If aging memory serves, it wasn’t long after the subject of today’s post first went on sale that it started to rapidly climb in value on the collector’s market — a phenomenon that was surely almost wholly attributable to the comic’s nine-page backup story, which presented the long-awaited first solo adventure of Howard the Duck.  But as epochal as Howard’s ascent to feature-starring status undoubtedly was half a century ago, the story which occupied the issue’s first thirty pages — “The Kid’s Night Out!”, starring the title’s muck-encrusted headliner, the Man-Thing — could hardly be called an inconsequential piece of work.  Rather, it’s one of the most memorable episodes of the lead feature’s entire original run… and it’s where we’ll begin our coverage of this seminal fifty-year-old comic book today. 

Gerber’s primary artistic collaborators on this story were Ed Hannigan and Ron Wilson, both credited as pencillers.  Both were young artists, and relatively new to the profession; but while Wilson had been around long enough to accrue multiple story credits on such books as Master of Kung Fu, Power Man, and Tales of the Zombie, this was only Hannigan’s second credit at Marvel, at least in a story published stateside.  (Prior to his first full story job in Planet of the Apes #5 [Feb., 1975], Hannigan had produced a number of pieces for the publisher’s UK line.).  Based on what I know of the artists’ styles from their other work, I see a good bit more of Hannigan than of Wilson in these pages… but I could easily be wrong.  And, of course, the distinctive inking of Frank Springer, himself an experienced penciller, helps provide visual continuity throughout the story.

Responding to the emotional stimulus of the trapped deer’s desperation, the Man-Thing steps forward and lifts the fallen tree, freeing the animal.  He then continues his aimless ramble, “seeking something else to feel”, until…

On the page above, notice how the funeral’s floral arrangement extends from the lid of the coffin, to its base, and then along the feet of the mourners, ultimately becoming part of the panel borders; a subtle visual effect that’s continued on through the following page…

The distraught young woman continues her imprecations, ignoring warnings from one of the mourners — the deceased’s uncle, Samuel Pinder — until, finally, Pinder takes matters into his own hands…

By the time Sam Pinder reaches Alice Rimes, the Man-Thing has stepped a short distance away, and so isn’t immediately seen by Pinder before he attacks the stunned girl…

Alice’s fellow students watch her pass in silence, each of them wondering “what Edmond’s words may say about him,”  until, finally, someone steps in front of her to block her way.  But it’s not a student — rather, it’s the school’s P.E. teacher, Lewis Milner, whom we saw earlier as one of the mourners at the funeral.  He demands that Alice hand over Edmond’s diary…

“The Book of Edmond” is another of the experiments with illustrated text that Gerber had begun conducting in recent months (see Giant-Size Defenders #3 for an earlier example); at five uninterrupted pages, it’s his most extensive use of this technique to date.

The technique’s utility in this particular story is at least two-fold.  First, it allows for Gerber to present considerably more information about the life of Edmond Winshed than he could ever have done in the same number of conventional comics-format pages; and to do so without overbalancing the narrative in the way that simply expanding the story’s page count would have.  Second, it immerses us within Edmond’s own subjective point of view, at a level which the natural imperatives of sequential art (“show, don’t tell”) would have interfered with; to this end, the illustrations that accompany the text are mostly symbolic, rather than representational, expressing Edmond’s inner landscape — which, of course, is dominated by his self-identification with the Man-Thing — rather than objective reality.

While the artwork by Hannigan, Wilson, and Springer is effective throughout the story, I think its at its best in these individual illustrations, which — especially in the pieces done to accompany Chapters 1 and II of Edmond’s diary — employ a dramatic chiaroscuro technique that eschews conventional linework to define forms entirely by light, shadow, and color, in a way reminiscent of Jim Steranko’s Marvel comic-book art of a few years before.

Asked in a 2002 interview (eventually published in Comic Book Creator #6 [Winter, 2014]) whether there was a strong autobiographical element in “The Kid’s Night Out!!”, Steve Gerber readily acknowledged that there was — although he then went on to clarify that readers shouldn’t assume a strict one-to-one correspondence between the circumstances encountered by his own younger self, and those faced by Edmond Winshed:

I was never grossly obese, but I was always overweight.  Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if I had just been some roly-poly kid who could resign himself to that, but I was always right over the line.  I was the last one picked with the soccer team or the baseball team or anything else, because my eyes were so bad…  I didn’t really have much depth perception, so I would get hit in the head a lot by softballs and footballs. [laughs]  Yeah, that story came, very much so, from personal experience.

The phallic symbolism of the hammer would likely be plain to any reader from the text alone; on the other hand, the concurrent Thor-referencing “if he be worthy” vibe is probably dependent on the accompanying illustration.

At this point, we’ve reached the end of Edmond’s diary… but not of the story’s extended experiment with illustrated text, as we have one last page of such — Alice’s epilogue —  left to experience.  In a note to readers on this issue’s letters page, Steve Gerber gratefully acknowledged the help of another Marvel talent, letterer Annette Kawecki (who, it should be noted, didn’t actually letter this particular story), in the crafting of Alice’s words:

Annette and I spent a slightly anguishing evening writing Alice’s epilogue to Edmond’s manuscript together.  It is, I think, the single most important page in the story — and the best.  If you agree, fully half the credit is Annette’s.  Half the credit… and all the appreciation I know how to express.

Three months later, the letters column of Giant-Size Man-Thing #5 featured a very positive missive from future pro cartoonist Fred Hembeck which noted that some elements of the story, such as “a kid dying of running laps” were “a little melodramatic… but that is not bad.  These stories are larger than life.”  That prompted the following response (probably written by Gerber):

(To the best of my knowledge, neither Gerber nor anyone else ever offered any further details about the “real-life” inspiration for Edmond’s death.)

(According to the Grand Comics Database, the page above was pencilled by neither Ed Hannigan nor Ron Wilson, but rather by John Buscema; there’s no further information given justifying this attribution, so make of it what you will.)

Along with Edmond’s death-by-running-laps, Fred Hembeck’s GSMT #5 letter of comment mentioned “Alice hanging from the rings” as one of this story’s more melodramatic elements; notably, the editorial response didn’t offer a real-world antecedent for that particular scene.  Nor did Gerber attempt to frame it as “realistic” when it came up in an interview published not long after this in Marvel’s own in-house fan magazine FOOM (specifically, in issue #9 [Mar., 1975]):

The scene the way I had written it originally had her just on the floor of the gymnasium, encircled by Edmund’s parents, the gym teacher, and these other people. I decided, basically for visual impact, to use something a little stronger than that- having her hang from those gym rings. I don’t think that was exceptionally realistic any more than I think the rest of the story was realistic.

In the gym, Alice tells her captors that they won’t get away with this: “When my parents hear — ”

But Lewis Milner cuts her off.  “I already called your parents.  They’re as… worried about ya as we are.”  According to Milner, he and the others have Alice’s folks’ permission to do whatever may be necessary to help their daughter come to her senses (she’s been keeping to herself so much since Edmond’s death, you understand, letting her studies slide, etc.)…

Among those on the receiving end of the Man-Thing’s (or, if you prefer, Edmond’s) vengeance, that which is here dealt out to Elinore Pinder — who, you may have noticed, hasn’t had a single word of dialogue in the story (not even in the context of Edmond’s diary), and now, never can — may seem the most brutal… and perhaps, also, the most unjust, given that she had at least been kind to Edmond in the past.  But the word here is “vengeance”, after all, rather than justice; and in the end, whatever else “The Kid’s Night Out!” might be, it is without doubt a horror story.

The Man-Thing now turns his attention now to the last of Edmond and Alice’s male tormentors (interestingly, other than Elinore, the guilty females — i.e., Edmond’s mother and grandmother — appear to make it through this sequence unscathed, at least physically) — and, clearly, also the most guilty: Lewis Milner.

In February, 1975, your humble blogger was seventeen years old, and in my final semester of high school.  As a short, soft-bodied, nerdy kid, I’d experienced my share of on-campus bullying (mostly in junior high), and I knew as well as Edmond Winshed (not to mention Steve Gerber) the regular humiliation of always being the last guy picked for any kind of athletic competition.  On the other hand, I was fortunate enough to have not been too overweight (something else I had in common with Gerber); also, the small private school I attended didn’t put much emphasis on sports, or even basic Phys. Ed., so I never had to deal with anyone remotely like Lewis Milner.  All of which is to say that while I identified with Edmond to a certain extent, I didn’t really internalize his story… mostly because I didn’t have to.  (Honestly, I don’t think I realized at the time just how lucky I was.)  But even if I didn’t take the story “to heart”, as it were, that didn’t mean I didn’t find it powerful… or that I didn’t have a clue what it must have meant to Steve Gerber to have this opportunity to exorcise a few of his own high school-era demons.

In the same FOOM #9 interview quoted from earlier in this post, Gerber was asked to expound on his “theory of comic books as self-therapy”; after acknowledging that the story in Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 did indeed draw on his “personal experience of growing up”, the author went on to say:

It’s not so much therapy, exactly.  I guess it is, in a way. It’s a means of getting out rage.  The trouble is, that when you let it just become therapy it sometimes weakens the story on the whole.  I don’t like the last chapter of that story, where Man-Thing comes into the gym and basically tears everyone limb-from-limb.  It came out as pure revenge.  While I think it had some exciting visual things that made it good for the comic book medium, it was not a true ending for that particular story.  The true ending to that particular story should have been that nothing happened.  Alice read the manuscript to the kids, they said, “Maybe we’ll print it, we’ll see.” She went back to the locker, put it away, and that’s the end of the story. Nothing happened. There was an alternate end to the story, and that’s what I did in the following issue…

After noting other less than “exceptionally realistic” aspects of the story (such as Alice being hung from the gym rings, Gerber’s comments about which we’ve already quoted), the writer concluded:

The next two issues of MAN-THING were in a sense an apology for that story. An apology for myself. I don’t know what the readers are going to say.  The other thing that could have happened as a result of Edmund’s death was a severe reaction against the high school for all the wrong reasons. That’s what happened to the book burning. The subsequent results, the death and rebirth of Man-Thing in issues 17 and 18. Those books were written about things I was concerned about but I think it becomes a problem when it really becomes therapy.

In those “next two issues” referred to here, Man-Thing #17 and #18, Steve Gerber would make what appeared at the time to be his final statement not just on Citrusville’s high school, but on the entire town.  Next month, we’ll be taking a look at those issues, as well as the preceding chapter of what we’ll call the Mad Viking Trilogy, which had appeared in Man-Thing #16 one month ahead of Giant-Size Man-Thing #4.  I hope to see you then.

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And now, for something completely different!

Well, OK, maybe not completely different, given that “Frog Death!” is, like “The Kid’s Night Out!”, a Marvel Comics story of fifty years’ vintage written by one Steve Gerber.  But in almost every other way that counts, the debut solo adventure of Howard the Duck is very much its own thing.

As previously discussed in our posts on Fear #19 and Man-Thing #1 (from sixteen and fifteen months ago, respectively), Howard was a sensation with fans virtually from his debut appearance on the last few pages of the former book; and demand for his return, following a editorially-decreed, supposed-to-be-fatal plunge into a dimensional void just a few pages into the latter book, was both loud and insistent.  So how come this story took well over a year to come to fruition?

At least some of the blame seems to fall upon the shoulders of the superstar artist initially slated to draw “Frog Death!” — the immensely talented, but notoriously slow (or at least over-committed), Neal Adams.  According to the artist who did end up pencilling (and inking, and coloring) the story, Frank Brunner, it was Adams’ alleged foot-dragging that provided him with the opportunity to be involved in launching Howard’s solo strip, as he related for a Gerber/HtD retrospective in Back Issue #31 (Nov., 2008):

The first time I saw Howard in Man-Thing, I knew I had to be part of this Duck’s career; he was unique compared to the rest of the Marvel Universe…  When I contacted Gerber about Howard the Duck, he said he’d already written a short story as a backup in Giant-Size Man-Thing, and the script had been sitting on Neal’s drawing board for six months with no progress!  I said, ‘Send it to me. I can start right away!’ And the rest, as they say, ‘is history.’

Of course, if you read our Giant-Size Man-Thing #3 post from three months ago, you’ll know that Gerber and Brunner’s “Frog Death!” was originally supposed to appear there, where it would have nicely complemented the lead story — a yarn that re-united the Man-Thing with several of his and Howard’s comrades from Fear #19/Man-Thing #1.  But as a note from Gerber on the letters page of that issue explained, as of the time he was writing, Howard’s solo debut was “still in California, on the sun-splashed drawing board of Frank Brunner.”  So it would seem that if there’s blame to go around, Mr. Brunner is probably eligible for at least a small share.

But, in the end, all that hardly matters, does it?  Fifty years later, “Frog Death!” is right here, ready to hand, waiting patiently for our perusal…

Back in February, 1975, I may or may not have recognized the name of “spiritual guide” Carl Barks — the long-anonymous Good Duck Artist who’d written and drawn hundreds of comic-book stories featuring Donald Duck and his feathered ilk (including, of course, Barks’ own creation, Uncle Scrooge) for the Walt Disney Company-licensed comic books produced by Western Publishing from the early ’40s through the late ’60s.  (If my younger self did have a clue who Barks was, it was probably thanks to my friend and fellow comics fan Ken Stribling, whose knowledge of comics history considerably outstripped my own at this time.)  Looking back now, it seems that while it was clearly appropriate to give Barks a shout-out, it was also perhaps more than a little imprudent on Marvel’s part — at least if they hoped to fly below the radar of the corporation that had launched a major lawsuit against Dan O’Neill’s Air Pirates just a few years before,

In a 1994 radio interview (eventually transcribed and published in Comic Book Creator #33 [Winter, 2024]), Steve Gerber was asked”, “Why Cleveland?”  He responded with the following:

Cleveland was the joke city of the moment, actually.  I had never been to Cleveland at the time I wrote that. It just seemed like the logical place. I mean, somewhere in the Rust Belt, someplace that was then, you know, sort of a city on its way down.  It seemed like the perfect location for a character like that…

 

I’ve never actually spent any time in Cleveland…  All the landmarks and everything were completely made up and nobody in Cleveland ever complained, which I found interesting.

I’ll leave it to others with more personal knowledge of the Forest City to opine on whether Gerber’s assessment of the place (circa 1975) was fair or not.  For now, however, let’s move on…

Not far away, Howard is sitting on a stoop with his two new acquaintances, answering their questions about how things are different back where he comes from:  “More ducks.  Apes don’t talk.”  And then…

For some reason, the original version of Frank Brunner’s cover for Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 — which included an inset portrait of Howard more or less identical to that in the circle-shaped panel above — was modified, with Howard’s mug being replaced by an all-text blurb, instead.  (A blurb which, incidentally, managed to misspell “Garko” as “Gorko”.)  Was someone in the Marvel offices still skittish about putting a pic of a funny animal on the cover of a “serious” comic book?  It certainly seems possible, at least.

Frank Brunner’s rendition of Howard the Duck follows that of the mallard’s original artist, Val Mayerik, quite closely — although I think it’s fair to say that his Howard bears an even closer resemblance to Donald than Mayerik’s did.

So ends Howard the Duck’s first, er, flight.  Among other things, it’s the “purest” version of Frank Brunner’s visual interpretation we’d ever get, at least in terms of story pages, since the artist wouldn’t end up inking any of the following series installments he’d pencil (and would color only one).  That didn’t mean there wasn’t still plenty to look forward to, however, both from Brunner and his artistic successors on the strip… and, of course, from Steve Gerber, whose absurdist, acerbic sensibility would prove to be the Duck’s heart and soul.

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Like every other “Giant-Size” comic published by Marvel during this era, Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 included some reprinted material.  So, in the interest of completeness if nothing else, we’ll wrap this post up by touching briefly on the two short tales from the publisher’s archives that filled out this issue’s page count.

The first, and most enjoyable of the pair, is “I Entered the… Doorway to Doom!”, by artist Steve Ditko and an unknown scripter.  Originally published in Strange Tales #72 (Dec., 1959), this five-pager about a Russian farmer’s discovery of a cavern containing a gateway to a dimension full of conquest-hungry aliens may not be anything to write home about, story-wise; but Ditko’s designs for the green, top-shaped aliens, who somehow manage to be both cute and menacing at the same time, are a lot of fun.

The second, and less interesting, offering is “The Man With No Past”, first presented in Journey into Mystery #21 (Jan., 1955).  Written by Paul S. Newman, the story recounts the efforts of a commercial artist to seek psychiatric help for his cripplingly severe claustrophobia.  Directed under hypnosis to draw a scene from his earliest memory, the patient can remember nothing earlier than his first day at his current job, just one year before… until, in a breakthrough, he draws himself lying in a coffin!  He’s actually a “reincarnated” dead guy.  Get it?  No?  Me either.   Outside of its being well-illustrated by the always reliable Joe Maneely, this one has little justification for having been returned to print.  But so it goes.