Mike Ploog’s splendidly over-the-top cover for Man-Thing #8 probably calls back harder to the lurid, gory glories of early-1950s pre-Code horror comics than anything else ever published by Marvel in the 1970s (including their Code-free black-and-white magazine line). Of course, back in May, 1974, my sixteen-year-old self probably didn’t fully comprehend that that was what the artist was up to here; still, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t appreciate the cover on its own merits. A muck-covered monstrosity breaking free from his lab-table restraints, while nearby a hideous ghoul threatened a beautiful, buxom young woman? What wasn’t to love?
Cover by Ron Wilson and Frank Giacoia.
Ploog contributed some very tasty art to the comic’s interior pages, as well, but since this issue features the second and concluding chapter of a story that he and writer Steve Gerber had begun telling in Man-Thing #7, we’ll need to spend some time looking at that comic before getting to the ostensible main topic of today’s post. Actually, we’ll need to go back a bit further even than that in order to properly set the stage, seeing as how we haven’t checked in with Manny since we covered the premiere issue of his own comic last October, and a fair amount has gone down in what passes for his life since then.
As you may recall, that issue’s story ended with the Man-Thing and his allies saving the universe from the depredations of Thog the Netherspawn. But the particular circumstance that had facilitated Thog’s assault in the first place — i.e., a construction project intended to erect a brand new airport in the middle of the Man-Thing’s Florida swamp (which just so happens to be the Nexus of All Realities) — remained yet unresolved.
Beginning with Man-Thing #2, the head of the construction company, Franklin Anthony Schist, stepped up his efforts to eradicate what he saw as the main impediment to his project’s successful completion: the Man-Thing himself. Schist hired a scientist named Hargood Wickham (whom we readers learned had been nicknamed “Professor Slaughter” by his students at M.I.T., prior to his being fired from that institution) to attempt to electrocute Manny using an invention of his called “the Slaughter Room”, but the effort was unsuccessful; and Schist actually ended up having his own life saved by the Man-Thing, when the former became the target of a psychopathic vigilante named the Foolkiller. (That tale was told in Man-Thing #3 and #4, and though its events don’t directly impact those of the story we’re dealing with today, it’s well worth reading on its own.) Naturally, that changed the businessman’s attitude nary a whit.
Following their misadventure, Schist and Wickham proceeded to sit out the next couple of issues, as the Man-Thing got involved with the ghost of a carnival clown; and the next time we readers saw the duo, we received the surprising news that during the interval, Schist’s airport project — a running subplot in the series ever since Fear #16 (Sep., 1973) — had been brought to a halt once and for all, off panel…
Artist Mike Ploog had come on board Man-Thing with issue #5; asked decades later how the assignment had come to him, he didn’t really recall, but speculated: “They wanted more drippy stuff, and I guess they figured I was a drippy artist, so… [laughs] Give it to Ploog, he’ll make it drip!” (Comic Book Creator #6 [Winter, 2014].) On his first two outings, his pencils had been inked by his frequent collaborator Frank Chiaramonte; and while the results were good, the news that he’d be doing complete art for issue #7’s “The Old Die Young!” was very welcome. Ploog’s stuff almost always looked best when he worked solo.
Yes, in the end F.A. Schist’s plans weren’t foiled by muck-monsters, psycho killers, or even extradimesnional demonic invaders, but by… the energy crisis! You really can’t get any more 1974 than that.
The pointy piece of wood thrown by Schist embeds itself in the Man-Thing’s shoulder; due to his empathic nature, however, the creature is pained more by the businessman’s anger than by his physical assault. Still, the end result is much the same, as Manny takes the hint and begins to shamble back off into the swamp. Meanwhile, Professor Wickham’s curiosity has been piqued: “What was that speech about ‘eternal youth‘, Mr. Schist?”
When the Man-Thing is unable to free himself from the net by struggling, he ceases to resist the conquistadors — and as the story will soon make plain, they really are conquistadors, not some kind of modern-day cosplayers — and they begin to drag him through the swamp towards an unknown destination. But they’re eventually foiled by the simple reality of the swamp creature’s physical nature, as his essence inexorably oozes through the mesh, ultimately leaving his captors holding nothing but an empty net. Shocked and unnerved by this development, the conquistadors flee from the Man-Thing in fear — and, driven by his own need to confront and destroy that loathed emotion at its source, he shambles after them in pursuit.
Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Citrusville, Schist and Wickham have stopped off to have a cup of coffee — and to further discuss that “eternal youth” stuff that Schist had brought up earlier…
I realize that, at this point in the narrative, we still have a lot to learn about what’s really going on here. Even so, I think it’s fair to observe that a plan to “save” the Man-Thing by sending armed men to catch him in a net and drag him off against his will, without ever making any attempt to communicate with him, hasn’t been especially well thought out. But hey, maybe it’s just me.
The man in the jodhpurs is quickly joined by more conquistadors; they attempt to drive the Man-Thing back out of their enclave with a battering ram, but, naturally, their efforts are to no avail…
The Man-Thing makes it as far as the swampy waters just beyond the walls, but then collapses — just as F.A. Schist and Professor Wickham show up in their rented swamp buggy…
This brings us to the end of Man-Thing #7… and to the beginning of Man-Thing #8, where we find Gerber and Ploog picking up right where they’d left off the previous month:
Charging Manny at ramming speed turns out to be a really bad idea; while it does send the muck-monster flying, it also results in the swamp buggy being dangerously damaged. “Its gas tank’s caught fire!” Schist shouts to Wickham. “It’s going to –”
Instinctively (if slowly) fleeing the brush-fire ignited by the swamp buggy’s explosion, the Man-Thing shambles back towards La Hacienda — unaware that he’s being followed…
Proceeding on towards the village, Manny is once more greeted by a handful of its citizens — including the “Capitain”, who extends his hand in friendship…
I’m sure I don’t really need to spell this out, but just for the record, Schist (and Gerber) are here referencing the Spanish conquistador Ponce de León‘s legendary search for the Fountain of Youth in Florida in the early 1500s.
This is the second time that Gerber has directly invoked “Shangri-La“ in relation to La Hacienda; it’s a concept that was getting a really good workout at Marvel in the first half of 1974, as we’ve discussed in a previous post.
El Capitan immediately rejects the very idea of Schist’s offer; what’s more, he informs the two intruders that, having learned the community’s secrets, they can’t be permitted to “leave here alive!” OK, that’s pretty harsh.
At this point, the Man-Thing — who by now has reverted to an almost half-human state. mentally as well as physically — rises angrily from the lab table…
This story implies pretty strongly that Hargood Wickham’s plunge is a fatal one; however, readers of The Savage She-Hulk #7 and #8, published six years hence, will learn that Professor Slaughter survives his fall, though the resulting injuries will leave him paralyzed from the waist down hereafter.
As the semi-transformed Man-Thing comes after Schist once again, a caption tells us that he’s now driven by “his rapidly-reviving intellect“, which is “horrified at the extent to which Schist is ruled by hatred” — as well as by his still-intact empathic nature, which is “revulsed by the almost tangible quality of the emotion itself!”
Gerber makes it a point to contrast the two grotesque combatants in this scene; one is a monster in the process of becoming a man once again, while the other is “a man who was a kind of monster even before his superficial transformation…”
“Man is still not ready to surrender his baser emotions for the joy of eternal youth….” Back in 1974, my sixteen-year-old self was pretty much content to take this very plainly stated moral of Steve Gerber’s tale at its face value. Human beings can’t have the peace and joy represented by La Hacienda as long as they selfishly strive for wealth, power, and other forms of worldly gain? Sure — that fit in quite well with my worldview at that time. And, to be honest, I still find a lot of truth in that basic proposition. On the other hand, my sixty-six-year-old self of 2024 can’t help but poke a bit at the supposed perfection of the community the story explicitly presents as an earthly paradise. What do they do all day in La Hacienda, exactly? Why, after almost five centuries of tranquility, are all of the men we see still going around armed? What other scientific wonders might the clearly technologically advanced Fathers have discovered that they might share with the rest of the world, to better the lives of all? And is their society really even all that benign? Their leaders (the Capitan as well as the Fathers) seem awfully high-handed in their interactions with outsiders, particularly in their stated willingness to kill anyone who stumbles upon their secrets.
Of course, some might say that such ambiguities and mysteries are part and parcel of the whole “Shangri-La” mystique. And one could also argue that with only two issues to work with, Gerber didn’t really have the room to really explore the workings of his fictional Utopian community. All of that may be true; but, even so, it doesn’t make the questions go away.*
Still, all of that being said, the story still works pretty well for your humble blogger, if only for its provision of an appropriately grisly end for the odious F.A. Schist — and, of course, for the marvelously macabre artwork of Mike Ploog, who brings the eerie, unsettling — and, yes, drippy — world of the Man-Thing to life as well as any artist ever did, and probably ever could.
It may be difficult for some younger readers — and perhaps even some older readers who just weren’t into horror comics back in the day (you all know who you are) — to realize just how popular Man-Thing was circa mid-1974. Per comments made by Steve Gerber in a 2002 interview (posthumously published in Comic Book Creator #6), around the same time that Mike Ploog became the book’s artist, Man-Thing had become (if only briefly) Marvel’s best-selling book, percentage-wise — meaning that it sold a higher percentage of its print run than any other title.
Whatever actual sales numbers that translated to, it was enough for the feature’s previous home, Fear, to have been promoted from a bi-monthly to a monthly publication schedule as of Manny’s sixth appearance within its pages (Fear #15 [Aug., 1973]), and for that status to continue through to the Man-Thing’s own title. (By way of comparison, Iron Man was only coming out every two months during this same period.) It also made it completely understandable that Marvel would seek to leverage the muck-monster’s popularity by having him make semi-regular appearances in the black-and-white horror anthology title Monsters Unleashed (where he sometimes took the cover spot, as with issue #5 [Apr., 1974], whose Bob Larkin-painted cover is shown at left).
And as of May, 1974, it also engendered a color-comics spin-off, as the first issue of Giant-Size Man Thing (a title which, for some unfathomable reason, is exponentially funnier than Man-Thing is on its own) arrived in spinner racks. This 64-page package (sorry) featured a new 25-page lead story featuring Manny’s precursor in the swamp-monster sweepstakes at Marvel, the Hulk villain known as the Glob. (Although once Gerber was through re-conceptualizing him, and Ploog re-designing him, there honestly wasn’t much left of the original Roy Thomas-Herb Trimpe character but the name.)
Meanwhile, the Man-Thing’s “heat” was reflected in his guest appearances in other Marvel heroes’ titles through this period. Of course, he’d been firmly established as belonging to the same fictional universe as the publisher’s superheroes as far back as his second appearance, when he guest-starred with Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales #12 (Jun., 1972); more recently, in Marvel Two-in-One #1 (Jan., 1974), he’d teamed up with the Thing (who took a trip to Florida for no better reason than he thought this new guy was infringing on his name). And coming up in the months immediately following May’s double-shot of Man-Thing solo titles, yet another urban-based superhero — Daredevil, the Man Without Fear — would be wading into the waters of the Everglades for a close encounter with the creature formerly known as Ted Sallis (as depicted on the Gil Kane-pencilled cover for DD #114 shown at left).
Of course, Manny’s guest-shots in Marvel Two-in-One and Daredevil were both written by Steve Gerber, who clearly had a vested interest in promoting the character’s Marvel Universe profile. But the swamp monster was also about to make an unexpected appearance in a story written by a different Steve — Englehart, that is — in a title whose genre — martial arts — was every bit as unlikely a berth for a horror-comics star as any of Marvel’s “cape” comics.
OK, I just wrote “about to make” — but, in fact, Man-Thing’s appearance in Master of Kung Fu #19 would be released on the very same day as Man-Thing #8: May 21, 1974. And while you won’t be reading more about that comic book here today, you won’t have very long to wait; just three days, as it happens. So don’t put your muck boots away quite yet, all right?
Art by Marie Severin and Joe Sinnott.
Art by Michael Golden.
*In researching this post, I discovered that some of my questions (as well as others) had eventually found their way into a sequel to this storyline, published in The Savage She-Hulk #7-8 (Aug. & Sep., 1980). In this two-parter, written by David Anthony Kraft and drawn by Mike Vosburg and Chic Stone, the titular heroine makes an unscheduled visit to La Hacienda, where being bathed in the waters of the Rainbow Fountain “cure” her of her gamma radiation-based condition. But though Jennifer Walters initially appreciates the community’s tranquility, she soon learns that its price is an unnatural passivity — a discovery she makes when one of the longtime residents is senselessly killed by alligators, simply because no one has been motivated to build a basic ‘gator-proof fence in the past four-hundred-plus years. Calling out the Fathers as well as their “flock”, lawyer Jen successfully makes the case that a paradise that depends on its inhabitants never doing anything is no place for human beings — at least, not those who wish to fully engage with life:
I want to be careful here not to oversell this story. In trying to deal with multiple plot elements from the old Man-Thing series within these two issues, Kraft has bitten off more than he can successfully chew, resulting in a rather disjointed narrative (for example, the obligatory fight scene between She-Hulk and Man-Thing has nothing to do with anything else that happens, either before or after); meanwhile, the Vosburg-Stone art is clearly better suited to the story’s superheroic aspects than its horrific ones. But for all that, I still find this a fascinating — perhaps even exemplary — instance of one writer thoughtfully interrogating the themes of an earlier story by a different writer, without resorting to retconning the earlier story’s events out of existence . Honestly, I wish we had more comics like these.
“Giant-Size Man Thing (a title which, for some unfathomable reason, is exponentially funnier” My wife, who is not a comics fan, definitely finds it so.
The moral of the piece that Schist is too corrupted by the world to benefit from the fountain doesn’t quite mesh with “you’re supposed to wash in it, not drink it!” The point would have been better made if Schist had used the waters as prescribed and then rejected it, though of course we wouldn’t have gotten man-into-monster.
That said, this one worked for me when I read it in Essential Man-Thing a few years back.
I know a comic book shop owner who has a great story; he’s attending on of those old-school comic-cons, you know the kind, the way they used to be, no cosplay attention seekers, no silly funko pops, no CGC witnessed book signings…however it’s in Canada and it’s the 80’s….so his tables where he sets up shop is across the isle from.. a porn star selling VHS tapes and signing; well, comic nerd being as mature as we are, the dare is put forth to stand in the queue with the guys and their porn mags and ask her to sign his…Giant Size Man Thing!
Turns out it was #4, bit of a waste to get signed as that’s Howard’s 1st solo story I believe, stunning Brunner art work! Also, that’s when you know you’re a nerd, you hear that story and ask which issue it was as opposed to which porn star it was!
Anyway gentlemen, another great read and are you all buying what I’m selling, August 1974 cover dated issues – what a month! You can see why I’m getting the whole set! Alan’s done a lot of them here but along side what he bought: Amazing Spider-Man #135 (2nd punisher), Tomb #23, Marvel Team Up #24 with Brother Voodoo, Fantastic Four #149, Ghost Rider #7 and Power-Man #20 (I like Cage so enjoyed this one). Great month!
I didn’t get this off the racks 50 years ago but filled in most of the Man-Thing holes in my collection in later decades. I love Gerber’s entire run, but the issues with Ploog are a definite high-point. Gotta run off to work just now but will add more thoughts later on regarding this little muckish classic!
This was definitely some of Mike Ploog’s best work and of course it was a pleasure to see both MT 7-8 penciled and inked by Ploog. 1974 was definitely a peak period for both Gerber and Ploog. Ploog’s run on Man-Thing was brief (MT 5-11 and GSMT 1) but very memorable. This was a good story for review. While I liked MT 5-6, it is also one of the saddest and most depressing stories I’ve ever read (the suicide of a clown). Even though I do remember this story (MT 8), you brought up some interesting points. I genuinely thought the professor had died (I never read the She-Hulk’s first series), so it was news to me to read he was still alive, and I had never seen that Michael Golden She-Hulk cover (nice cover). Regarding F.A. Schist….I never thought about it at the time, and not until it was either brought up in a letter column or directly pointed out to me…but…”F.A.Schist?”…facist? I guess Steve G could be a little heavy-handed…not sure what that was all about since Schist appeared to be just a corrupt businessman. Certainly Steve was putting a lot of messaging in his stories (especially at the end of this issue as you showed above with Schist’s comments about his life being a waste), but somehow he made it work and made it all entertaining. The only additional thought I had was (and this is now….it never occurred to me 50 years ago)….if the “Fathers” were so concerned about the MT/Ted Sallis keeping their secret that they let him remain the Man-Thing at the end, why were they going to cure him in the first place? Didn’t they realize he would become human? Or did they worry that he would behave like Schist? It doesn’t really make sense, but of course the Man-Thing could not be cured or there would be no series. Oh well..
I did also notice that Steve did a a couple of retcons on Schist. When he first appeared and in all appearances before MT 7 there is no mention about this Fountain of Youth obsession, so it just may be something Steve came up with for a new storyline. Then in GSMT 2, it is revealed that Schist had a wife and adult daughter who were never even remotely discussed in any of his previous appearances.
It appears you won’t be discussing GSMT 1 so just thought I’d mention that this story has a villainous cult leader with a face partly hidden by a hood but clearly looks like Nixon. He has an odd name..I believe it was Yagzan. I don’t know..if you say it fast does it sound like Nixon? I believe there was an interview where Gerber said Ploog had drawn the villain to look like Nixon and Gerber just went with it. I haven’t done any research on this so don’t know the full story, but it was a strange issue (well drawn of course). And yes, as you noted Alan, the Glob that appeared in this story did not look much like the Glob from Hulk 121 and 129.
I’ve come to realize something else in reading your Man-Thing reviews. While I like Gerber’s stories very much, I now realize I did not care much for the character of Man-Thing, who was not much of a character. After all, MT is mute and mindless and not really as interesting as DC’s Swamp Thing. I can’t even remember why I started buying Man-Thing in Adventure into Fear about a year earlier (Fear 14 or 15), but I did continue to buy it and bought the entire first run of Man-Thing (1-22), but I now look at that as a tribute to the excellent writing of Steve Gerber. In various interviews Gerber noted that Man-Thing was a perfect vehicle to write just about any kind of story. Indeed, M-T 9 and 10 (which I am not sure you will be reviewing) was a strange and touching (and unusual) character study of an old couple and their dog in the swamp and it was sad and excellent. I bring all this up because I remember that Marvel revived the Man-Thing series in 1979. The writers were Michael Fleischer and Chris Claremont. The stories were ok ( I don’t remember them at all, sorry to say), but the revival had a short bimonthly run of 11 issues. And as far as I can recall there has not been a regular long running Man-Thing series since. So what made this series in 1974 so successful? Was it the great art from Mike Ploog? Was it the wild and off-beat stories of Steve Gerber? I don’t know and don’t have any answers, but I know I was buying this series would continue till the end of both this series and the Giant -Size series in 1975. Perhaps horror was just very popular in 1974 since it appears the Dracula comic was also successful at this time. thanks for another enjoyable review Alan.
The Fleischer/Claremont revival series was nowhere near as weird as Gerber’s work and nowhere near as good or interesting. I suspect this is not a coincidence.
Yeah, I got those issues and they just couldn’t conjure up that old Gerber magic or create one of their own. Not every Gerber story was a winner, but they generally had a weird, memorable aspect to them due to his sense of humor, outrage and somewhat bent imagination. Fleischer and Claremont both had their own unique talents as writers, and maybe it’s unfair to compare them to Gerber on Man-Thing. The very nature of the character makes him difficult to write well, a mostly mindless creature who either unwittingly shambles into trouble or just somehow attracts trouble, but unlike Hulk or Swamp Thing can’t articulate or even ponder his troubles. But somehow, the intense emotions of others triggers him into a variety of actions, including attacking or retreating from the sources, or just checking it out of primitive curiosity.
Fleischer and Claremont can write great character but their style of characterization doesn’t mesh well with Man-Thing.
As a friend of mine puts it, Man-Thing was like a guest-star in his own book so the quality depended entirely on who the central character was. Sometimes it was awesome — the dying clown, poor Dawg in the next story — and other times we got a lemon.
One thing I noticed reading the Essentials, Gerber frequently cheats on the rules. In one story Man-Thing miraculously remembers how to bind a broken arm. When he meets Richard Rory (IIRC) Richard freaks out from fear but Man-Thing doesn’t attack. That’s annoying.
Hi, Bruce,
I was wondering if someone would bring up “F.A. Schist.” I think Gerber had axes to grind, and though he usually let the characters take center stage to any messaging, this was atypically sledgehammer-subtle. To say nothing of incorrect; Schist may have been a skunk, but he was a capitalist through and through. It’s hard to recall, but I think the word “fascist” (often coupled with “pig”) was a bit of a catch-all slur in the 1960s (and Gerber definitely was a child of the ’60s) for THE MAN.
I like to think that, had he the chance to revisit it, Gerber would do something a little bit more nuanced.
Thanks Bill. I agree with your comments here and below. Regarding the “resolution” to the Omega storyline in Defenders 76-77, I don’t believe there is anyone that was satisfied with those issues since they were not written by Steve Gerber and/or Mary Skrenes. Gerber admitted in a later interview that those stories had nothing to do with he had planned for the characters but unfortunately we will never know what those plans were.
Over in the “Comic Book Historians” page on Facebook, some Nutt started a thread Under the name of his lovely wife, Debbie Lockwood) asking members of the group about all the books in Lucien’s library that they’d most like to read. It has been receiving quite a number of visits, and OMEGA gets mentioned a few times….
Well, since I didn’t care for either of the Big 2’s swamp monster heroes in 1974, I missed this. Which is a shame, because I really came to love Ploog’s work in later years, once I discovered it, and of course, Gerber is one of the most original, iconoclastic writers comics produced during this entire era. I’m constantly amazed and chagrined at how many great stories I missed out on, due to my insistance than the only good stories had capes in them. What a shame.
By the way, I also thought the Fathers’ rationale for wanting to cure Sallis/not cure Sallis was weird and didn’t really make much sense. Also, where did the Fathers get advanced technology for their cave when they’d been spending their all their time in La Hacienda since they drank the Rainbow water?
Also…did you notice how much less monster-like the Fathers looked in She-Hulk than they did in Man-Thing? What was up with that?
Anyway, thanks for introducing me now, to what I should have read then, Alan. Better late than never!
I wondered about the tech too.
Back home again, after work & trivia (my team, Pretzel Logic, came in 1st place!), fed the cats & dog and took the latter for a walk and now logged back into Alan’s half-century waaaay back machine! Anyhow, great cover! And it actually closely represented scenes in the story, so it wasn’t a cheat at all, even it didn’t mimic an exact scene. I must admit that even if my 11-year-old self had gotten this off the racks in 1974, Gerber’s “fascist” joke would’ve gone over my head, although I’d read books about WWII and was certainly familiar with the term. My 61-year-old self doesn’t mind at all that Gerber was engaged in a bit of moralizing in this tale, and ensuring that a destructive jerk got his just desserts. Doesn’t always happen in real life.
In 1974 I was living in Utah and Florida seemed an exotic far off land. Now I’ve been living in Florida for 25 years now, not quite near any swamps but within a half mile of a creek wherein in just five years I’ve seen many large turtles and one alligator but now they’re all gone and more and more natural habitat is being wiped out for ever more people. Paving over paradise for parking lots, condos, shopping centers, and, oh, yeah, airports, etc.
500 years ago, even Manhattan Island was mostly wilderness. Gerber’s pocket human paradise couldn’t have supported all that many people, although in fantasies scores of people can live in a little shack. Too many or too few people can make paradise a miserable place, I’d think. Either way, I’d suspect most of the inhabitants would be bored out of their skulls, unless they keep themselves so perpetually stoned with magic mushrooms they don’t really mind. But then there are those elders who got wise a little too late and like to play their little jokes on outsiders — “yes, go ahead, drink up our magic water! You’ll love what it does for your complexion!”
I love how Gerber manages to mix dark humor with horror, and Ploog’s style is a fine mix of somewhat comic, but moody and eerie as well. The comic aspects appear more prevalent in his Man-Thing run than in his other horror works, but IMO that fits in well with Gerber’s writing style. That would be more evident in the next two-part story, the tragedy of Dawg, which just thinking about can make my old blue eyes weepy.
Enjoy reminiscing about these old classics courtesy of Alan and everyone else, whether or not we all read them 50 years ago or more recently.
Glad to hear you won. Trivia is inherently ‘non-trivial.”
What’s that old sci-fi chestnut again? Ah, yes…
There are some things man was never meant to tamper with.
This reminds me a bit of the episode of The Twilight Zone titled “Valley of the Shadow” written by Charles Beaumont, with its small town with miraculous technology that is kept hidden from the rest of the world because humanity in general is just not ready for such awesome power. There’s a quote from the episode that leads me to wonder if Steve Gerber was influenced, consciously or not, by it…
“Think! What did you do with Professor Einstein’s primitive equation, e=mc squared? It could have been used to bring waters to the deserts, to feed starving millions. Was it? It was used to destroy countless thousands of human beings.”
Call me skeptical or cynical, but there’s just too many people like Mr. F. A. Schist in the real world, so that any invention, any new technology that has the potential to make things better for a significant part of the population is either A) quickly monopolized by a greedy few who see it as a way to increase their already-obscene wealth or B) weaponized to kill people instead.
I certainly wouldn’t trust humanity with immortality.
Similarly, a Doc Savage story “The Time Terror” suggests a treatment for speeding up evolution would go to the rich and powerful, turning them into a master race. The scientist agrees to bury his research.
Of course “The world is not ready” is one of those tropes that crops up a lot, and in many cases I’m thinking the tech would do enough good it’s worth trying.
I was a big fan of the Man-Thing book (after only starting to read the Fear run with the last issue).
I have to say that these two issues were my least favorite of the entire run. The Night of the Laughing Dead arc that preceded it and the Dawg arc that followed it were vastly my preference, even with their similarities to Carnival of Souls (1962) and Twilight Zone‘s The Hunt
Gerber could become inspired by something else (Butterflies Are Free probably influenced A Candle for Sainte-Cloud in #15) but he always took it in a new (and usually interesting) direction. Gerber also influenced subsequent writers (Red Sails at 40,000 Feet had to be an influence on Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and possibly the Pirates of the Carribean franchise.)
in a certain way, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (and the Marty Pasko issues that preceded it) were more of a continuation of Man-Thing than anything Marvel has done.
Although both Fleischer and Clermont are interesting writers, I wonder what David Anthony Kraft and J.M. de Matteis (who had both effectively followed Gerber on The Defenders) or even Moore or Pasko could have done with the book.
Given that the shed at my parents’ house contained a shovel with the name “F. A. Schullan Construction Company” carved into the handle (to prevent the kind of pilferage a cousin of my dad’s had apparently perpetrated when he worked for them a few decades before), I always liked “F. A. Schist’s” name. I liked it more after being stationed in Germany and understanding it is also a sort of pun on a common German word.
DeMatteis might have been interesting. Kraft remains one of my least favorite writers of the Bronze Age.
He did a sort of Gerber pastiche on The Defenders that was sort of interesting.
I also liked his Secret Society of Supervillains story that re-introduced CPT Comet. It seemed to be a nice distillation of what John Broome had implied in his stories in Strange Adventures in the early 1950s.
It captured the loneliness of knowing you are the only one of your kind and that the only way you insure there will be more of your kind in preserving the primitive brutes who exist now long enough to give rise to more people like you.
In the original CPT Comet story (Strange Adventures 9 & 10), this is brought home when the antagonist in the two-part origin story discovers the rest of his people have died while in suspended animation and the villain commits suicide.
That pre-Code stuff went hard sometimes . . . .
Re MOKF#19: In today’s joined up world Films and tv ( eg Doctor Who) are released at the same time across many different countries. Not the same 50 years ago….but interestingly MOKF19 was immediately ‘reprinted’ in UK’s Avengers#36, issued 25 May 1974. I may well have read the story before you Alan ( or at least the first part of the story….MOKF 19 was split over two issues of UK Avengers (#36 and #37)! Several of the following MOKF stories may well have seen the light in the UK first, before the US.
In Alan’s ongoing chronicle of all the wild and weird books that Marvel (and others) published in this golden era of the early 1970s, a special spot needs to be reserved for Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing stories. It’s one thing to say that you never quite predict what would happen next in a series like Captain America & the Falcon or the Black Panther series in Jungle Action. But with Man-Thing, anything was possible, from social satire to high fantasy to grim interpersonal drama. A few people have mentioned that they didn’t like the book because Man-Thing itself had no particular character, but to me, that was precisely made it so special (to say nothing of distinguishing it from Swamp Thing over at DC). It wasn’t always great, but it sure was different.
The other thing about this book is that so many different artists were able to successfully leave their mark on this series. I mean, how many titles can claim extended runs by both Val Mayerik and Jim Mooney (more than 20 years after Tommy Tomorrow!)? But I think of all the collaborators who most influenced the book, Mike Ploog deserves a place of honor. Short though his run was, he really brought an energy to the book that even a John Buscema didn’t. In a way, he was like Joe Staton in that his work was one half-step away from being cartoony while still conveying the necessary elements of horror and outright strangeness.
(Not sure if your 50-year-old reading included the black-and-white Planet of the Apes book, Alan, but if it did, I hope you’ll spare the time to include one of the issues that were shot directly from Ploog’s pencils. They are a revelation!)
Having said all that, I have to say that this was an intriguing story, but not necessarily one of Gerber’s best, especially since the previous two-parter (which I can’t think of without hearing the Kinks’ “Death of a Clown”) WAS one of the more memorable ones of this time. I gathered Gerber wanted to end the F. A. Schist storyline in a somewhat spectacular way by exposing the character’s ugliness, and I like the idea of tying in the Fountain of Youth. (Actually, now that I think on it, it presaged the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, didn’t it? Even down to the creature that Schist turned into.) But as much as I appreciated it – and appreciated being able to revisit in here – it just didn’t resonate with me the way other Man-Thing stories had – or would.
By the way, this was the first time I heard that the theme of this story had been revisited, in an implicitly critical way, by David A. Kraft, of all people. Wasn’t Kraft an early champion of Gerber? (He lent his name to the wizard Dakimh – David A. Kraft is my hero, right?). And wasn’t Kraft also responsible for that (to my mind) awful conclusion to the Omega the Unknown story in the pages of the Defenders. To me, you don’t take a story that had a recurring line like “The body does what it can to survive” and end it the way Kraft did.
No that was Stephen Grant who did the dreadful finish to Omega.
Thanks for the correction! (And thanks for reassuring me that I was NOT the only one who hated that ending to the Omega story.(
I didn’t follow Omega back in the day but when I read the Epic collection I appreciated how bad the finish was. Also derivative of the Korvac saga finish in having the Defenders discovering they were the wrong side.
No-one liked the conclusion to the Omega storyline……
I thought Jim Mooney’s work at the tail-end of the Man-Thing series in 1975 as the best of his career.
Too bad Gerber and Skrenes did not get to finish it . . . .
Mooney did a WONDERFUL job with the facial expressions. Especially Richard Rory…