Pasko And Yeates: Better Than You Remember

Martin Pasko and Tom Yeates were the team that resurrected the Swamp Thing. According to the Len Wein interview in Swamp Creatures, he suggested bringing the book back after Wes Craven had purchased the movie rights. Why not have a comic to give readers something to latch onto after the film whet their appetites?

Swamp Thing hadn’t completely disappeared from the DC universe, but he was scarce enough to be legendary. As mentioned in the previous Swamp Thing entry, he guest starred in Challengers of the Unknown, written by Gerry Conway, the writer of the first Man-Thing story. This was followed by an appearance in The Brave and the Bold 122 (October 1975) when he again teamed up with Batman to defeat a super plant that threatened to take over Gotham. Alan Moore would use a similar plot, only with Swamp Thing as Batman’s antagonist instigating the plant growth. In DC Comics Presents #8, (April,1979) the Swamp Thing assisted Superman in defeating some sixty Solomon Grundies in a more superhero than horror story Steve Englehardt. Compared to Man-Thing, or any second-tier superhero, four years without an appearance is virtual character death.

I have, perhaps arbitrarily decided to mark the beginning of Swamp Thing volume 2 with The Brave and the Bold issue 176, from July 1981. It’s written by Martin Pasko, who would, one year later, take on the recrudescence of the Swamp Thing in May 1982. Before this story, Swamp Thing hadn’t been seen for two years.

Pasko’s “The Delta Connection” is a straightforward Batman story from the early eighties; more Darknight Detective than Batgod, involving no other superpowered individuals. A man is murdered, and the search for the culprit takes Batman into the swamps of Louisiana. The Swamp Thing is coincidentally present, and a random shotgun blast allows the two to meet. Again. More likely to attract a Batman fan than a Swamp Thing fan, the story includes a one-page recapitulation of the Swamp Thing’s origin, and Pasko references their two previous encounters. In keeping with the Gothic atmosphere, and the resurgence of the weird in the eighties, Swamp Thing is given a vital but mysterious clue by a ghost. Later, the Swamp Thing concocts a rational explanation for this, but there’s definitely room to believe either way. Which is the strength of Pasko’s writing. The two solve the mystery and the criminals are brought to justice. It’s an atmospheric mystery, everything wrapped up. Pasko’s writing sets an excellent mood for the piece, and legendary Batman artist Jim Aparo artist does an excellent job with the swampy setting so distant from Gotham’s concrete jungles.

I don’t know if Pasko was handed the Swamp Thing assignment because of this story, but it’s more than a coincidence that he was chosen to write the new Swamp Thing book.

The paradigm shifted slightly when Swamp Thing got its own series again. Pasko’s ideas were now very divorced from the mainstream DC Universe. No superheroes, not even Batman appear during his tenure. Only the Phantom Stranger, a mystical hero, appears, and those two stories are fill-ins written by Dan Mishkin. But there was a good reason for not including superheroes. Pasko set out to not write a kids’ book. His tenure on Swamp Thing deals with some very heavy psychological issues and current events, in the more or less direct way that Steve Gerber did in Man-Thing. This for-mature-readers approach was one of the stepping stones that eventually led DC to ditch the Comics Code Authority. Pasko deals with demons, child murder, Nazis, fanaticism, Vietnam, the aftereffects of electroconvulsive therapy, shady governmental-corporate partnerships, and the coming of the antichrist. It’s a heavy for a comic, especially one from the early eighties.

Len Wein was chosen as the editor. It must have been a strange sensation, editing another writer’s take on a character he had created. Even stranger to see Pakso update the character from Wein’s classic Gothic stories to neo-noir.

In the first issue, Swamp Thing rescues a mute girl in an act of kindness. Although young, she later proves to be anything but innocent. Her character arc is a beautiful inversion of the usual rescue of a child. What harm could come from saving a young girl, Karen Clancy from a father who is about to shoot her because he thinks she is some sort of witch spawn? It’s a familiar story, two outcasts bonding with each other. Pakso slowly transforms that initial rescue into a fantastic inversion of the story the readers expected. The issue also introduces “Harry Kay” an agent for the Sunderland Corporation. Kay turns out to have a lot of layers. Nobody is wholly good in Pasko’s Swamp Thing. And nobody is completely devoid of sympathetic qualities, either.

In the very next issue the Swamp Thing and Karen are separated. They will never manage to truly get together again until the last two issues of the story arc, allowing for a diversity of stories as each character can be the protagonist on their own. When these other characters are the focus of a story, the Swamp Thing often plays the role the Heap did in the Hillman comics: arriving at the end to resolve the story. Pasko is too savvy to have the Swamp Thing administer justice, because there is no justice in these stories. The status quo is too flawed for anyone to desire a return to it.

Other characters, often initially antagonistic to Swamp Thing or at odds with the rest of the cast, filter in. Liz Tremayne appears, a tough, no-nonsense reporter fighting for recognition as well as justice in the stories she reports. Helmut “Harry Kay” Kripptmann, a Jewish doctor and former Nazi collaborator, is morally ambiguous. Dr. Barclay starts as a naive “psychic” healer who doesn’t know he is the conduit transferring wounds from people onto captive clones. They are not heroes, but rather people with checkered pasts, attempting do to what is right by what they know. The frisson between the well-rounded characters makes the stories complex and interesting, and slowly layer after layer of the onion peels away until each character is exposed in all their complexity.

In the background looms Sunderland Corporation. Sunderland would be a standard evil corporation, similar to OCP, Weyland-Utani, Umbrella Corporation, or Abstergo, but these stories were written before any of these other companies were invented. Sunderland is always a shadowy presence with its filthy fingers in a large number of very dirty pies. In the Reagan/Thatcher area, Pasko also made sure that he reader knew that Sunderland had government ties, allowing it access to information and material it might not otherwise. The revelation that many large companies had government contacts was a shock to us in the eighties. It is understood to be a matter of course now.

Issue three introduces us to Rosewood, Illinois. The town has been taken over by vampires, and only a desperate family is left to resist them. But those who fight evil are not necessarily good people. Larry Childress blows up a local dam to flood the town, dissolving the vampires under running water. But he does so taking his son with him, where he could have left the boy out of harm’s way. His nihilism is not praised.

Issue four, “In the White Room” presents us with another complex situation. “Uncle Barney” a local kids TV show host, has been caught murdering children. His show’s catchy song “Give the benefit of the doubt/When you trust it all works out” is implied to have contributed to the murders, since kids trust Uncle Barney. That said, Barney made a pact with demons, which brought out his murderous desires. The demon escapes Barney and finds other hosts, Liz Tremayne is caught in the middle of the supernatural struggle. And though the demon is defeated, by the end of the issue, Uncle Barney has been replaced with “Aunt Polly” who has the same catchy tune about trust. Pineboro hasn’t learned anything.

Issue Five “The Screams of Hungry Flesh” brings us Dennis Barclay, a doctor who is part of Sunderland. He’s a naive psychic healer working with Kripptmann. He discovers that he’s just transferring wounds onto semiconscious clones. Once the truth is revealed, he flees Sunderland and his clinic, adding another character to the Swamp Thing and Liz Tremayne party.

The next story, a two parter “Sins on the Water” and “I Have Seen the Splintered Timbers of a Hundred Shattered Hulls” is the most bizarre and comic-book story yet, starting with an alien invasion on a Sunderland corporate cruise, and ending up with isolated psychically-enhanced Vietnam vets who can alter reality. At its heart, “Here’s Looking at You, Kid” has a back and forth discussion about the treatment of those veterans. Pasko is canny enough not to let the story take sides. In the background, Casey is seen to be more dangerous, and Kripptmann is unable to apprehend her.

With issue nine, "Prelude to Holocaust", the series now shifts full-time to the Karen Clancy story. I suppose there’s a little bit of Stephen King’s Carrie in the little psychic girl, but Karen isn’t an innocent cursed with psychic abilities she can’t control. The little girl the Swamp Thing saved is the herald of the Antichrist. She’s an evil person, growing and developing her psychic powers, using them get what she wants. And to make sure we know she’s evil, Pasko shows her looting a Nazi collector’s stash for a particular item. Kripptmann is shown to have a larger agenda, using what resources he can glean from Sunderland to pursue Karen. And he is ruthless, even murdering Sunderland employees to get what he needs. He is not a good person, even though he stands opposed to both Sunderland and Clancy.

The coming of the Antichrist is very similar to the Nazi Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust was a prelude to what Karen and the Antichrist are going to bring about. Neither Pasko or artist Tom Yeates sugar coat this. When Karen pulls the memories of an extermination camp out of Kripptmann’s head, we see Nazis pulling the gold fillings out of dead prisoners, Nazi doctors about to inject gasoline in a hapless prisoner’s veins. They are absolutely not fucking around with this story line. This is the motivation behind Kripptmann, and these two pages of terrible memories hammer home the reason he seeks personal redemption for his previous actions. It’s a fascinating drive for the character.

The Swamp Thing is ultimately the agent that foils Hell's plan. Not the religious, not the powerful, but the swamp man who was once intervened to save a young girl, using power siphoned from Clancy. Even Kripptmann finds some measure of redemption by killing the man who would be the Antichrist. After the build-up, it’s a little unsatisfying, but the journey was well worth pursuing.

After this are two fill-in issues from Dan Mishkin, crossing over with the Phantom Stranger. It’s an mediocre, comic-booky technothriller, in which Nat Broder turns himself into pure silicon. Initially he goes on a rampage, turning many things, including Swamp Thing, into crystalline versions of themselves. Swamp Thing, fortunately, is still soaked with the bio-restorative formula, so he able to re-convert back to his mucky self. Broder turns out to also have power over computers, and in a few moments, takes over the world's computers. Eventually he is stopped by the combined forces of the Swamp Thing and the Stranger.

Issue sixteen “Stopover In a Place of Secret Truths” introduces a few changes to the book. Abby Arcane from the original series returns. The story is a bit of a Twilight Zone style stand-alone, about a community that wears masks to hide hideous deformities. It also adds Kripptmann to the Swamp Thing’s traveling cast.

But more importantly, this is the first issue with John Totleben and Steve Bissette as artists. Now Tom Yeates is an amazing artist, and I should have talked about his work before. His work is very clean, nuanced, and full of unexpected little details. Yeates drew grotesque and the weird of the Swamp Thing series extraordinarily well. His art is strong, and developed amazingly as the series progressed. The climax of the Karen Clancy storyline would have been much weaker in the hands of a less-talented artist.

This new team of Totleben and Bissette gave a frenetic, intricately detailed line art to the Swamp Thing that I fell in love with the instant I saw it. I love Bernie Wrightson’s art, but the Bissette/Totleben Swamp Thing art remains my favorite. The new team broke the art molds. No longer was the action confined to tidy boxes. Panels could be crystal-like shards that slashed diagonally across the page, sound effects could be reinforced with art, rather than being cartoonishly splashed across the page. In some ways, this is the punk element that appealed to me. While Yeates’ art is excellent the new team had a wild, uncontained, and unpredictable style. It didn’t march in staid array across the page but drew the eye in unexpected directions. This confrontational art style served Pasko's scripts very well, creating the atmosphere in which the words had more impact.

There is also a level of grotesquerie to Bissette and Totleben’s work that outstrips anything else I have seen in comics. Their monsters are carefully and patently impossible, with teeth that could never fit into their mouths. And they’re glorious. Art like this makes comics more effective than pure text, only a visual/text hybrid like comics could produce something that startling. Thankfully, we will get to see more of their art in Moore’s run.

With Abbey reestablished, issue seventeen brings Matthew Cable back. And he’s a mess. A drunk, suffering from the aftereffects of electroconvulsive therapy, his life has been burned to the ground. But somehoe he has managed to gain some sort of psychic power. Which is kind of interesting, since Abby had started to developing powers in the original series. This is also the re-introduction of Anton Arcane. His is powerful and creepy, and this return cemented his place as Swamp Thing’s best recurring villain.

Issue eighteen “The Man Who Would Not Die” is a few new pages bookending the original resurrection of Anton Arcane, from back in the original Swamp Thing #9, and recolored. This is the first time I’ve seen the “Auntie Bellum” change to the script, and this has remained in every subsequent release.

Issue nineteen “...And the Meek Shall Inherit...” is Pasko’s last, and it’s magnificent. Arcane and his un-men have taken on insect traits, making them even more grotesque than before. They capture Swamp Thing, Kripptmann, and Abby. Arcane still covets the Swamp Thing’s nearly-indestructable body. Kripptmann, a very gray and occasionally reprehensible character, redeems himself by destroying Arcane’s plans. At the cost of his life. His struggle, half-transformed into some sort of wasp or spider, is very small, but agonizingly illustrated by Totleben and Bissette. Pasko’s words are just right, giving the struggle a pathos seldom elicited in comics. With his sacrifice, Arcane is undone, and everyone separates. The stage is now set for Alan Moore’s tenure.

Pasko’s work on Swamp Thing has gone unrecognized for more than thirty years, and that’s a shame. It’s certainly overshadowed by Moore’s years on the book, but these are excellent, creepy comics that pull the reader into a shadowy realm of modern horror. He literally draws the Swamp Thing out of the Gothic and comic-book trappings that defined the character in the initial series and presents us with fully modern horror. Going back over these comics is a pleasure, because Pasko’s writing is subtle and complex, different from what was being written then, and different from what’s being written now. It’s absolutely worth re-visiting for modern readers or horror, for its mood, its complex characters, and refusal to tie the end of the story up in a bow. Personally, I love the way the stories do not let the reader off the hook, but force us to look at issues and ideas from which the stories germinated. This is comics at their best. Telling stories that do not condescend to the reader.

Next up, Roy Thomas once again pays homage to his favorite character. Somewhere I never would have expected it. Thanks for your patience, and I’ll write more soon.

The Classic: Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing

Sometimes I wonder what was in the air, or perhaps the water in 1971. Three swamp creature crawled their way into comics in a single year. Skywald’s Heap was the first, published in March, Marvel’s Man-Thing followed in May, and DC’s Swamp Thing followed in July. Accusations of copying have flown ever since, both professionally and in the respective fan communities. But that’s not a knot I'm prepared to detangle. Looking past the similarities of the swamp monsters allows us to perceive their great differences. As a character-driven media, comics depend very heavily on the character for the type and style of story that can be told. Swamp monsters are not, generally, interchangeable. One of Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing stories would not work if the Man-Thing was swapped out for the Swamp Thing, or even the Skywald Heap.

Bias alert here, Swamp Thing was the comic that got me into comics, and for a long time, kept me buying. Like a lot of kids, I got a big stack of hand-me-down comics at a young age, including Swamp Thing issues 9 and 10. They were unlike anything I had ever read anywhere else, and still have a special place in my heart. They had such an effect on me that the second volume of Swamp Thing, starting in 1982, was the first comic series I followed regularly. I stopped at issue #10, and then returned four years later with Swamp Thing 48. Swamp Thing and I have history.



Swamp Thing’s initial story appeared in House of Secrets #92, cover date July, 1971, a collaboration between Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. A one-shot Victorian Gothic tale of Alex Olsen, who is murdered and left to die in the swamp. He returns to find the murderer making the moves on his wife. Smashing through a window, he murders the man who murdered him. However, he cannot reconcile with his wife, she cannot recognize him in his new mucky form. He then returns to the swamp, forever. Len Wein’s wordsmithing in this story is excellent and moody, and Bernie Wrightson’s art is magnificent. What makes keeps it from being yet another "back from the dead to take revenge on the murderer" story is the heartfelt love story that underlies it. The images from the story, with the red eyes and the outstreteched hand, the image of the Swamp Thing peering at the house where it once had a normal life, have become iconic. From this story sprang so much of the non-superhero comics of the nineties and the first decade of the two thousands, two films, a cartoon, a live-action TV series, and more than four hundred stories featuring the character. Although the seminal partnership between Wein and Wrightson only lasted eleven stories, those classic stories have left an indelible mark on comics.

One year after House of Secrets 92, Wein and Wrightson brought the concept back, this time in a modern setting. They had been reluctant to do so, but were encouraged to do so by DC editor-in-chief Carmine Infanto, who had once been the illustrator for Hillman's Heap. As the new Swamp Thing (#1 cover date November 1972) this was an ongoing series, the background is better fleshed out, and Alec Holland is a more fully realized character than Alex Olsen was. And the Hollands are working on a biorestorative formula, a catalyst added to the swamp to make the transformation of the protagonist into a grotesque more credible. Interestingly, between the House of Secrets story and the first issue of Swamp Thing, Len Wein wrote the second Man-Thing story for Marvel. The story was shelved when Savage Tales #2 was postponed, but brought back by Roy Thomas, and saw print in Astonishing Tales, in June, 1972.

As a character, the Swamp Thing is very different from the Hillman Heap, and Man-Thing. Not only does the creature retain the intellect of Dr. Alec Holland, it also retains some ability to speak. This also separates it from the Skywald Heap, which could think, but wasn’t a scientist, and couldn’t speak. As the decades have passed, speech has gotten easier for the Swamp Thing, but in the initial Wein and Wrightson stage, it’s pretty limited. Instead of being shaggy, as Man-Thing and the Hillman Heap are, the Swamp Thing is mossy, its surface (skin?) is smooth, although shot through with roots. It has the shape of a larger, more muscular man than Alec Holland was, as opposed to the shapeless goopiness of the Skywald Heap. Being able to reason and even sometimes speak allows the character a more active role in its stories. It need not be reactive, but can interpret what it sees without the need of an intermediary. Despite this, the Swamp Thing manages to get a supporting cast of humans, allowing for some complex stories told from different points of view.

The Swamp Thing’s background cast is filled out with two people initially. Matt Cable was assigned to protect Alec Holland and now chases the Swamp Thing here and there across the globe. Cable is a bit generic, a down-on-his-luck government agent who hunts the monster that has ruined (in his opinion) his career. While on a trip to the Balkans, he picks up Abby Arcane, niece of recurring villain Anton Arcane. The two make a good team, although Abigail doesn’t have a lot of agency. They duo becomes a trio with Jefferson Bolt, a black man who was being held by the worms in issue eleven. Wein doesn't develop Bolt all that much, really only having two issues to do so. Bolt seems like he is there to provide conflict, or at least a different perspective that Abbey is unable to provide. The two (and then three) often provide a more human counterpoint to the Swamp Thing's stories, although occasionally (Issue 5 "Last of the Ravenwind Witches", and issue 10 "The Man Who Would Not Die") they don't show up at all. The supporting cast allowed Wein and Wrightson to approach stories from different perspectives. Issue 9, "The Stalker From Beyond" is an excellent example, switching perspective from Cable and the Abbey back to the Swamp Thing, moving the story forward through each character's perspective.


The initial story of Swamp Thing is strangely unlike like the rest of the book. It’s a modern revenge thriller, an expansion of the original story. Later stories are almost entirely Gothic. Sorcerers dreaming of immortality, werewolves, New England witches, creepy robot human replacements, a Lovecraftian horror down a mine shaft, and an alien all populate the pages. Only issues 1 “Dark Genesis” and 7 “Night of the Bat" are without supernatural of science-fiction trappings. Wein crammed a lot of story into the twenty-four pages, and while they are nods of homages to films like Freaks, The Wolf Man, and Frankenstein, they are not imitative. The werewolf story happens on the moors of Scotland, the alien story takes place in the swamps of Louisiana, giving each a unique setting and flavor. The book fell into a "monster of the week" format almost by default. Multi-issue story arcs were not the norm in the seventies, so this could be viewed as an extended horror anthology series, like House of Secrets, but sharing a protagonist. The stories often present a familiar trope, but they are always given a unique twist. And this is Wein's genius, and half the reason these stories have held up.


Swamp Thing interacts with the rest of the DC Universe only once during Wein and Wrightson’s time on the book. Swamp Thing comes to Gotham City, the home of Batman. The Batman concept is flexible enough that it doesn't break the Gothic horror atmosphere that Wein and Wrightson carefully cultivated. The story itself stretches the concept of the Swamp Thing himself. For the first time, he is in a city. And the plot is again not a horror one, but an investigation, but starring Batman and the Swamp Thing conducting parallel lines of inquiry, arriving at he same conclusion at the same time. It works as both a Batman mystery and a Swamp Thing horror story, and sets in motion an association between the Batman and Swamp Thing that would be fruitful for years to come.


Issue 10 also deserves some special mention, since it’s the only issue with Wrightson as the plotter. It's a ghost story, as well as the return of Anton Arcane, who becomes the Swamp Thing's longest-lasting recurrine villain. His appearance here is quite memorable for its pure grotesqueness. Wrightson says the climax came from Ray Bradbury’s “The Handler” (adapted in Tales from the Crypt 36) and the parallel is easy to see. The image with the tombstones is very close to the Tales of the Crypt story. The story itself is radically different from the original Bradbury. It's a wonderfully dark story, and for once, the Swamp Thing is more a passive observer of the action rather than a participant. It’s a wonderfully dark story, very well told, and remains a personal favorite of mine. One point about "The Man Who Would Not Die" which I have never seen addressed, is the change of the old woman’s name from “Auntie De Luvian” to Auntie Bellum” in virtually every reprint I’ve seen. I’ve always wondered why tiny touch has been changed in the reprints.



Although I have written mostly about Wein's writing, I have to note that Wrightson's art is the perfect match to Wein's storytelling. He often adds strange or disconcerting angles to his art which makes it more powerful. He also ads subtle layers to stories that are not in Wein's scripts. For example, there is a sequence in "The Stalker From Beyond", a stack of page-wide panels in which the army squad is setting up camp. From the apparent chaos of the first panel, the men have resolved themselves into their respective sides concerning the fate of the alien. Those that want to kill it stand to the right, those that do not stand at the left. It’s a very subtle piece of art, but one that ads texture to the story. When Nestor Redondo took over the art chores with issue eleven, this layer of artistic nuance was lost. Which is not to say that Redondo was a bad artist. He isn't. He's an exceptional artist. But he was more of a superhero artist, so his choices of point of view tended to be more conventional.

Wein wrote another three issues with artist Nestor Redondo made the comic his, and gave us very strong art. Unfortunately, virtually anything would have seemed pale after the masterwork Wrightson did. That said, Redondo's art is sharp and very well defined, although not as detailed or chaiscuro as Wrightson. Len Wein’s stories remained solid, addressing more novel concepts such as alien worms that wanted to keep humanity for food stock, time travel, allowing some wonderful illustrations of strange worms, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and lions from the Roman arena. But the stories were pitched and broken differently. They were were no longer a collaboration, but fully scripted by Wein before being sent to Redondo. So they have a different feel. They're still good, but they lack the sense of the Gothic and the grotesque that was present in first ten issues. The only thing I can say is that they feel more like a standard comic-book. A little more 'gonzo' and a bit less personal. They're still worth reading, but it seems clear that Wein was winding down his time on the book. As a lovely farewell, Wein ended the series with the same line that ended the short story: “... And if tears could come, they would.”

More than Man-Thing, which in its heyday was Steve Gerber's personal pulpit, the Wein and Wrightson Swamp Thing is foundational in the development of modern comics. Both of these comics sold well, outstripping popular superhero comics of their day. But Man-Thing doesn't seem to have acquired another writer who understood how to write compelling stories for the character, and Man-Thing has not managed to recapture its popularity under Gerber. Swamp Thing, on the other hand, managed to attract other authors and artists who would re-create the character, changing it from a simple "mucky human" into something larger and even more unique. Swamp Thing would eventually become the springboard from which DC Comics launched Vertigo, its successful line of horror comics in the early nineties. Swamp Thing is and remains a reminder that comics are not the exclusive domain of superheroes, that horror comics have and continue to be viable titles that, when well-written, sell well.

I hope I haven’t simply sung the praises of the Wein/Wrightson issues of Swamp Thing, but given the reader an idea of why I consider these to be some of the best comics ever produced. When it was going strong, Swamp Thing was one of DC Comics’ best sellers, and the stories have been endlessly reprinted. While the character has changed, especially after Alan Moore’s reinterpretation of the character in the eighties, these stories continue to be the firm foundation on which this extraordinarily popular character is based. The moody, beautiful art of Bernie Wrightson (and later, Nestor Redondo) combines with the carefully-chosen words of Len Wein to create a modern masterpiece, a book that i have read and re-read many times since I discovered it more than thirty-five years ago.

Slinging Swamp Mud at Icons: Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing

Although Man-Thing was not invented by Steve Gerber, it did attain popularity because of his brilliant and unconventional writing. So although this article will examine the early Man-Thing stories by other writers, the main thrust will be on the man who brought it to prominence. Man-Thing was originally conceived by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas. As discussed in the Skywald Heap entry, this likely came about after the lunch Sol Brodsky and Thomas had in which Thomas suggested resurrecting the Hillman Heap. That Heap came out in March 1971, Man-Thing in May of the same year, the first Swamp Thing story in July.

The initial Man-Thing story could have been taken from the pages of Skywald’s Psycho. Savage Tales 1 was a black and white magazine, thus avoiding the Comics Code Authority. Like Psycho, it had a titillation factor that would not have been acceptable in a mainstream Marvel comic. The story also has a heavy narration, setting a creepy, Gothic mood. Wonderfully atmospheric Gray Morrow art cements the tone.

Physically, Man-Thing looks the most like the Heap out of all its vegetable spawn. The Heap's distinctive carrot-nose flanked by three root-like tentacles. It changes between being shaggy and gloopy, depending on the artist involved, although it it generally described as being shaggy. Aside from that, it is huge and muscular, generally human-shaped, although sometimes the head juts out from the chest in a distinctly inhuman way.

The initial story can be seen as an origin, or as a complete and self-contained story like Sturgeon’s “It”. Scientist Ted Sallis is working on reformulating the super-soldier serum. Unable to deal with working in a government lab, he moves to an isolated lab in the Everglades. Violating security, he brings his girlfriend, Ellen. She doesn’t seem to have packed enough clothing. Ellen, it turns out, is looking for a better lifestyle, and intends to sell Sallis’s newly-developed formula. He breaks away from her thugs, and races away. To keep the formula from falling into their hands, he injects himself with it, and crashes his car into the swamp. The combination of super-soldier catalyst and the swamp turn him into the Man-Thing. Subsequently empowered, he takes his revenge on the thugs. He spares Ellen’s life, but his touch causes her to burn. Only in the last panel, with a tribute to HP Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” does Man-Thing realize he has been transformed into a grotesque.



If the origin story sounds familiar, it’s likely because it is similar to that of Swamp Thing. But it’s also very close to Roy Thomas’s Glob origin. The protagonist dies in the swamp with a chemical catalyst which does not kill but transmutes the character into an aberration. This is also the origin of many swamp creatures that come after. Sludge, Swamp-Thing, Garbage Man, and The Lurker in the Swamp all share this origin, with a few tonal variations.

Len Wein wrote a follow-up to the Savage Tales story, possibly in between his original Swamp Thing story and Swamp Thing 1, but Savage Tales was shelved until 1973. Roy Thomas, either on his own initiative or at someone else’s prompting, decided to drop the story, art and all, into an Astonishing Tales storyline involving Ka-Zar. Wein’s writing makes it clear that the Man-Thing is not sentient, but rather close to mindless. It is, however, Thomas' wrap-around story that comes up with the specific statement that the Man-Thing hates fear, that its touch burns only in response to fear. This allows Ka-Zar to interact with the Man-Thing without paying a price. At the end of the second story, like the Frankenstein creature in Bride of Frankenstein, Man-Thing pulls a lever and destroys a lab, himself in it.

It’s impossible to keep a good monster down. Only two months after its ostensible death, the Man-Thing emerges again in Fear 10, cover date October 1972, again with writer Gerry Conway, and edited by Roy Thomas. It’s a domestic issue, involving the troubles of swamp-dwelling a man and a woman, well written without any magic or super-science that is not the Man-Thing itself. Like the initial story, it could be self-contained, in case it failed. It’s a good, creepy story that again shows the versatility of the Man-Thing character and the possibilities nonstandard story structures featuring it. Like the Heap before it, stories aren't about the Man-Thing. They happen around it.

The very next issue of Fear, December, Steve Gerber begins writing. As had been established by Conway, Gerber knew to let other characters and elements carry the Man-Thing story. Things happen that the Man-Thing is not directly involved in. This requires a lot of creativity, since stories have to grow out of elements other than the character. The Man-Thing can’t even acknowledge his supporting cast. The sentient Skywald Heap had a goal: restoring itself to human form. Although Man-Thing does occasionally get returned to human form, it’s not something he pursues.

Gerber was surprisingly comfortable with the multiple genres that the Marvel universe offered. He began with a tale of occultism, a summoning gone wrong. The Man-Thing intervenes, and the devil is banished. It’s a pretty conventional story, but when Gerber gets the book firing on all cylinders, the story structures are similar to the better Heap stories. Man-Thing is not as much a character as a vehicle for justice. And Steve Gerber saw a lot of injustice in the world.

With his second issue, the second issue, Feb 1973’s “No Choice of Colors” that Gerber established that he was not going to be an ordinary comic. The Man-Thing encounters Jackson, a black man on the run from racist sheriff Corlee. Jackson claims he is being set up because he is romantically attached to a white woman, once Corlee has eyes for. When they run into Corlee, however, it turns out that Jackson murdered the deputy who came to arrest him. The two shout at each other, fervent in their hatreds. Ultimately, the Man-Thing sees no difference between them. And rather than act, he walks away. But when Corlee is murdered, there is only one source of hatred. What follows is the first full iteration of what will become the Man-Thing’s tag line: “Whatever knows fear burns at he touch of the Man-Thing.”

This is a story about very gray justice. Both men are guilty, both men hate and fear the other. The difference is that Corlee is armed, and when the Man-Thing withdraws his protection, Corlee shoots Jackson. Justice is not served. Each man is guilty, Corlee is clearly a racist of the worst stripe, and Jackson may be more justified in his loathing of Corlee, but that doesn’t justify his murder of the deputy. Both are consumed by hate, and rather than dictate a moral high ground, Gerber condemns both.

One of the major themes that develops in Gerber’s work with Man-Thing was morality, often condemning unthinking allegiance to traditional icons (religion, parents, community) which leaves no room for mercy or compassion. Standing against these rigid icons are dissidents and loners, free-thinkers who are able to see that he traditional authorities have lost heir way, and make the mistake of speaking truth to power. The Man-Thing is the defender of such people, protecting them when they do not have the skills or resources to do so themselves. Which is not to say that every loner he wrote was the moral authority of the story. His villains include the Cult of Nihilism, and other very strange fringe groups. But

Another unusual aspect of his work is his smooth movement from genre to genre. In Fear 14, Gerber begins to mine a rich vein of Moorcockian fantasy, transporting the Man-Thing and Jennifer Kale to a strange world of wizards and gladiatorial combat. The Man-Thing’s swamp, as coincidence would have it, is the Nexus of All Realities, a weak point where it is easier to contact different planes of existence. This simple device allows Gerber to explore multiple secondary world fantasy settings. But he never settled down to explore just one of these options. After a Superman parody, Gerber wrote “Question of Survival” an entirely human-centric story in Fear 18. After a bus crash, radically different characters, a nihilist, a nurse, a soldier, and a construction foreman attempt to work together in order to get themselves, and a wounded child, to civilization. But the personalities clash, each ideology so precious that they cannot get along, even to save themselves. Only the nurse survives. And again, Gerber isn’t interested who is right, he’s interested in who is less wrong than the others.

It does, however, bring out another theme in his work. Whenever there are conflicting points of view, as there often are, generally speaking it’s the voice of business that turns out to be murderous. Overall his anti-capitalist stance is subtle. Everyone associated with the construction project are irredeemably evil. A construction worker shoots a native American in the back. Foreman Ralph Sorrell murders two men to keep his drunk driving, which killed others, a secret. Without the intervention of the Man-Thing, he would have murdered a nurse. Perhaps the most prominent businessman is the subtly-named F. A Schist, the developer with deep pockets who is planning on bulldozing part of the everglades near Citriusville in order to put in an airport. It's difficult to say if Gerber is saying that evil breeds, or at least employs similar evil, or if he wanted to tie all these villains together.

Which is not to say that industrialists were the only villains in his work. Gerber is also scornful when it comes to power. The Netherspawn speechifies about its power, but Gerber says in the narration that the Man-Thing is unimpressed, because it doesn’t understand the word. When shifty motorcycle gang leader Snake attacks the Man-Thing leaving his chain stuck in its mucky body. When it casually discards it, the chain strikes Snake in the head, possibly killing him. Ruth, a former associate of Snake’s, says that he used to call the chain his ‘power.’ “You envy my success, the wealth I’ve amassed!” says F. A. Schist in Man-Thing 8 “The Gift of Death.” “That’s why you want to destroy me!” The weird Cult of Entropy, a group of villains who pay lip service to living without illusion, but will kill anyone who lives in a way they don't approve of. Their leader, Yagzan, bears a suspicious, jowly resemblance to an aged Richard Nixon.

Man-Thing became popular enough to warrant its own title. After Fear issue 19, Marvel put the Man-Thing in its own book, and Morbius, the Living Vampire was the headliner for Fear until it ceased with issue 31.

Gerber also wrote with a sly sense of humor that is tremendously appealing. In the very first issue of Man-Thing, Daredevil and Black Widow swing through a very chaotic scene. They don’t impact the story at all. But it’s quite funny to see the famous characters, who Gerber wrote, pop through in a time when most crossovers were serious affairs. Which isn’t to say that Man-Thing didn’t interact in a meaningful way with the rest of the marvel Universe. Just as Man-Thing was getting its own title, the swamp creature appeared in the Gerber-scripted Marvel Two In One 1, ‘Vengeance of the Molecule Man” in which Ben Grimm, the Thing, decides that the Man-Thing is stealing his moniker. The later team up to Molecule Man, who reverts both Thing and Man-Thing to Ben Grimm and Ted Sallis, respectively. Ultimately, the story is a clever retelling of the origin of the Man-Thing, available to those who might not have been reading Fear, and an attempt to hook in the Thing fans who might not have been aware of the Man-Thing.

Gerber created many memorable characters, and trusted his creativity enough to discard them when their characters no longer fit his stories. The Foolkiller is a villain who is a parody of a superhero. Essentially the same as the Punisher, who emerged a few moths after the Foolkiller’s debut. The Foolkiller is unhinged, and and believes he knows who should live and who should die, and takes a more active hand in the process than most. He is a fanatic, and more importantly, a religious fanatic, believing he is guided by God. And although he has his targets, there are others who he doesn’t seem to mind killing. For defying him. Or merely scoffing at him. Gerber’s depiction of narcissistic megalomania is spot on, as the self-justifying Foolkiller murders victim after victim, assured of his own righteousness.

Gerber's breakout character was Howard the Duck. A humanoid, four-foot duck who could speak, Howard was a non-superhuman character in a superheroic world, and became popular enough to warrant his own title. He started out as a refugee in the Nexus of All Realities, and never really fit into the Marvel universe. As a duck among humans, he's perpetually out of his element, constanly baffled by the intricacies and insanities of modern American culture, Howard was a way for Gerber to share his point of view with the audience. Howard's own magazine sold well, but only as long as Gerber wrote it. Others have tried, but no one has really managed to match Gerber's writing. The same holds true with Man-Thing. Other writers have written the series, but it has never proved as popular as it did in Gerber's hands. Relaunches of Man-Thing have not been successful. A 1979 relaunch didn't even last twelve issues. The next attempt didn’t even last nine. This may be the result of writers attempting to place Man-Thing into more standard, central role to which the character is not suited

Gerber’s most acclaimed Man-Thing story is probably “Night of the Laughing Dead,” a psychodrama enacted by the ghost of a clown who has just committed suicide. It is one of the best depictions of depression that I have ever run across. The ghost of Darrell, the clown, forces the mortal around him to re-enact scenes from his life. Because he is a sad clown, all of these involve the systematic destruction of his happiness. A father who neglected him favor of his financing work, an unhelpful psychiatrist, and finally, the circus owner who used him for his money. These have conspired to poison the clown’s creative well, to render him capable of fulfillment, and making his comedy a failure. Only when the aerialist admits that she loves him does his soul bound free, released from the constraints of self-doubt and the feeling of a life wasted.

Symbolically, the Man-Thing attacks one of the self-doubt demons, and I can’t help wonder if this is symbolic of Gerber’s sense of fulfillment from writing Man-Thing. Clearly, the project was personal, and at this point, he had not engaged in the lawsuit against Marvel in regards to his intellectual property. But with Gerber gone, there’s no way to verify this. Still, the portrayal of the struggling artist is a fascinating and clearly a deeply personal one, and it clearly resonated with readers. The story was popular enough that Marvel made a heavily-modified version of the story into a power record, a combination of comic book and 45 RPM record, available here.

Giant-sized Man-Thing 2 (November, 1974) involves the capture of the Man-Thing, which is interesting because Swamp Thing 14, released only a month after, also involves the capture and imprisonment of the main character.

Man-Thing 12 contains another one of Gerber’s unconventional stories. “Song-Cry of The Living Dead Man.” In some ways similar to “Night of the Laughing Dead” a writer has come to an abandoned asylum in order to write in peace, but his fears and daily turmoil pursue him, in a real rather than a metaphorical way. Again, the monsters are defeated when someone tells the writer Brian that she loves him. This piece, so clearly personal to Gerber, would be followed up in 2012, four years after Gerber’s death, with the Infernal Man-Thing miniseries.

Again demonstrating his versatility, Man-Thing next encounters a ship of pirates, commanded by Captain Fate. Now, Skywald’s Heap had also encountered pirates, after stowing away on board a cargo ship, in issue 11, March of 1973, nearly two years before. Coincidence? Was Steve Gerber reading Psycho magazine, or was there something that both writers had read or seen that made them think classic Caribbean pirates would be a good antagonist for their swamp creature? But where the Psycho pirates turn out to be inspired by 18th century pirates, Gerber’s story instead involves a hundred year-old pact, reincarnation, a floating tower, and a sympathetic satyr. It may not have been his best story, but it certainly wasn’t a predictable one.

Man-Thing 15, "A Candle for Saint Cloud" is daring in that the Man-Thing doesn’t technically appear in it at all. Instead, we have a candle (and a fair amount of urban fantasy) of the Man0Thing, which causes all who breathe its fumes to dream of the Man-Thing. But the story, a love triangle with perky blonde hippy Sainte-Cloud as the hypotenuse. She purchases a candle of the Man-Thing, and its theoretically-drugged wick provokes visions of the Man-Thing. In the vision, shared by Sainte-Cloud and her blind boyfriend, is disrupted when her other suitor kicks down the door. Fortunately, the drug is potent, and the vision Man-Thing stops the violence before anyone who doesn’t deserve it gets hurt. This stands a bit opposed to some of Gerber’s previous endings, for example, “No Choice of Colors” where he doesn’t allow the virtuous to triumph, but allows the tragedy to unspool. Again, Gerber has radically shifted gears, with a story of a flying pirate ship one month, and a small, domestic, human story the next.

"Decay Meets the Mad Viking” in Man-Thing 16 again touches on some of Gerber’s favorite subjects. The establishment gone mad and inhuman. Josefsen is strong and able at sixty-five, and considers that men who are not strong are all weak, hippies, and wussies. Compared to his own remarkable self, of course. His loathing of weakness extends to far that he chases Astrid, his granddaughter, into the Man-Thing’s swamp, swinging a battle axe, screaming that she’s a traitor. He destroys the encampment of a nihilistic rock star, who had set up shop where Sallis was murdered, seeking inspiration from tragedy. Gerber writes some of his most truly nihilistic words in the end of the episode: "Then, the last traces of hope must be wiped out. The jaded young pale into insignificance while something unsoiled endures. Only the mad must be left to inherit the Earth.”

Gerber's stories could be daringly topical, also. He tackled high school suicide in Giant Sized Man-Thing 4, a controversial topic, but not one specifically banned by the Comics Code Authority, It is strange reading the comic so many years later and realizing how long it has taken for phrases like ‘fat-shaming’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ to come into our culture. He also takes on a moral panic, with a woman standing on the public stage waving a book about sexual hygiene screaming “Communism, atheism, sex – is that what we want out children taught? If we’re to control what out children think – we have to decide what they learn!” How little America has changed since 1974. I will also note that there is no supernatural ignition for the panic. Humanity cannot dodge responsibility, the villainy presented are all too human.

Giant-Sized Man-Thing 5 brought a new story from Gerber, but also a new editor at Marvel, Len Wein. Wein took over from fellow Swamp Monster scribe Roy Thomas in issue 15. Wein’s story is rich with language, as are all his Swamp Thing stories. Wein had finished with Swamp Thing at the end of 1974, and took over editing Man-thing pretty quickly, starting with the March 1975 issue of Man-Thing. Wein had clearly picked up a thing or two from Man-Thing. His short Romeo and Juliet story concerns two kids in love despite their parents’ antagonism, both to each other and the romance. The parents (their fathers, truth be told) were business partners, but they ended up angry at each other, and literally come to blows once they find their children, who have run off into the swamp. The only thing that stops their fighting is when their daughter begins sinking into quicksand. Unable to rescue her, and even Man-Thing cannot, they watch helplessly as she drowns. Her boyfriend then shoots himself, and we end up with a perfectly Romeo and Juliet ending. But the last frame makes it clear that this does not spell the end of the parents’ argument.

All things must come to an end. With sales dwindling, the decision was made to close down the Man-Thing book with issue 22. But Gerber knew that this was the end, and was able to write one of the most unusual endings to a comic.

"Pop Goes the Cosmos" takes place at the end of a superhero plot involving mind-control, as well as the fantasy characters he had created. But the issue is framed as a letter from Steve Gerber to Len Wein, his editor. Illustrated, as Gerber and Wein are now parts of the story. Dakimh, the mage introduced in the fantasy issue Fear14, has been telling Gerber the stories Gerber has been writing as comics. In a delightfully weird piece of metafiction that was at least thirty years before its time, Gerber stands back and writes the climax of his Man-Thing series with heavy narration, as if it were a confession letter to his editor, including himself in the narrative. "Pop Goes the Cosmos" is one of the weirdest, and at the same time the best sendoffs any comics has received. And it is yet another unexpected story from Gerber, who still had tricks up his sleeve after writing Man-Thing and Giant-Sized Man-Thing as well as various other comics, for four years.

But as with many personal projects, Gerber would return to write Man-Thing after he departed the book. Man-Thing would pop up in Gerber's Howard the Duck book on occasion. He also wrote a Man-Thing story in the black and white Rampaging Hulk 7 in 1978. Again, the story is a throwback to the Skywald and Warren magazines. Man-Thing encounters a wild woman, Andrea, who wears a home-made bikini that seems on constant danger of falling off. Titillation factor achieved. The story is another one of Gerber's interesting psycvhodramas, with exterior factors acting in concert with Andrea's inner division.

Gerber will show up a few more times as I move the timeline forward. Most notably, he had an indelible impact on the future of the Man-Thing, but he also wrote Sludge, a mucky character with a similar origin for Malibu comics during the early 90’s indie explosion. Most poignantly, he also left behind his final Man-Thing script, which later became the Infernal Man-Thing. And, of course, other writers used the Man-Thing in their stories, with some degree of success. The Man-Thing showed up in a lot of books, from Thor to the Micronauts, Strange Tales, She-Hulk, X-Men, Ghost Rider, Punisher, Deadpool, and even reformed villain book Thunderbolts. Gerber's legacy of the flexibility of the character lives on.

Gerber demonstrated that like the Heap, Man-Thing as a nonthinking swamp monster character was viable, and in the correct hands, an almost infinitely plastic concept. Man-Thing worked well in superhero comics, stand-alone weird tales, as well as a vehicle for character exploration. His time on Man-Thing serves to demonstrate how versatile he was as a writer, and how adaptable the concept of the swamp man is. Where Swamp Thing under Wein stuck to Gothic horror and weird tales tropes, Man-Thing leapt from fantasy to quiet horror to domestic drama. And they remain interesting and poignant reads today. Particularly trenchant is Gerber’s use of the moral panic in issue Man-Thing 17 and 18, and his treatment of teen suicide. These remain relevant some forty years after he wrote them. As always, comic stories vary in quality, but the Gerber Man-Thing remains consistently good at its lowest, and stellar when he’s making social observations. More than almost any other comic writer, Gerber made his Man-Thing stories personal. His stories took on the issues he saw in the world, and with enough skill that they entertained. A common failing of didactic entertainment is that it emphasizes the didactic and fails to be entertaining. Although Gerber shows us villains and heroes, he does not make his stories black and white morality tales. They may not be particularly subtle, but Gerber’s writing makes them entertaining, and seldom end in the easily-anticipated way. All of Gerber’s work on Man-Thing, by turns acerbic, funny, horrifying, and touching, shows a man struggling to express himself or go mad.

All images used in this article are copyright by Marvel Comics.

Special shout-out to Brian Keene. He told me to go back and re-read the Gerber Man-Thing after I had dismissed it. You were right, Brian. This stuff is amazing.

Roy Thomas Shows His Love: The Glob

Roy Thomas has long been a champion of the Heap. His career has been entwined with it. In 1969, he created a one-off villain for the incredible Hulk to fight, called the Glob. It was his first full writing assignment. In The Incredible Hulk # 121 (“Within the Swamp There Stirs... A Glob” November, 1969), The Hulk throws radioactive barrels into a swamp, which inevitably leads to the resurrection of some thing in the swamp. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Glob.

According to his introduction to Heap Vol 1, Thomas originally wanted to call his creation the Shape, but Stan Lee though that sounded too feminine. The Glob is the first character to be written by many names that will become familiar as I go through the Heap's progeny. Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, and Len Wein have all used the Glob.

The Glob shares certain similarities to the Heap. Swamp-derived, inhumanly strong, but it’s also mute, inhumanly tough, and uniquely, shaggy. The Heap could recognize events from its past, as if through fog, never able to truly think in words, as far as we could tell. The Glob’s mental faculties are similar, unable to reason, unable to think. is able to , it seems can think in words and images. Except for the flashback that shows the Glob’s origin, it seems to work on the same instinctual level the Heap did. Interestingly Herb Trimpe was the illustrator for Marvel's Phantom Eagle, a WWI flyer.

Joe Timms, the human who becomes the Glob, wasn’t a pilot. He was an escaped prisoner who blundered into quicksand, and drowned. And there is an echo of the Heap's language about the will to live being strong enough. Like von Emmelmann the human that was the Glob lay in the swamp for decades, before an outside catalyst, something like The Mad Heap’s life formula, seeps into the swamp, leading to Joe Timms’ monstrous rebirth.

It's no longer sufficient for the dead man to have possessed unbreakable will, or get the help of the baby ghosts of Walcaw swamp: Heap offshoots often need an exterior catalyst to explain their transmogrification. For the Glob, it's the Hulk's destruction of a warehouse full of drums of radioactive waste. The stories being set in swamps, this is usually a liquid. Later muck men will be acted upon by experimental chemicals, the super soldier serum, biorestorative formulae, and necroplasm.

Thomas says in his essay that the Hulk is also a derivative of the Heap, being super strong, green, and invulnerable to bullets. Although I'm not convinced myself, his idea is explored in the comic. The Hulk and the Glob are mistaken for each other, and when one is anticipated, the other shows up.

The Glob’s initial storyline is pretty by the numbers. The Hulk wanders into a swamp fleeing the military, and encounters the Glob. The Glob, acting on dim memories of a wife, is attempting to carry away a woman. When he begins to dissolve in a radioactive swamp, he holds the woman up, showing to the Hulk that killing her is not his aim. The hulk rescues her, and the Glob vanishes beneath the surface.

What’s interesting about this story is that the Hulk the putative hero of the story, fights the Glob mostly because the Glob won’t speak to him. When they work in tandem to rescue the woman from the radioactive water, the Hulk realizes his mistake.




Less than a year later, the Glob was back, reconstituted by green supergenius The Leader. In Incredible Hulk #129 (“Again, the Glob”, July 1970) the Glob is little more than a determined pawn, mind-controlled into attacking the Hulk. This appearance doesn't show much about the Glob, since his personality is subsumed into the Leader's control. Nevertheless, he is a determined opponent that even the Incredible Hulk really can't damage. The Hulk eventually has to electrocute the Glob in order to stop its unstoppable attacks. Even so, the little bits of the Glob that are left begin to come together, and the comic leaves it there. It's not an issue that does a lot of development.

Of course, this all changed when Steve Gerber gets his hands on the character. Gerber introduced the Glob in Giant-Sized Man-Thing #1 (“How Will We Keep Warm When the Last Flame Dies?”, August, 1974). Sort of. Joe Timms' brain has been rescued from the swamp by the Cult of Entropy. This is all that's left of him, but it's a golden brain, capable of projecting the Glob. Two pages later, this new, projected fights the Man-Thing and loses. Timms' golden brain is again naked and alone, sinking in the swamp.

But this is Steve Gerber we're discussing. I'll write more, a lot more, on his work on Man-Thing pretty soon. Let me just say that Gerber had a brilliant writer with a constant and amazing stream of ideas. The Golden Brain builds itself a new, familiar body out of mud, Joe Timms, to be precise. But like the Glob and the Heap, he cannot speak. Simple and thoughtless, he it put to work until the leader of the Cult of Entropy forces him to become the Glob again. But now the Glob is mucky, rather than the shaggy creature. Once again mind-controlled, the Glob now attacks the Man-Thing.

Poor Glob is once again subject to mind control when he reappears in Incredible Hulk 197 and 198 (“...And Man-Thing Makes Three” and “The Shangri-La Syndrome”, March and April 1976, respectively). The writer is notably Len Wein. Wein, perhaps best known to me as the creator of Swamp Thing, wrote that title until 1974. Two years later, he took another dip in the swamps in in two Hulk issues.

Joe Timms has once again resumed his mute, human form. But another mind-control expert, this time the Collector, turns him back into the clay-like Glob. Alongside the similarly-dominated Man-Thing, the two muck monsters defeat the Hulk.

The Glob doesn't have much to do for the rest of the story. But it is part of the successful rebellion, and it is the Glob that attacks the Collector in the end of the story. Poor Glob is probably feeling ill-used, after being manipulated by the Leader, the Cult of Entropy, and now Collector. Small wonder he wants to take it out on his most recent tormentor.

Sixteen years later, writer Tom Field and artist Gary Barker reintroduced the Glob in Incredible Hulk # 389 (“Of Man and Man-Thing”, January 1992). But this Glob is not Timms. Instead, a scientist named Samuel Beckwith, attempting to discover Ted Sallis (the Man-Thing)’s version of the supersoldier formula, injects himself it.

This Glob has nothing to do with the swamp, aside from living there. Apparently, what makes this Glob is the serum. Sallis burned and ran into the swamp, but there’s no indication that Beckwith had any accidents or external forces aside from the serum. Why it turns him into the Glob… we don’t know. But the appearance is exactly the same as the clay Glob from the Steve Gerber and Len Wein stories. I wonder why the new Beckwith version was necessary, unless writer Tom Field didn't want to destroy Roy Thomas's work.

This time the Glob, which is not as noble as Timms, serves as a foil to Man-Thing. Although they are both hideous swamp creatures, the Man-Thing isn’t out to kill. The Glob is. And in contrast to the previous team-up, this time the Glob squares off against the Hulk and Man-Thing. Like many stories in which the Man-Thng guest stars, the fight ends with the Man-Thing burning whatever knows fear. In this case, the Glob lights up like a Christmas tree.

Ultimately, the Glob’s presence in the story is minimal, only on seven pages out of a thirty page story. Not a lot of time to develop itself as anything but a mindless swamp killer. Sort of like bigfoot, something that lurks in the swamp, and kills when it encounters a group of teenagers. But it is destroyed, as much as comics characters are ever destroyed, this is the last time we see the Beckwith Glob.

Fourteen years went by before the Glob resurfaced in 2006. The original, shaggy Glob is part part of Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos. They have apparently picked him up in a swamp, and are rehabilitating him. The miniseries is about an assembly of monsters who work for S.H.I.E.L.D. As part of an ensemble cast, the Glob is not given much time to develop as a character. It is the shaggy Glob again, rather than the clayey post-Gerber Glob. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold a unique position o the team. It’s merely a strong, tough character.

The Glob is also fitted with a communications device, so it can finally speak. This is not the mindless, mute Joe Timms that has been mentally controlled. With the speech device, it seems to be a perfectly normal human, even making jokes, under the streamers of swamp muck. But the Glob is not very taken over so many times. This is done for the Man-Thing much later. After this, he’s shuffled to the back of the pack. He only appears in a single panel of the final assault at the end of issue six.

With its creation by Roy Thomas, as well as the turns on the character from Steve Gerber and Len Wein, make the Glob a potentially interesting character. Unfortunately, it has been treated as a generic strong antagonist. In its nearly fifty year life span, the Glob hasn't yet been better developed than it was in it's initial appearance. It hasn’t proven popular, seldom appearing without the character it was born to fight: the Incredible Hulk. Roy Thomas’s initial script has a good origin, and gives the character some nuance, which has been subsequently discarded in favor of using it as a strong, durable punching bag for the Hulk, usually dominated by some villain or other. Given how much Marvel recycles its characters, there’s always a chance someone will pick up the Glob and develop it. Here's hoping.

One aspect of the character that has been interesting to me personally is the way the art has changed over the decades. With the Glob dropping off Marvel's radar entirely for decades at a time, the jump in art styles is arresting. Herb Trimpe's detailed art, delicately inked, with the muted, messy colors indicative of the printing process marvel was using at the time. Gary Barker's art in Incredible Hulk 389 is less detailed, concentrating more on the characters, less on the background, the coloring process giving us much brighter colors.

All images Copyright Marvel comics.

Next up, the first of three characters that appeared in 1971. The least famous one, in fact.