living. I live to work. Every morn at six a.m. the grating clangor of the orange clockwork drives a spike into my ear, and I rise from not-sleep and prepare to confront a new demon-day.”

This is perhaps a good time to mention that Steve Gerber, like Brian Lazarus, was an advertising writer. And Brian’s song-cry is, of course, Gerber’s song-cry, inasmuch as Gerber wrote it. So when Gerber has Sybil’s hard heart just melt right through her leotards upon hearing this drivel, it is difficult to see it as anything but the most self-indulgent of adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasies. “Th-there’s such terrible pain in these words…” Sybil stammers. “I never dreamed anyone could feel so…so…” and then she babbles on “You touched something in me…that I wasn’t even sure was there. I think…I care about you.” Yep, Steve, your poetry is so true, so powerful, so raw, that random babes will fall in love with you after a single recitation. Your pain is so deep, so fascinating, that all the shallow people (“I’ve always been a pretty happy person myself” Sybil gushes) would have to acknowledge your genius if only they would listen to you…I mean, really listen. You’re beautiful Steve Gerber; you’ve seen the true underbelly of capitalism, and you’ve risen above all that. Money? Hah! All you desire in return for your utterly pedestrian creative effusions and grinding self-pity is the abject adulation of some boring fantasy honey. Who could possibly begrudge you that?

Not the mindless Man-Thing. Oh sure, he takes a swipe at Brian at the end, but only so Sybil can interpose herself and make Brian see that someone cares about him. “It took something as unhumans as that monster…to show us both our humanity.” Sybil earnestly declares. And so Man-Thing wanders off, to touch other worthy, poorly-drawn souls with his sodden transcendence.

Tucker will have to deal with that, though. I’m done.

Man Thing Part One;Man Thing Part Two;Man Thing Part Three; Man-Thing Part Four

________________

In his last post, Tucker refused to say anything about Man-Thing #3, preferring instead to talk about his experience caring for killer attack dogs. This was a wise move; I would rather hear about killer attack dogs than about Man-Thing #3. Nor do I want to hear about Man-Thing #4, in which we learn that Foolkiller has a tragic backstory. Even less do I want to discuss Man-Things 5 and 6, in which Steve Gerber introduces us to a sad clown, which is theoretically interesting, you see, because it is a clown who is sad, which is ironic. And also poignant. With a tragic backstory.

And yes, Man Thing #7 has a tragic backstory too. It’s the backstory of Man-Thing himself, actually. Remember, Man-Thing was once…a man! And in this issue renegade conquistadors slosh him with the water of life, causing him to almost remember his past, and to regrow one human hand. That’s kind of a squicky image….But you know, really, I look deep into my heart of hearts and…yeah, I still don’t care.

These comics suck. Not in an apocalyptic or interesting or surprising way; not in a way that’s even much fun to laugh at. They suck in a rote, boring way. They suck because Steve Gerber, like masses of other writers for television, stage, and screen, thinks the key to entertaining drama is pop psychology and predictable, feeble irony. If you’ve got a preacher, he’s got to be a hypocrite; if you’ve got a rich guy, he has to be a heartless bastard. If you’ve got a clown, he has to be sad. Put enough of these startling reversals together and you’ve got a story with a meaningful human moral. Add in suitably portentous contrivances (the sad clown is dead, but his ghost rises and makes a bunch of random passersby, including the oddly acquiescent Man-Thing, re-enact moments from his sad past) and maybe, if you’re lucky, somebody’ll even think you’re profound.

So there’s Steve Gerber for you; meaningful human morals and pretentions to profundity. Which would be fine, if Gerber had ever actually experienced a single thought about meaning or morals or, for that matter, humans. But he hasn’t. He’s got nothing to say, jack. He might as well be the mindless, shambling Man-Thing for all the brain activity you can detect in these pages. Calling a developer “F.A. Schist” is the sort of thing he passes off as clever. He’s the hectoring, droning drunk you can’t shut up, except he doesn’t even have that much character. The drunk at least tends to have a pungent urgency about him. Gerber manages to be bland even in his crankery.

It is frustrating that there are some indications (such as the Wundarr story that Gerber could write entertaining comics if he’d just chuck the serious messages and go for laughs. But what’s really annoying is that Man-Thing as a concept was originally pretty good. That first issue, and the seven-page Len Wein/Neil Adams follow-up really had something going for them. They were vicious and mean, built around revenge and senseless death and violence and bodily disfigurement. They even had good cheesecake. They were solid exploitation pulp, with some nifty ideas and whacky visuals. And Gerber took that and turned it into tired TV melodrama. All I can say is, fuck him.

I suppose I should talk about Mike Ploog now. Ploog did the art for Man-Thing 5, 6, and 7. He has a very strong reputation…but I have to say, I’m not exactly seeing what all the fuss is about. He tends to make Man-Thing thinner and more hunched. I think the ultimate result really is to make him cuter. I can’t really get worked up about it one way or the other, in any case. Ploog does have a talent for exaggerated faces, which is kind of balanced by the fact that his more ordinary faces tend to look awkward and unexpressive. Certainly, in terms of rendering and layout, he doesn’t seem anywhere near Gray Morrow’s level. If anything, I’d rate him slightly below Val Mayerik, the completely unheralded penciller who was doing Man-Thing before Ploog came on board.

I don’t know. I may be being overly harsh because I am thoroughly sick of this crap, and I’ve got what? twelve issues to go or something? Perhaps some titles were just never meant to be collected into big honking anthologies….

Update: More Tucker on Man-Thing Action!

We’re following up on some Tucker Stone on Man-Thing action. At the conclusion of his review Tucker laments that he didn’t get to review Fear #15 because it looked like Man-Thing fought fighter jets and that seemed like it might be cool. He doesn’t and it isn’t.

Fear #15
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Val Mayerik
Inker Chic Stone

At the end of my last post I wondered aloud how exactly Steve Gerber was going to save us from creeping genre confusion. Was he going to just embrace the obvious and make Man-Thing the horror title it clearly wanted to be? Or would he manage to mix horror and super-heroics or melodrama or whatever in some way that wasn’t obviously stupid?

And the answer is…neither. Gerber just chucks the horror tropes altogether. And it’s still stupid.

I guess I’m supposed to be appreciating the Silver Age goofiness, and it’s certainly true that the narrative veers all over the place. Continuing over from last issue, we start with everyone in the world going insane. Then we’ve got Man-Thing being shot by rural yahoos, then on to magic ritual, a flashback to an Atlantean sorceress, the sudden appearance of a wizard complete with goofy wizard hat so you can spot him, unlikely mystical quest, monster fight monster, good monster win, victory, the end.

So as I said, pretty crazed. And yet, Gerber manages to take this zany, cobbled-together plot and make it really tedious. It’s true that the story is a heterogeneous mish-mash. But when, say, Bob Haney put together a heterogeneous mish-mash he did it with verve and panache; you felt like he was bouncing form idea to idea because he’d thought of something so funny and delightful he just had to drop it in. Ghost peg-leg pirates; Batman turning into a mad scientist, Spanish kids calling the Dark-knight detective Bat-Hombre; rallies for robot rights — the man was having a blast. (And it didn’t hurt that he worked with a number of brilliant artists like Nick Cardy and Jim Aparo. Mayerik’s okay, but he’s certainly not in that class.)

Whereas with this Gerber story, it’s more like a Hollywood movie assembled by committee that never managed to gel — Superman IV, for example, or Judge Dredd. The individual bits aren’t exciting or clever; they’re boring. The Atlantean sorceress, for example, is just Jor-El in a two-piece, warning everyone that the world’s going to end. The wizard who suddenly appears has no discernible personality — he just has “to make certain you were the ones!” Yep, that’s a news flash. The main character, Jennifer, is as bland as her good looks ; now she’s spouting courageous drivel, now she’s weeping because Man-Thing is dead — who gives a shit? Even the prurient touches are lame:

Nice crotchface there, Jen. Good to know you’re comfortable with that.

In short, this feels like hack-work…except for a couple of moments. The first is on the second page; Gerber explains, straight-faced, that one sign of the demonic possession of the earth is that “rock-hurling protestors demand that the President resume the war!” The second is further on; Jennifer and Man-Thing find the sacred tome (isn’t there always a sacred tome?) when suddenly:

And that’s it; the elf disappears, big evil monster appears, and we’re back to formulaic drudgery. Blink and you’d miss it, but for two or three panels there we’re in Flaming Carrot or Cerebus territory. There’s at least a little more of that coming, thank God. First though, we’ve got to endure….

Fear #16
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Sal Trapani
Inker Chic Stone

From Hollywood schlock to a Very Special Issue of Man-Thing. The bad men are trying to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. The noble Indians fight back, Man-Thing stands around and drips. Everything drips, for that matter. Soggy ideologies slosh back and forth like stubborn, intolerant hamburgers wrestling with proud, game corn tortillas for possession of your lower intestine, which is sacred to both. But do not be afraid, for if you are, the arrugala with the big nose will shoulder all aside and burn a hole in your pasty white sphincter. Or, as Michael Kupperman famously put it, “The tribes of my people used to cover the land, as numberless as the buffalo. Now we are dead and inside your sticks of chewing gum.”

Fear #17
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Val Mayerik
Inker Sal Trapani

The title here is “It Came Out of the Sky!”, and it opens with three and a hlaf pages of Man-Thing in single combat with the spacecraft from Action Comics #1. We learn where Man-Thing’s ears are (in his forehead) before he finally cracks the thing open revealing…the second backstory flashback in three issues that retells the damn Jor-El narrative. This time it’s not a semi-nude Atlantean witch, but a dude named Hektu who does the useless warning schtick. The sun! The sun! It will explode! Ha, ha, he’s crazy. I know…let’s build a rocket..yadayadayada. It’s a straight, retelling…until:

Yep, the Kents are portrayed as small-minded rural hicks. It’s a stereotype, sure, and an obvious thing to do in a way…but it’s also bracingly mean-spirited and, most of all, completely out of nowhere. There’s nothing in the Jor-El retelling to indicate that it’s a satire and not a dopey retread. Indeed, it is a dopey retread, complete with melodramatic voice over (“It is the weight of a lifeless hand…that pulls the lever down…and sends the ship skyward!”) It’s like Gerber was telling a standard issue, derivative comic retread, and then all of a sudden said, “You know what? Fuck this.” And hey, presto, we’ve got anti-Kents and then, next page, we’re introduced to Wundarr! a Superman who grew up alone in the spacecraft, pops out of it, sees Man-Thing, and thinks the shambling monstrosity is his mother.

That’s the joke; a developmentally-challenged Superman. And you know what? It’s pretty funny. Wundarr can’t control his muscles so he bounces around spastically, leaping about the swamp, smashing up the construction equipment of the evil developers (yes, they’re still around), staring vacantly into space, tipping over into the muck face first, accidentally killing an alligator, and finally trying to cuddle with ol’ mother Man-Thing. This last precipitates the big super-power battle in the center of town…until Man-Thing gets tired and wanders off. Wundarr is sad…and then scared that his Mom is abandoning him. Of course, Man-Thing can’t tolerate fear, and so he slaps the man-kid, leaving a slight burn on Wundarr’s cheek, and then lumbering off.

Along the way you’ve got lots and lots and lots of hyperactive voice-over. Neither Man-Thing nor Wundarr can actually talk, and though Mayerik has a grand old time drawing Wundarr’s goofily clueless expression:

we can’t really expect Marvel readers to read facial subtleties. So we’ve got captions like:

“But the Ma-Thing has mistaken Wundarr’s accident for an attack — and so stalks menacingly toward him — to retaliate! Can this be? Will even his ‘Mother” be mean to him? Yes! Yes! “She” is going to hurt him!”

You’ve got to love that “‘she'” in quotes especially. Cause, without the quotes, you might start to think that Man-Thing is actually a “she” right?

In a way, it’s kind of entertaining; what happens to a Marvel writer if he can’t explicate everything endlessly through speech bubbles? He goes insane! But at the same time… this is a nifty story with some clever ideas and a loopy sense of humor…wouldn’t it be great if it were being told by someone who could write? Someone who, say, could have figured out a way to do something interesting with the Jor-El retelling, so you’re not just bored and irritated for three pages; somebody who didn’t have to underline every potentially poignant moment with three or four exclamation points.

It’s like, you’ve got an Alan Moore story with Stan Lee storytelling; there’s a funny, original, and even subtle tale here, but the voice and the pacing are just for crap. It reminds me of the last time I went to see the Flatlanders actually. For those who don’t know, the Flatlanders were an early 80s hippie country band; great spaced out playing, lovely melodies. Anyway, they got back together because they could make a buck, presumably, and their new material is dreadful, but of course they played a lot of old stuff as well, which was enjoyable…except they had hired The Worst Drummer in the World to perform with them, and there they are singing their pretty, ragged, spacey melodies, and over everything is this guy basically hitting his kit with his forehead: Thump! (pause) Thump! (pause) Thump! Each beat sits there as if to say, yep, I’m a big stinking turd, and the next one’s coming predictably right — Thump! Yep, there it was.

Okay, you got me. I’m just stalling. I don’t want to go on to:

Fear #18
Writer: Steve Gerber
Penciler: Val Mayerik
Inker Sal Trapani

It’s another Very Special Issue of Man-Thing. This time there’s a bus accident, and the bus is filled with rejects form last night’s lousy late night movie. There’s the nurse with the heart of gold! The wounded child! The tough and manly All-American Nam vet! The disillusioned student protestor with the heart of gold! The drunk-driving salesman who caused the whole thing, the bastard!

And is there conflict? Oh yes, there is conflict. But Man-Thing follows them around like a good puppy and protects them until the bad salesman kills everybody except the nurse and the kid and then Man-Thing kills the bad salesman because that’s what good monsters do. And it’s all so heartwarming that it brought a tear to my eye…oh, wait, I just have conjunctivitis. Never mind.

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious, but…who wants to read this? You pick up a Man-Thing title with some giant gloppy, dripping monster on the cover, you’re saying to yourself…y’know, I’d really like to see a sixth-rate stage play about the human passions boiling just below the surface in my fellow sufferer, with a heartwarming finale about the way love and tenderness can bridge the gap between man and thing? Or are you maybe saying instead, I want to see some havoc, I want to see mayhem, I want to see people brutally killed, I want to see guts and brains and dismemberment and mean-spirited nihilism?

I’m willing to work with Gerber to some extent. Okay, he’s not into carnage. I’ll settle for goofiness. I’ll settle for a decent story. But this…this is just egregious crap. This is a hack writer who isn’t even a decent hack; a preening twit spouting empty-headed platitudes: “Mary, Look around you! It’s not just me! It’s our whole blasted country! We all hate life!” Yes, I hate life, and the reason I hate life is that I’m reading your pompous, boring-ass shit.

All these irritating, incredibly trite characters? Man-Thing. should. kill. them. That’s what horror is for, damn it. The whiny hippie who says he hates life should piss himself and beg and beg and beg for mercy as Man-Thing rips his still-beating pansy heart from his rib-cage. The manly Nam vet should have a poignant scene where he talks about being tortured by Charley and how glad he was to escape, and then, in the next panel, he should get his leg torn off and bleed hideously to death. The nurse should reach out to Man-Thing and ask him to please save this innocent child’s life, and then Man-Thing should smother the kid to death as she watches and then snap her sanctimonious neck. And the evil, uber-patriotic drunk driver, who killed all those people? Well, Man-Thing should…um…

Aw, fuck it. The drunk driver can escape. He’s a lot less annoying than the others anyway.

_________

Tucker’s back tomorrow with more, as we all wonder why this is a cult classic, anyway.

Update: And Tucker’s next post is up.

A while back Tucker Stone and I blogged our way through a volume of Bob Haney’s The Brave and the Bold. We called the series The Cowardly and the Castrated because back then we were just wee little girlie bloggers, and the other bloggers made fun of us, yes, even Matthew Brady and Jog. They wiped eye-snot on our Hal Jordan ofrendas and made us ingest our entire painstakingly obtained collection of Alan Moore beard clippings — which had to be even more painstakingly and even humiliatingly retrieved with the use of a powerful magnifying glass, forceps, and twenty pounds of prunes.

But that’s all in the PAST!! Our sinews are new, our nether orifice is rectilinear, our hit counts are UP, and we are ready to ask that immortal question (without even a slight pause to ponce): WHOM IS YOUR DADDY!

Savage Tales #1
Writer: Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas
Artist Gray Morrow
1971

So with a name like Man-Thing, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get some action. Still, even Peter Wood or Randy North would have to be impressed at how fast we’re into the muck here. Sure, there’s a little three-page tease where we’ve got the big fella wrestling with an alligator (not that that isn’t kind of hot in itself) but then we’re right, right there:

Yep. You can tell she’s bad ’cause you can see her bits; you can tell he’s a cad ’cause he’s got hair on his tits. And thus endeth my rap career. But you get the point; sure, it’s the 70s and all, but no girl like that is gonna wear some abbreviated piece of ephemera and throw herself at a guy with +5 body foliage and galloping neuroses unless she plans to be holding a cigarette and selling his secret formula to the plug-uglies within a page or two.

Oooh, why that….ooooh! She just totally castrated him! Darn femme fatale. But no worries! He will regain his manhood by injecting the super-soldier formula he has stolen from Captain America!

And, presto! It works! Up from the depths he comes (as it were), and his nose is way, way bigger than her cigarette. Those manipulative pretty girls, getting into car crashes and falling out of their clothes just to tease us! Well let’s see how they like a little rape fantasy, huh?

Stupid good looks; that’s what let’s them control us, huh guys? But we’ve had our way with her now, and she’ll never rob another man of his precious fluids.

And afterwards, as the caption sententiously wonders, “Why did you feel …soft towards her at that last moment?” Why indeed? Don’t worry, though…you just need a minute or two and I’m sure you’ll be ready to go again. And soon, as your consciousness fades away utterly, you need never be soft again; like Jason in Friday the 13th, losing your mind and your manhood makes you paradoxically more masculine. It takes a thing to be a man.

That’s the last panel of our Man-Thing tale, and it’s really nicely done; you can see the poignant confusion in those beady little eyes. Man-Thing is the phallus, but he’s also a wounded child…which emphasizes again just how much he is the law. The law inhabits bodies which are mockeries, because all bodies are mockeries before the law—which is why defacement is such a perfect punishment.

I mentioned off-hand the way this origin mirrors Captain America’s; I think they even use the phrase “Super-soldier formula” a couple of times. One of the things Stan Lee did at Marvel was to figure out how seamlessly the the horror genre and the super-hero genre could fit together. The Thing, the Hulk, Man-Thing; all suggestively named shambling shibboleths; castrated weaklings whose naughty severed portions rise up and walk and start kicking ass and taking names. Whether the big needle turns you into an upright American or a giant veiny monolith, it’s really, in some sense, all one and the same. Male Freudian fantasy is male Freudian fantasy. Yes, Captain America is a more straightforward dream of power, good against evil, whereas Man-Thing passes through masochism and self-pity in order to justify seizing the phallus and wreaking havoc. But we’re still talking about bifurcated selves; weaklings feeling a prick before transforming into the vengeful law.

Gray Morrow’s art is great, by the way. Trusty Wikipedia says it was originally in black and white, which is certainly what it looks like; the grey washes are nicely done (though we may be losing a little detail in the reprinting? It’s kind of muddy — not that that’s not appropriate in some sense.) He draws some fine, basic cheesecake and good drippy tactile vines. Nice pacing and clean, imaginative layouts, too:

I like the way the last inset panel breaks up the bigger shot of Man-Thing against the moon; it makes the sky seem to stretch up and up, isolating our muck monster dramatially.

Oh, and if you’re wondering which came first, the scientist falling into swamp with secret formula who turned into Man-Thing or the scientist falling into swamp who turned into Swamp Thing…it was Man-Thing. Roy Thomas and Len Wein were roommates at the time, and Wein seems to have more or less shamelessly ripped off Man-Thing for Swampy. Or so says Wikipedia, anyway. That’s why, in later issues, we learn that Man-Thing can only burn you if you feel fear or have downloaded copyrighted material in the last 24 hours.

Astonishing Tales #12
Writer: Roy Thomas and Len Wein
Pencillers: John Buscema and Neal Adams
Inkers: Dan Adkins and Neal Adams
1972

Astonishing Tales #13
Writer: Roy Thomas
Pencillers: John Buscema and Rich Buckler
Inker: Dan Adkins
1972

That first Swamp Thing tale [Update: I mean Man-Thing of course, darn it] had an elegance that I associate with good exploitation fare — rape-revenge stories or slasher films, where the formula has the iron inevitability of a folk tale. These Astonishing Tales stories are from only a year later, but elegant they ain’t. Most of the two-parter is basically a Kazar story with decent art by John Buscema, and Roy Thomas basically writing whatever pops into his head — Kazar fights security guards in an airport? Sure! Sabre-toothed tiger vs. alligator? Why not! Just so long as Kazar can keep referring to himself in the third person, it’s all good. Highlight quote: “Ka-Zar is strangely appeased by this thing you call…gumbo.” No, really. It’s in there, I swear. Other favorite moments are the revelation that Shield asked one of its top scientists to pimp herself out in order to uncover an AIM spy. Keeping it classy guys.

The Man-Thing on Ka-Zar action is fairly entertaining as well:

This is the moment where we figure out that the Man-Thing is attracted to/burns up anyone who feels fear. In this sequence,, it’s fairly clear that fear has gendered implications. Those who fear are emasculated, and so Man-Thing can destroy them — the first burning in issue #1 was an obvious rape, and his later assaults are also, I think, rape-like. But once Ka-Zar decides to man up, the gender dynamics switch, and we get a super-hero/super-villain fight, where the homoerotic tensions are worked out through violence rather than through violation. (I know Ka-Zar isn’t quite a super-hero officially…but I feel bad for him. It’s okay, Ka-Zar. Wearing no shirt, wearing tights; it’s all good.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. I know I claimed above that super-heroes and horror were effectively the same, but perhaps I spoke too soon. Because trying to squish Man-Thing and Ka-Zar into one big savage ball of fun does point up some of the genre differences. Most obviously, (as I did suggest above) horror tends to embrace masochism less equivocally. When Ka-Zar first confronts Man-Thing, he’s behaving like he’s in a horror storyline; he’s scared and about to be victimized. The catharsis is in identifying with his fear and anticipating his defeat. But then he remembers that he’s a super-hero, damn it…and he’s back to battling the villain in grand manner, even if he’s tightsless. There’s something of the slasher movie switch, where the final girl gets to battle back against the slasher and eventually overcome him…but it happens too fast, here, and Ka-Zar is too all-fired competent. Basically, in slasher films, the payoff is in the fear, the vulnerability,and the triumphant reversal of roles. In super-hero action, the payoff is in never really being in danger; the invulnerability. The Man-Thing/Ka-Zar battle flirst with the one, then with the other, and ends up confused. It’s an interesting confusion though; you don’t usually get to see super-heroes lose their shit the way Ka-Zar does for a second here.

The real centerpiece of the storyline, though is a seven page feature written a year earlier (again, says Wikipedia) by Roy Thomas and drawn by Neal Adams. It’s dropped into the narrative wholesale, as a flashback. Thomas seems a lot more focused in these older pages, the 2nd person narration is completely over-the-top, “You shambled along silently — struggling to pierce the cobwebs cloaking your mind –where did you know the old woman from?” It’s so incessant and so purple that it ends up sounding definitely mocking; like we’re supposed to be laughing at the fact that this scientist has been reduced to a mentally deficient shambling mound of sludge. It’s also, as a stand alone story, significantly more brutal; Man-Thing kills a bunch of people in an effort to protect the scientist who may be able to help him…and then she gets pointlessly and viciously killed. (They claim she’s just in a coma for the latter story, but I’m pretty sure she was originally headed to the grave.) Neal Adams’ art is also more explicitly exploitative than John Buscema’s, in several senses; his violence is a lot more visceral:

And his cheesecake is more toothsome.

All in all, these seven pages are more of a piece with the first story; they’re mean-spirited horror rather than triumphant action-adventure. Unfortunately, the reproduction is also, as you can see, for shit. Not sure why this should be; it was originally printed in black and white, but it just looks like we’re losing a ton of detail. A real shame.

Fear #10
Writer: Gerry Conway
Artists: Gray Morrow and Howard Chaykin
1972

Wikipedia says that Chaykin did the pencils here and that Morrow is the inker. In any case, the art is very nice…and the storytelling is much smoother than in the Ka-Zar clunkfest. Even the omnipresent voice-over has been pared away, and instead we get silent cinematic sequences like this:

Unfortunately, while the execution is improved, the narrative itself is hard to get behind. That baby that Man-Thing catches was dropped by some abusive hick who hates the kid because it comes between him and his improbably hot wife, Billie-Jo. After looking deep into the baby’s eyes, Man-Thing feels the psychic connection, and becomes his infantile avatar. He hunts Daddy down, reduces him to whiny terror in satisfying Oedipal fashion, and then burns his face. And then…a miracle occurs! Now that the big bad patriarch has been castrated, his wife loves him again,— and being punished has also, we are told, “somehow awakened the surviving humanity” in his soul. Awww.

The fantasy of dad disciplined and domestic harmony restored could work in some circumstances; it’s how Jane Eyre gets resolved, more or less. There’s a magical, fairy-tale, day-dream logic to it — the child’s wish to become powerful and make Mom and Dad love each other again.

The problem is…well, I keep thinking about what would happen if this were Friday the 13th, right? If Man-Thing were Jason, he might well stumble on the same backwoods husband and wife duo, staples of horror genre exploitation that they are. And when Jason found them…he’d slaughter them! And that would be the right thing to do, because they’re insufferably irritating white trash caricatures, with his neanderthal assholery and her ineffectual whining and their mutual dysfunctional relationship. I don’t want them to make it up and become better people because (A) I don’t believe for a second that they would do that in the first place, and (B) they’re so clearly idiotic stereotypes that it insults my intelligence to pretend that they can achieve salvation through any method other than the scythe. Basically, it feels like the creative team here is trying to turn horror into sentimental fantasy romance, and you can hear the gears grinding.

So far, then, we got one quite decent straight horror tale, one clumsy but somewhat entertaining effort to fuse horror and super-heroic action, and one smoother but ultimately more annoying effort to fuse horror with melodrama. I’m not sure how Steve Gerber is going to rescue this exactly, but I hope he finds a way; there’s a big book left, and if I have to keep reading stories like that last one, I’m going to be pretty cantankerous by the time we’re done.

Update: More Man-Thing blogging tomorrow at The Factual Opinion by Tucker, then back here on Wednesday.

Update 2: And Tucker’s follow-up post is now online.