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.

I Understand It's Healthy To Express Gratitude

Yesterday, Brian Keene wrote a touching blog post called "A Little Warmth Against the Winter Chill." In it, he writes about the pleasure of spending time with younger writers whose hearts had not yet hardened, whose enthusiasm blazes bright warms the people near them. Making art day in and out is tiring, and it's never easy when people repeatedly try to screw you.

I'll never be able to be objective about Brian Keene. He has, more than anyone else in this business, been a mentor to me. When I was starting out, he had a website called World Domination 101. It laid out the principles that any writer needs to follow in order to get anywhere. Write as much as you can. And value your writing. As someone who did not initially understand the value of his writing, this was excellent advice. And I pass it on to anyone who needs it. Do not accept bad terms for what you have worked so hard to create. Value yourself, value your work. He was the first professional to say that he thought I could make it to being a full-time writer. Which I haven't yet, but it's something I'm striving for. For someone who makes art, the good word of someone who makes good, successful art is huge.

Did I mention that his book Dark Hollow is one of the best books I've ever read? And now I have spent time with the man who wrote it, being interviewed for his podcast. I try to express my gratitude often. I have watched too many people go away, or have near-misses. Thank you for the inspiration, and encouragement, Brian. You have made a tremendous difference in my writing, and my career.

And yes, I will be continuing the Heap series.

2016 Surprise: 10 Cloverfield Lane

With the success of Pacific Rim (despite the turbulence with the sequel) and Legendary's Godzilla, the stage seems set for other monster brands to make a return. And so JJ Abrams has brought Cloverfield back. There seems to be some confusion as to the budget of the film: $5 million or $100 million, but Abrams has called it a 'blood relative' of Cloverfield. I can't find much information about it, sort of the opposite of the ubiquitous viral campaigning the original film staged. But it arrives in theaters March 11.



Importantly, it seems to have gotten rid of the biggest problem with Cloverfield, which was the shallow, unsympathetic characters. My dislike of the protagonists really made the film drag for me. John Goodman seldom gives a dull performance, so I hope he'll make this first outing by director Dan Trachtenberg a good one.

The New Godzilla Trailer...

It doesn't show much, but there's a bit to be mined out of this trailer. The footsteps sound like the drumbeat footsteps from the original Godzilla. And the roar sounds like it was taken directly from the tape for the 1954 Godzilla. It's a great sound, and I miss the metallic grating of the early Godzilla roars. I'll get the new poster up as soon as I can find a good quality picture to pinch. (Update, done.) 2016 is looking good for kaiju fans.



Since this is the beginning of a new series, I wonder if Godzilla will be alone, or will he have something to fight. Either way, I hope it gets an American theatrical release.

Terrible, Wonderful Things

It's out. I have a copy in my hands. My second novel, I Do Terrible Things, published by Thunderstorm Books.



Cover art by Caroline O'Neal

Here's the back cover blurb, which sums the novel up pretty well:

Donna doesn't know the old man with the sad face and yet there she is, beating him to death with a shovel. Is suppressed rage making her murder people in horrifying ways, or is she some sort of latent psychopath? The more people she kills, the more desperate she becomes to stop herself. Can she find the key before she commits yet another gruesome murder?

Here is is on the back of the book:



What I really cannot convey in this blog post is the quality of materials. The cover is gorgeous, the hard cover under the dusk jacket is beautiful. The end papers have been printed with metallic ink so thickly that it's textured. Here's a picture, but it certainly doesn't to the book justice.



This is a gorgeous book, and I am ridiculously proud to have Thunderstorm publish it. I can't believe I wrote something that received such wonderful treatment. But I open it up, and there are my words. Here's the header for Chapter 4: Gas Grill.



Only 64 copies of the book have been made. And I am proud and humbled and excited that Thunderstorm Books actually put this out. Thank you to the Thunderstorm team who made this a wonderful, quality book.

Armistice Day, once again...

It's Veterans Day. Thank you veterans, for your service, for your sacrifice, for your courage, for the wounds you bear. I hope healing comes soon.

At the same time, I wish to express a profound desire that we make no more combat veterans, wound no more people. That some day soon, we can gaze into the eyes of our war dead and say with a clear conscience, that their lives were not wasted.

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.

After A Long Silence, Gamera Returns

Gamera is, as promised, back for his 50^th anniversary. In his most eye-popping (and -melting) adventure yet. This looks like a touch of Gamera the Brave's structure, as well as Shûsuke Kaneko's plot. Gyaos, Gamera's most popular enemy, is back, and if you watch closely, you can see their breath weapon in the background.

Good for the director for having the foresight to introduce a new monster. This is hopefully a forward-looking entry into the franchise, not a backward-looking one.

Next Project: A History of Swamp Monsters in Comics

Having gone through all the daikaiju films I could, I feel like this blog once again needs a structure so I don't ignore it. So I'm going to work through another list, because I love both lists and textual analysis, and perhaps a bit too much of my own voice, I'm going to be looking at swamp monsters in the comics.

I find superhero comics to be repetitive, characterizations shallow, the constant fights uninteresting. Even as a kid, I was more into the monster and horror comics than Batman or Thor. I was given a stack of early seventies comics by a friend, which included the original Swamp Thing comics numbers nine and ten. And BAM I was hooked. Even after all these years, those two issues (which I still have) remain some of the best comics I have ever read. I drifted away from comics when I was twelve, and returned to them when I was seventeen, purchasing a copy of Swamp Thing # 48, smack dab in the middle of Alan Moore's tenure on the series. Swamp Thing was my gateway to comics, not once but twice. Sadly, the way the art form is used often leaves me cold, both as a reader and a creator of stories. But Swamp Thing, Man Thing, these characters are broad and strange enough that they bring out the author. And, it should be said, they're a pretty select group.

That said, this won't be comprehensive, partially because there are a lot of obscure bog beasts in comics, and some of them are quite expensive. The original appearance of Glob, in The Incredible Hulk #121 sells for about $50. I don't love muck men or my audience that much. Sorry. I've already done a gigantic index of John Constantine appearances. I don't want to do that again. It has become very tiring and I'm cutting down on my comics-related expenses. But I'll hit what I consider the highlights: the original Heap Stories, Gerber's classic Man-Thing, Wein/Wrightson Swamp Thing, Moore's Swamp Thing, Gerber's Sludge, and whatever else I can find that's not just a single appearance in a single book. Likewise, I'm not going to track down all the appearances of Swamp Thing, who has some 286 comics with his own name on them, not including reprints. Man-Thing has more than 262. That's a lot of comics. I've got several chunks of each, generally considered the classic author/artist periods, or just the easily available.

This wouldn't have been possible without the release of Comic Book Creator's SwampMen book. It's got background and some amazing interviews with the creators of many of the best Swamp Men comics, including Wein and Wrightson, Alan Moore, Steves Bissette and Gerber, and many more. If you have any interest in the mucky denizens of superhero universes, this is the book to get.



Also helpful has been the Lonely Geek's Muck Men page, without which I never would have learned about Sludge, or Captain Carrot's opponent Mudd. But part of the appeal of Muck Men in the comics is that individuals can be picked out without being overwhelming. Vampires are everywhere, and often used as stormtroopers, to be knocked off by a superhero simply to get to the other end of the story. Muck Men call back to the Gothic story tradition, and the best of them concentrate on the humanity of the characters, whether supernaturally enhanced of not.

First Up, PS Publishing reprints The Heap's earliest stories.

Post-Traumetic Stress Kaiju: Monsters Dark Continent

Monsters: Dark Continent is the follow-up to Gareth Edward's Monsters. It features none of the original crew, nor the original location. However, it shares a lot of similarities with the previous film in the series.



The film starts off in Detroit. Devastated, post-apocalyptic-looking Detroit. Ruined locations will be the norm for the film. And it's entirely in shaky-cam. Normally, I hate shaky-cam. All of the footage from Monsters: Dark Continent sways gently as if shot by a handheld. In this one case, I think it enhances the film, never allowing the audience to focus on one thing entirely, emphasizing the shifting and slippery nature of action and intent.



Our protagonist, Parkes, joined the army to get out of Detroit. The army's original mission was to destroy the monsters, but imprecise bombing has turned a segment of the unnamed Middle-Eastern populace against American intervention. Yes the metaphor is pretty transparent, but with fantasy and horror films, it is possible to deal with themes that are too difficult to deal with head-on. Detroit holds no opportunity for Parkes, so he had to look for it elsewhere. But even in America, the monsters are a presence. Parkes shoots at painted images of monsters. He attends a bloodsport pitting a dog against a small version of the monsters. Parkes, winning us some sympathy, is disgusted by the entertainment.



Parkes ships out with his three best friends, Frankie, Shawn, and Karl. Sadly, we know that Shaun is going to die. His wife just had a baby, he promises to come back, and he's black. His fate could have only been more certain if he'd been about to retire.



In the desert, things are different from Detroit. Goliaths roam the dry planes in gigantic herds. These seem different from the previous iterations, perhaps due to the environment. But the monsters are no longer the military's main mission. Now, they are mainly concerned with shutting down insurgent activity. While the Goliaths are a threat, they do not set IED traps. And while anyone can identify a Goliath on sight, it's difficult to tell if any given local has hostile intentions. Nothing in this area is as clear as it seems.



We also meet a horse-sized intermediate stage monster. It can run along at a good clip, moving quickly on six legs. It is never made clear if all these different creatures are different species of alien, or of they are all growth stages of the Goliaths.



Everything turns to shit when they are ambushed. An IED followed by sniping kills the majority of the team, and pushes the protagonists into the hands of insurgents.



The plot moves with frenetic brutality. Parkes' friends are killed without warning. We watch Frankie die a slow death, bleeding out from an abdominal wound. The casual interpretation of the film, asking who is the real monster, doesn't really fit. The camera does not judge actions. The script does not punish. The viewer is merely along for the ride, unable to see the next thing coming. Like the monsters, the brutality of humans just is, and the film makes no attempt to explain or justify it. But every major character has a meltdown at one point.



At this point, the film becomes is very similar to the first. Two people, in this case Parkes and Frater, undertake a journey that is impeded by the monsters. They meet local people, and get experience the hospitality of a involved in a culture they do not understand. Parkes wanders out into the night, and watches one of the Goliaths apparently mourning one of its own. The corpse releases spores in a beautiful florescent purple display. Like the people the Goliaths are capable of making something beautiful.



In an interesting closer that parallels the opening, Frater and Parkes come across some kids who are shooting at a wall with a painted Goliath on it. Exactly what Parkes was doing at the beginning of the film.



In the end, Frater becomes untethered because the mission is a failure. The men he is looking for are dead. That's been his focus, the thing that has kept him together through the film. The mission, which Frater has clung to, has failed. He staggers out of town to see an enormous eruption of something fantastically larger than any was have yet seen. And there the film ends.



There's a Cloverfield feel to Monsters: Dark Continent. The film doesn't feel it owes the audience a detailed explanation. In fact, that seems to be the point. The audience is just as much in the dark as to what's going to happen next as the characters are. Frightening things are happening, and it wears on the human characters. The monsters of the film aren't the focus, which was off-putting to a lot of people who were hoping for a movie that dealt more directly with monsters. As it is, I have to agree with Kim Newman's review for Empire, it's a good film that takes on human extremes in a way that a more straightforward film more directly about war would. As alien invasions go, this one is messy and slow, just like real-world invasions.