It's Goopy and Thoroughly Disgusting: The Skywald Recrudescence of the Heap

When most people talk about swamp monsters in the comics, they think of Man Thing and Swamp Thing. Both of these mucky derivatives of Hillman's the Heap came out within months of each other in 1971, and then morphed into ongoing series. Because they came out so close together (initially Savage Tales #1, May 1971 for Man-Thing, House of Secrets #92, July, 1971 for Swamp Thing), and because the creators Gerry Conway and Len Wein were room mates, makes it rather confusing as to whose idea was first and therefore the 'original.' The answer is neither. Months before either of them came out, Skywald resurrected the Heap.

Roy Thomas, in his introduction to the first Heap anthology, writes about sitting down with Sol Brodsky, who was looking for ideas for his new venture, Skywald Publishing. Thomas suggested that Brodsky revive the Hillman Heap. Roy Thomas will come up repeatedly as I work through the various generations of Heap-inspired muck men. His love of the character, combined with this productivity and the quality of his writing are very much behind the recrudescence of the Heap and similar swamp characters. Perhaps that lunch stirred more than just Sol Brodsky, because afterward, Thomas, who had already created the Glob, helped co-create Marvel’s Man-Thing.

Skywald was a small comics publisher that established itself in 1970. The brainchild of former Marvel Production Manager Sol Brodsky and Israel Waldman, Skywald was looking to move into the niche that Warren Publications was currently filling. Printing primarily in black and white, Skywald avoided the scrutiny of the Comics Code Authority, allowing them more freedom to develop what they called horror-mood, and a certain amount of titillation. They produces a few color comics, mostly Westerns. But it was magazines like Psycho and Nightmare that really earned Skywald its reputation.



In Psycho #2 (March 1971), the Heap was reborn. Like the previous Heap, it was once human, a pilot. Jim Roberts was a crop duster, one of the few biplane pilots left. Instead of being shot down into the Wasau swamp, Roberts crashes into a vat of chemicals, carrying on the catalyst trope, which began all the way back with Mad’s Outer Sanctum and came back with Roy Thomas’s Glob. In the seventies atmosphere of of anti-militarism, the chemicals are there for the army. Roberts’ death is the result of collusion between his girlfriend and Bill Ryan in order to collect a life insurance policy. The femme fatale will also show up in the origin story of Marvel's Man-Thing.

More goopy than shaggy, the Heap retains the mind of Jim Roberts, although it cannot speak. So the book tends to center on the character, and his quest for redemption, which was a radical departure from the Hillman Heap. The new Heap is more a character than a plot device. But that doesn’t stop the stories from being wildly diverse, in the same way the original Heap stories were. Although shorter-lived, this Heap was involved in a broad range of plots. Central to the stories is Jim’s self-pity, but also his flashes of compassion. And although the Hillman's dietary habits were quickly shuffled to the wayside, the Skywald Heap seems to glory in the Heap slurping down rats.



The Jim Roberts Heap is really the first muck monster that has retained its own mind, and there is a unique pathos to the human transformed into something hideous. Unlike Swamp Thing, who can speak with difficulty, the Skywalkd Heap cannot talk at all. And while it cannot hold a pen to write, it discovers that it is able to communicate by scratching words in the dirt. Like so many sentient muck monsters, Roberts spends a lot of his time trying to regain his human form, and an ongoing storyline allows him to partially succeed. This particular configuration, with the Heap able to think but not speak, allows for a lot of thought balloons, which have not been used to explore the thoughts of a muck monster before. And of course, these thoughts usually add to the pathos of the character.



Many of these Heap stories presage ones that would later appear in Swamp Thing or Man-Thing. Psycho 11, for example, puts the Heap and apparently 18th century pirates together, something Steve Gerber will do in his later, legendary work on Man-Thing. In the same issue, the Heap battles a werewolf, which Swamp Thing will do in Swamp Thing #3, and Garbageman will do the same thing. Strangely, it’s not until the Pasko Swamp Thing that a muck monster will face off against a vampire.

I'm not using these examples of repetition to imply that there is anything less than creative. But the way th3ese stories intertwine with each other, feeding off previous stories to come up with new ideas that are different because of both the characters and the creators. Part of the reason I'm going through the interesting parts of swamp monsters in comics is that it represents a microcosm of creativity. Unlike mummies, vampires, or werewolves, it's possible to trace much of the swamp monster's origins and the origins of the ideas for many of the subsequent stories. Because "It" was published in the twentieth century. There aren't many myths or legends of dead men coming back from the swamp... at least not before the Heap made its debut. So it's possible to look at the way ideas are transmitted, reinterpreted, and made fresh by writers who were inspired by the original work. Which I suppose is trope-based discussion, but this really isn't for an audience. It's mostly for me to understand

The Heap was a bit of an odd fit for Psycho magazine, but it proved popular. The magazines had other characters with multiple issue story arcs. The Frankenstein creature and the Mummy both had several stories, although the majority of the magazines were one-shots, usually with a nonfiction article or review on a horror-related topic in the middle.

The initial story, with the Heap’s new origin, was written by Chuck McNaughton, who wrote the stories in Psycho 2 and 3. Psycho 4’s story, “Night of Evil,” was written by Ross Andru. Robert Kangher, later famous for such war comics as Sgt. Rock and WWI flyer Enemy Ace, wrote the single issue color comic. After Psycho6, Andru handed the writing chores off to Al Hewitson, who apparently hated it. The Heap wasn’t in issues 8 and 9, but with reader demand and no one else to fill the void, Hewitson continued to write the character. Psycho 10 and 11 feature outre stories of animated fossils, pirates, and a werewolf. Beginning in Psycho 12, Hewitson lost all love for the Heap. Somehow, the Heap lost its ability to speak, or reason, the Heap becomes an evil, horrible creature, killing without reason. But again, these are ideas that are used later by Len Wein. In fact, the idea of a second, monstrous Swamp Thing was used in later issues of the original Swamp Thing. The Heap is hauled into the air by a helicopter with a claw, which will happen in Swamp Thing 6 (October 73) "Clockwork Horror" just five months later. The Heap is dropped down an elevator shaft, then smashed by a subway train. In Psycho 13, The Heap kills a child (off-screen, but still). Following an increasingly improbable series of events, the Heap finds itself on his parents' farm, and able to speak for the first time. Hewitson was clearly done with the character.



According to the Swamp Men article, Hewitson was doing his best to make sure the Heap was disliked. Psycho continued to sell until Skywald folded, but this was the end of the Skywald Heap. There's a mention that they are trying to get it back on track in the letter column of Scream #11 (Winter, 1975) but that never came to fruition.

Apparently, the Skywald version of the Heap was resurrected by a UK semi-pro zine called Bedlam magazine, which is very obscure. The only serious reference I can find for it is On the Wayback Machine, but the scripts apparently are by Skywald Heap scribe/artist Ross Andru. I’ve spend a fair amount of time searching for any copies of the magazine, and I am unable to find any at reasonable prices. Or even which of the six issues contain Heap stories.

If this article has given you a taste for Skywald's Heap, you're in luck. The majority of Skywald's output is available from the Internet Archive. the Internet Archive. The only issue missing is Psycho #6. Unfortunately, Psycho 12 has been mislabeled, so it appears Psycho 6 is available, but it is not.

Skywald’s Heap is something of a trailblazer in the field of the swamp monster. It si clearly influential with the individuals, Len Wein and Steve Gerber, who would make their Man-Thing and Swamp Things so famous. It is also the first swamp monster that retains its mind, and therefore is an actual protagonist.

It seems there was something in the air in early 1971. After decades of fitful sputtering, three swamp monsters rose from the mud, two becoming regular characters in their relative superhero universes. Muck men would cross the paths of such prominent characters as Batman, Spider-Man, and Ka-Zar. Next up, I’ll be looking at first of these now-legendary writer/creator combinations. Steve Gerber writes the Man-Thing.

Heap Volume Three: The Last of the First Growth

The third and final volume of Roy Thomas’s The Heap continues in the line established and refined by the second volume. The formula had been polished, and the Heap continued to be a popular part of Airboy Comics until the end. Perhaps with the confidence of the formula, the writers no longer felt the need to cleave to the overall Airboy and airfighter theme of the book. The von Emmelman's life as a flier is seldom referenced any more.

Given that the stories now had free reign to include fantastical elements, I find it interesting how many of them are weird menace—events that seem supernatural, but turn out to be entirely mundane. And while the plots include dragons, man-eating plants, witches, and mind control, there are also stories concerning ape-assisted jewel thieves, gas-lamping nobility, entirely human treachery, and still the occasional gangster. But these are not the straight-up rime stories from earlier in the Heap’s history. There is always something weird, or at least implicitly supernatural in the stories. The overtly beneficial influence of Ceres and Mother Nature is gone. The Heap acts alone, by instinct, or perhaps by dim reasoning, but without exterior inspiration.

Although the stories had always traveled far, this last third of the Heap’s original incarnation cover a tremendous amount of cultural ground, from Africa to Native American New Mexico, France to Japan to China.



There is also a creeping science fantasy involved in some of the later stories. The Heap encounters a plant transported by human astronauts from the planet Urania. Another science-based tale revolves around the strange man-eating plant found in Malaya.

The Heap is seldom shot anymore. The writers, who are at this point anonymous, seem to assume that the audience knows that this half-man, half-vegetable creature is immune to gunfire. It is also, with no wavering whatsoever, the vessel of deliverance and justice. As often as not, the Heap does not figure particularly prominently in the stories, but it is always the fulcrum of the narrative. Without the Heap’s intervention, the story would not come out in a positive way. And there are varied and satisfying conclusions to the narrative, demonstrating that brute force it not always the way to resolve a story. Sometimes, an act as simple as purloining a sea-serpent’s egg or waving a flag from behind the grave of a respected general is all that is necessary. But as often as not, the Heap’s physical prowess is necessary, and Nature’s prank physically assaults evil men, alien plants, or even full-grown dragons.



This is at least part of the appeal for me. The Heap has many ways of solving the problem posed by the narrative. The varied nature of these stories is part of the appeal of the character. One month, the Heap is hunting down the ship whose evil history causes the stumps in Wasau swamp, the next, it is battling an evil scientist that’s been petrified in a volcano.

The art is entirely by the Heap’s best-known artist, Ernest Schroeder. Schroeder illustrated the final half of Hillman’s Heap stories, and the Heap Volume 3 contains an interview conduced by Jim Amash interviewed him before he passed away in 2006. Schroeder’s Heap art is consistent, energetic, and conveys a sense of individuality for each character on the page.

Ultimately, in the third volume, the Heap has found its niche. The Heap’s mix of weird and noir was perhaps an extension of the Weird Tales pulps, which was itself winding down in the middle fifties. The comics-related moral panic instigated by Fredrick Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and Congressional hearings were only a year away when Airboy Comics ceased publication.

I had originally planned to dig into the Skywald version of the Heap next, but by chance, I discovered a swamp creature that is not mentioned in the Comic Book Creator's SwampMen book. I'll write that up in a few weeks.

The Heap Volume 2: Darker Stories

Welcome back to my Muck Monsters series. This time, I'll be looking at the second volume of PS Publishing's wonderful collection of the Heap.

The second volume of Roy Thomas's Heap is a time of transition. It begins as a crime comic, with dangerous broads and guns and surprisingly frequent murder. But the stories are starting to move into 'weird menace territory. Gangsters are slowly being replaced by serial murderers, murderous molls. In the second story in the book, from Airboy Comics V5#6, July 1948, the ugly and deranged Henri kills people because they are ugly, uglier than he is. Henri attempt to kill the Heap with his bare hands, with the inevitable results. The Heap itself remains the only unnatural figure in these tales, but the story structure, in which the heap is the catalyst for justice rather than the protagonist, has been well established. Of particular note are two stories with deceitful women, who shoot people who get in their way and get their comeuppance through the actions of the Heap. And, because this is still Airboy Comics, the occasional touch on von Emmelman's flying past. There's a club that reveres him, a man who stole his medals, and his bosom friend (who we have never seen before).



The supernatural begins to creep in with the sixth story in this volume, called "The Iron Duke of Galicia" (November 1948). In it, we are introduced to the ghost babies of Wasau, children murdered during the Iron Duke's merciless rampage. Why they have chosen von Emmelmann, and what sort of power they have to create something both human and plant, we really aren't privy to. We never see the ghost babies again, but Mother Nature takes their place as the Heap's sponsor, a Charlie to his Angels.

Mother Nature is very reminiscent of Ceres, who appeared for three stories in the first volume. Her hair is dark where Ceres was redheaded. Like Ceres, Nature uses the Heap very specifically against men who destroy and make war. This more generalized conflict and magical agency seemed to work better, since it stuck around longer. Rather than opposing Ares as the godly personification of war, Nature directs the Heap against cruelty and destruction. Nature also has her own powers. In the first story, she calls on the trees to grow their roots and break down a castle. This seems like the first true precursor to Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, linking the Heap to a larger force of nature, and giving it power of the local plants. Later, the Heap itself commands the roots and grasses, without the intervention of Mother Nature. Moore, as is his wont, expands on this, taking it to a fantastic but logical end. But the exploration of that is for a future blog post.



A bit later, we come across a pair of stories that are different, but not quite contradictory accounts of why von Emmelmann became the Heap. In the first, it turns out that the Belled Goose grants wishes, and in his last moments, von Emmelmann wishes to live forever. After Emmelmann's crash, the goose flies the cell of Captain Bocke, who is being held for jamming von Emmelmann's guns. He also wishes to live forever. Facing down a firing squad, he discovers that he can no longer be killed. The story ends on a melancholy note, with the two immortals, Bocke and Emmelmann, wandering away from each other attempting to capture the elusive belled goose. A year later, we revisit Bocke and von Emmelmann in a connected three-part story. While alive, von Emmelmann was working on the secret of Egyptian alchemy. Bocke drinks von Emmalmann's formula, and it is this that renders him unkillable. However, the alchemical immortality has a loophole: Bocke can be killed if he returns to the scene of his crimes. The Heap pursued the immportal Bocke across the landscape, and eventually he falls into a crocodile swamp. It Bocke truly immortal? Can he come back from being eaten? The story leaves this question unanswered, Bocke ready for his role as a recurring villain. Which didn't happen.

The Heap runs across all kinds of strange entities, including the messenger of the Prince of Darkness. The stories become more and more weird. But whatever he faces, whether it's a messenger from the Prince of Darkness, the ghost of a ship, a mummy, a werewolf, gigantic white seal, or even inbred degenerate Roman soldiers, the Heap triumphs over evil or brutality with a few swipes of its paws, or its inhuman strength and the occasional vine. The stories are pretty formula, but it's a good formula. There's enough unexpected weirdness happening that it carries the story. The Heapo also has an advantage in tghat it does not speak, and it only rarely has thought balloons. So its motivations are not laid out for us. It only communicates through its actions, a trait shared with Man-Thing as well as the first incarnation of Swamp Thing. In many ways, this is the character's saving grace. In a medium that is very over-written, the lack of direct information about the Heap and its motivations is welcome.



The Heap also exhibits some classic images that are later used in some comics. In the Ernest Schroeder's first issue, there is a panel of the Heap, arms raised, framed slightly from below. This may have influenced Steve Bissette's classic splash page which closed issue 24 of Saga of the Swamp Thing, forty years later. Of course, Bissette could work in a lot more detail, with more room and a better printing process at his disposal.



Further, there is an image at the end of "The Book of the Dead" (August 1950) that bears a pronounced similarity to the iconic last frame of the original Swamp Thing story (House of Secrets #92) as the mute swamp creature that was once Alec Olsen returns to the swamp.

The second volume of The Heap really finds the book hitting on all cylinders. The variety of strange situations is very good, lending the stories a sense of unpredictability. The Heap had found its niche, and it remained a regular fixture in Airboy Comics until the title was shut down by Hillman Publication's transition out of comics. It's an excellent and informative prototype for the many swamp creatures we know and love today. But even read not as history but for themselves, the stories are pretty good. Although sometimes overwritten, with characters making speeches designed to hammer home what's going on, the plots move at a good clip. At eight or nine pages, there's little room for filler. There's a reason the Heap has been resurrected and imitated so many times.

The Heap: Dark Roots

The Heap began as a throw-away encounter in Hillman’s Air Fighters Comic in 1942. From a single appearance, it grew into its own monthly story and continued to be one until Hillman got out of comics in 1953. Finding these appearances would have been hideously expensive, but PS Publishing has put out three beautiful collections of Heap stories, edited by Roy Thomas, long-time Heap fan and comics professional. We will See Thomas's name involved with a number of Heap-related projects.

For convenience, I'll be breaking this discussion of the Heap into three sections, each one concerning each of the three volumes. Although the tenor of the stories does not change precisely with each volume, it breaks the stories down into more digestible chunks.

First, it should be said that the Heap is likely a tribute to the Theodore Sturgeon story "It". "It" first appeared in a 1940 issue of Unknown magazine. "It" is an excellent Sturgeon story, and involves a dead man who rises as a plant-like hominid, its intelligence clouded, to wreak havoc on a small backwater town. The main difference between the Heap and It is that the Heap has a specifically WWI flier origin, and It dissolves in water, ending the story. "It" would later be adapted to comics by Roy Thomas in 1972, right at the beginning of the Swamp Monster boom. I'll talk about that in due course.

The Heap started out as a one-off appearance in a Sky Wolf story. Comics in the forties were collections of stories, from eight to sixteen pages, rather than one long story, which is more common now. This allowed an individual issue to appeal to a broader audience. Someone would potentially buy the comic because they followed one of those stories. Fans of Sky Wolf and Airboy would both buy an issue of Air Fighter Comics.

The first Heap story, from the third issue of Air Fighter Comics also contains the Heap's origin story, told in four brief panels, of a WWI German pilot. Baron von Emmelmann is shot down over a Polish swamp. His incredible will to live does not let him die, so for unexplained reasons, he becomes a man-shaped plant. Unlike the later Swamp Things, the Heap cannot speak, and only barely remembers its past as von Emmelmann. The amount any given muck monster remembers of its past life varied. This origin is recounted many times, even in this volume of twenty-four initial stories. And a WWI flight nerd notices that Emmelmann is flying a different plane every time the story is recounted, or wonder what a German flier is doing engaging an Eastern-front plane over Poland. Still, this origin remains consistent, and the character is well-defined at this origin. The Heap is inhumanly strong, immune to bullets, and although it cannot think, it has emotional reactions to things from its past. Initially, it is said to get oxygen by sucking the blood of animals, but this falls by the wayside fairly quickly, as do its fangs.

The initial four stories, published between December 1942 and May 1946, ostensibly star Sky Wolf, a rogue Allied flier who flies against the Nazis, and at least once, against the Japanese. The first three stories are war stories, while the fourth seems like a calculated transition to get the Heap to America. After this, Airboy Comics (which changed its name from Air Fighter Comics to reflect its breakout star in December, 1945) would publish one Heap story every issue. These initial stories are less than stellar. The Heap interferes with Iron Ace's plans to capture Sky Wolf, allowing Sky Wolf to escape the Nazi's nefarious clutches. Aside from the Heap, it's a pretty by-the-numbers plot. The second story, from Air Fighter Stories #9 is more less generic. The Heap begins stealing and flying aircraft all over the front, wrecking both Allies and Nazi airbases. Sky Wolf must take care of the problem. But it's strange to see the Heap flying planes.

Air Fighter Comics V. 2 #10 contains the third, and perhaps most interesting of the Sky Wolf and Heap stories. The Heap finds its way to occupied China, the art is pretty 1940's racist. The Heap is also brown, for some unknown reason, where it had been white before. With one exception, it would remain brown until 1948, when he would unexpectedly shift to green. There's also a surprising amount of killing. The Heap strangles the evil Japanese commander right before our eyes. Killings would become more commonplace in the Heap, and are still surprising to someone who grew up reading comics that had to be approved by the Comics Code Authority.

But this story also provides us with our first real taste of pathos. His wife, the Baroness von Emmelman, has been providing humanitarian aid to the Chinese. As is inevitable in this sort of plot, the Heap attempts to protect her, but a bullet intended for him kills her. This is echoed in Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing # 1. And for the first time, a story keys in on the theme that later swamp creatures like Man-Thing and Swamp Thing will possess in abundance, the pathos of loneliness and loss. Similar themes have kept Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in print for nearly two hundred years.

Once the war was over, Sky Wolf faded from the pages of Airboy Comics, but the Heap remained popular. Believing that the audience wouldn't sympathize with the inhuman Heap, or perhaps wishing to provide structure for the stories to come, Hillman's writers invented Rickie Wood, an adolescent whose love of model airplanes enticed the Heap to imprint on him, allowing a tenuous connection with the Airboy Comics' air fighter theme. But the Heap was a regular feature now, one story would appear in every issue of Airboy Comics until Hillman stopped publishing comics in 1953.

The Rickie Wood stories quickly become the sort of crime comics that proliferated in the forties and fifties, until Wertham and the Comics Code Authority decided comic books should only be used for moral instruction. Gangsters attempt to steal fortunes or murder people, and it always comes down to Ricki and the Heap to set things right. The Heap acts as the avenging hand of God, or the writer's moral sensibility, giving the bad guy his just desserts at the end of the story. The Heap is usually just a little-seen presence in his own story. The crime stories owes a lot to the hard-boiled genre, and contain less of the weird horror sensibility that the character would later display. There are plenty of fedora-wearing gangsters shooting people, and a lot of dames with impressive builds and bare midriffs.

As a fan of weird horror, I find these stories are disappointing. They are often formulaic, and represent cheap pulp work. Rickie's ability to keep the Heap tailing after him grows tired after a few stories, and it's unsatisfying to see the Heap acting as a in Rickie's stead in the final act of the story. And the writers appeared to know this, since the Heap changed directions completely a year later. But they are a step away from the very pulpy war stories, and small steps toward the more Gothic stories to come later.

There are only three Heap stores that include the Roman Goddess Ceres and her rival Ares, but they're very unusual. The Heap's origin is not rewritten, but is given a magical underpinning. The goddess Ceres chose the Heap to be her champion of Nature, an idea that Alan Moore would pick up many years later in his Saga of the Swamp Thing. This is not the most interesting thing about the stories, however. Now cut off from narrative leash Rickie Wood, the Heap roams the globe, and in an unusual move for forties pulp, two of the stories address colonialism in a time when it really wasn’t discussed. The antagonists are white males exercising corrupt authority over native populations (Arab, and an odd sort of African/Polynesian that I find difficult to recognize). Firther, the heap doesn't serve as the direct instrument of comeuppance, beating up or killing the antagonist. Instead it is instrumental in showing the native populations the duplicity of the greedy. The natives are left to their own devices when determining their oppressor's fate.

Apparently, these stories did not prove to be popular, because they only lasted three issues. The next stage of the Heap's narrative development kept the world-traveling, but dropped the overtly supernatural figures of Ceres and Ares. These, the last five stories in Volume One, return to the crime themes and ideas of the Rickie Wood era. But they are more interesting. First of all, they lack Rickie Wood, and the bland suburban America that he as a narrative device is tied to. The exotic settings mean that the stories have more freedom to introduce fantastic elements, such as man-eating plants. And again, the Heap does not serve as the violence of justice being served, but instead is more of a plot element that allows the ending to happen in a satisfactory way. This is the approach that Steve Gerber very successfully took when writing Man-Thing. It's a radical and inventive way to tell a comic story, since the Heap is not the protagonist of the story. Instead, it is a catalyst.

The exoticism of the stories also lends them additional interest. The Heap ends up in a South American plantation, where a scheming cousin is attempting to steal the family inheritance from the feisty Estella. The Heap helps a gold prospector escape from a series of double-crosses, his duplicitous partner drowning in quicksand. An Indian story-teller weaves a tale of a Nazi fugitive being brought to justice.

Once the Heap as catalyst had been established as a pattern, the Heap stories begin on the path to the Gothic, and the stories start firing on more cylinders. The later stories, with the man-eating plants, strange storytellers, and snakes mistaken for neckties, synthesized the best of the Ceres stories with the best aspects of the Rickie Wood stories. These stranger tales will be what later muck monster creators will draw their best material from. And if the early Heap stories don't engage me as much as the later two volumes will, the sense of being there at the beginning of the story, watching the experimentation as the Heap begins to find its way, more than makes up for it. The Heap, Volume 2.