Coming Full Circle: Roy Thomas Adapts Sturgeon's "It" To Comics

In 1972, Marvel handed a new magazine, Supernatural Thrillers to Roy Thomas. The new magazine, which ran 15 issues, started as an attempt to capture the new macabre movement in comics. With the loosening of the CCA rules, Marvel thought they could now adapt classic weird short stories into comics, giving the medium more legitimacy. This plan lasted four issues, adapting Sturgeon's “It”, The Invisible Man, Robert E. Howard's “Valley of the Worm” and finally Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde before the original creation N'Kantu, the Living Mummy came to dominate the title.

In December 1972, the first issue of DC's Swamp Thing had just appeared, Gold Key had just released their first “Lurker in the Swamp” story, and Marvel's own Man-Thing had just merited its own magazine appearance as the lead in Fear, and Skywald's Heap was going strong in Psycho. That's a lot of swamp monsters to choose from. It had been three years since Roy Thomas had created the Glob. The Swamp Monster was at virtually every publisher, but no one had yet begin to really delve into the possibilities such a character held for long-term story telling. When Roy Thomas was handed the opportunity to launch a more literary series, he decided the first story he wanted to adapt was Sturgeon’s “It.” He adapted the story himself, primarily using Sturgeon’s language. As a fan of the story, why wouldn’t he?

Thomas had been a professional for three years at this point. The first story he’d worked was the Incredible Hulk story in which he had created The Glob. His adaptation of Sturgeon’s story is solid, using as much as the original author’s text as he could, while still adapting the story to a different, more visual medium.

The art is good. Not as moody as Wrightson, Bissette, or Mayrik, but the faces are expressive, and the emotional content of the story is conveyed well. Penciler Marie Severin would illustrate more than a hundred and sixty issues for Marvel. Especially effective is the panel Where Alton tells Corey about finding the corpse of his dog Kimbo is excellent. The tension in Alton’s stance, the sadness mixed with wariness are plain.

The creature itself is painted in a combination of green and gray, and is not as distinct from the background as Swamp Thing and Man Thing would be. Which is a bit of a shame since it’s difficult to see exactly what It looks like. The coloring, however, emphasizes the fact that it is made of the swamp stuff that surrounds it. Although it is human-shaped, It does not have a recognizable face. It has eyes, but they are usually brushed over in the same color as the rest of the creature. Other swamp monsters have red eyes, which helps to separate them from the rest of the creature, but that’s not the case here. As a result, I find it difficult to figure out which direction the creature is ‘facing.’ This and the coloration leads to a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, which is not entirely unwelcome in a thriller/horror comic.

The way that Alton dotes on the dog makes me wonder if the dog as adjunct was a deliberate homage on the part of Swamp Thing scribe Len Wein. Steve Gerber also wrote a story involving a dog in the swamp, in issues 9 and 10 of Man-Thing. Kimbo is one of the early emotional hooks that moves the plot of “It” forward.

Apparently, Marvel had the idea of turning “It” into an ongoing series. But what good would it have done to set one swamp monster against another from the same publisher? Man-Thing had done well enough to was doing reasonably well. Was there enough market for two Marvel swamp monsters? Thomas didn’t think so. So “It” remained a one-off from Supernatural Thrillers. Unfortunately, Marvel has lost the contract Sturgeon signed, so it was reprinted once. Beyond that, it’s in legal limbo, since no one knows the terms of the contract. So muck monster completist’s only hope of finding the story is to buy an old comic. Luckily, it’s not enormously popular, so copies are relatively inexpensive. It's a good single issue, and brings the origin of the swamp monster back to its origin, the Theodore Sturgeon story. But it's a single issue, so there's really not a lot to dig into here.

Next month, Warren Publishing gets into it with their own, pretty unique swamp monster.

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.

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.

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.

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.