Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

This week at Robot 6 I wrote about TwoMorrows' Swampmen: Muck-Monsters and Their Makers, a book of features, interviews and tons of art edited by Jon B. Cooke and George Khoury (the above image is a title page, featuring a painting by Douglas Kaluba).

They "only" cover the swamp monster genre from a Golden Age prose short story to the end of the 1980s climax of Swamp Thing, not discussing the phenomenon's relationship with film (not even the based-on-the-comics swamp monster movies, like the Swamp Thing films and TV shows, except in passing during interviews), or of DC and Marvel's efforts to keep their respective 'Things ongoing concerns, despite no one ever quite being able to replicate what Alan Moore did for DC or Steve Gerber did for Marvel. It occurs to me there's probably a book about swamp monsters to be written—like, a book-book—and that this represents a hell of a head-start on it, with plenty of research and interviews done already, should Cooke or any of his collaborators want to sit down to set down the whole history of the swamp monster genre of horror.

In my review, I sort of mused on why it is that the weird little sub-genre became so popular and, given Moore's run on Swamp Thing, so important to comics history, and the best I could come up with was coincidence, although Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein offered his own rather convincing theory, which I shared at the end of my piece.

Flipping through the book again, starting with the Frank Cho-drawn cover (see below), I noticed another pattern that could at least explain why so many of these comics were popular upon release, and perhaps helped sustain the genre.

1970

Neal Adams, 1971

Hector Varella, 1971

Tom Sutton and Jack Abel, 1971

Frank Brunner, 1973

Neal Adams, 1973

Bob Larkin, 1974

Nestor Redondo, 1974

Nestor Redondo, 1975

Phil Belbin, 1976

Jesse Santos, 1976

Tom Yeates, 1982

Hmmm...I think I detect a pattern.

Speaking of which, here are two original pieces that appear in the book, Frank Cho's cover, here unencumbered by the title and text...

...and a pin-up by Pablos Marcos of Skywald's 1970s revival of The Heap, a much more grotesque and scary version of the original Golden Age comics muck-monster...

Sex sells...swamp monsters.

Review: Fear Itself: Deadpool/Fearsome Four

This collection does not feature a Deadpool/Fearsome Four team-up, as the title might make one think. Rather, it collects two separate and unconnected Fear Itself tie-in series: the three-part Deadpool series and the four-part Fearsome Four series.

This is the way Marvel handled a bunch of the tie-in minis, which at three-to-four issues were generally too short to fill up a sizable trade collection of their own.

There doesn’t even seem to be a lot of logic to the pairings either, as evidenced from this particular collection. The two miniseries have nothing in common with one another beyond both being Fear Itself tie-ins.

They don’t share any characters, the characters don’t share a franchise or family, no creators are involved in both stories (Contrast this collection to FI: Avengers, which collected two Avengers titles by the same writer).

It was the second half of this book that interested me, and convinced me to pick it up. That name may be borrowed from some old Fantastic Four villains, but the make-up of the thrown-together team include some of my favorite Marvel characters, locked in conflict with another of my favorite Marvel characters (Howard the Duck, She-Hulk, The Defenders’ Nighthawk and Marvel’s fur vest rocking Frankenstein team-up to take on Man-Thing).

The involvement of artists Michael Kaluta and Simon Bisley certainly didn’t make that series any less attractive, either.

But let’s start at the beginning, with Deadpool. Despite what I consider a rather valiant attempt on my part, I still don’t quite “get” Deadpool. I can see why other folks like him a lot, but he doesn’t really work for me, and I rarely if ever find him amusing. (Personally, I think he works best as either a villain or as part of an ensemble in a straight story, as in Rick Remender and company’s Uncanny X-Force, for example).

Writer Christopher Hastings (never heard of him; Internet search reveals that the artist responsible for Dr. McNinja is also named Christopher Hastings though) and artist Bong Dazo construct a somewhat random plot involving the character.

As the book opens, Deadpool and two contractors are installing a supervillian security system for a civilian couple, and just as Deadpool is boasting that it can keep Juggernaut himself out, the Juggernaut—now powered-up by his evil Thor hammer—runs in through one wall and out through another wall.

When the contractors’ van is blown up by a mysterious, furry person and the explosion showers the neighborhood with their tools, their hammer strikes Deadpool in the head and he comes up with a weird, circuitous plan I don’t quite remember the details of, even though I just read it.

When he hears about the magic hammers on the news, he decides to decorate the hammer that hit him on the head to make it look special, and then put it in the hands of a lame-o supervillain (The Walrus, whom I had to look up on the Internet to see if he’s original to this series or not; I just assume any Marvel villain whose name is simply that of an animal probably appeared in an issue of a Spider-Man comic at some point).

Then a disguised Deadpool follows The Walrus around, egging him on to commit villainy that he will eventually put a stop to. But, quite randomly, it turns out that the hammer is actually also a magical hammer, just not one of The Serpent’s hammers—instead, it’s an enchanted hammer used for fighting off werewolves, and the contractors were apparently also werewolf-hunters who were going to use it to stave off a werewolf invasion of a small, Arizona town.

The book is packed with jokes, verbal and visual, and several of them are MC Hammer jokes, which is about the level the humor in the series rises too—1990s Saturday Night Live.

I didn’t like anything about it, although Dazo’s art is of a professional quality, and is just cartoony enough to function as both serious superhero comic art and comic comedy art simultaneously.

As for Fearsome Four, it’s written by Brandon Montclare (another writer whose name was unfamiliar to me, although I guess he wrote that not-that-great Halloween Eve one-shot that Amy Reeder drew for Image). And it's artwork? It's artwork is a complete fucking mess.

There are seven artists credited for the four issues, plus three additional artists given “with” credits. A lot of these artists are really great artists, the sorts of artists whose presence on a Marvel event tie-in is eyebrow-raising enough to get a casual reader to at least browse through the series and, incidentally, among some of my favorite artists and/or artists whose work I wish I could see on a monthly basis.

Check out this line up: Simon Bisley, Ryan Bodenheim, Henry Flint, Timothy Green, Tom Grummet, Ray-Anthony Height and Michael Kaluta.

What the fuck went on with this series, behind the scenes, that lead to the weird hodge-podge of artists? I have no idea, but it certainly doesn’t work at all. Bisley is employed strategically, illustrating a section where Man-Thing uses his connection to the Nexus of All Realities to transform the heroes opposing him into monsters (or, in the case of Frankenstein, a more monstrous monster). The other artists come and go seemingly at random, and none stick close to any sort of character design—She-Hulk’s size and shape is just as amorphous as the all-muck swamp monster’s.

Howard the Duck, a character whose real-world history involves legal battles over his very design, looks different on an almost page-by-page basis, with Bisley the only artist drawing him in his original, pre-Disney legal noise version (before he’s transformed into first a duck monster and then a lizard monster).

His height, the size and shape of his bill, his clothes change from panel to panel.

Montclare’s plot at least addresses a question that Man-Thing fans might have wondered about when reading Fear Itself: How would a worldwide outbreak of supernaturally-inspired fear affect the mindless, emotionally empathic Man-Thing, who is drawn to snuff out fear by his own bizarre chemical reaction that immolates its source upon contact with his own body (You know, the whole “whatever knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing” thing).

Man-Thing is in New York City and running amok: He’s getting bigger, he’s attacking at random and fires are being set all around him (of non-sentient things, so I guess all the fear powers him up…?). Howard The Duck is on his trail, wanting to get his old friend to calm down before he ends up hurting himself and/or destroying the city.

On the way, Howard runs into She-Hulk, Frankenstein’s monster and Nighthawk (the latter of whom is portrayed as a complete nut, fighting criminals by clawing at them with his fingertips). Dubbing them the Fearsome Four, they track and try to stop Man-Thing, but are opposed by Fantastic Four villain Psycho-Man and the old, temporary Fantastic Four of (Gray) Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine and Ghost Rider…either because including those characters helps justify the appropriation of the name “Fearsome Four,” or because having Spidey and Wolvie in your comic never hurts sales any.

It’s a pretty terrible comic book, really, but is confounding in its bad-ness, given how much talent is involved (if you see this trade on a shop or library shelf, I’d still recommend picking it up, if only to see what a Kaluta Nighthawk looks like).

Much of that is due to the chaotic art, but the story is rather pointless, repetitive and meandering, and told surprisingly straight. It’s a very, very serious story, and how exactly one takes all those particular ingredients and comes up with an almost joke-free, deadly serious story is beyond me.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I participated in this week's edition of "What Are You Reading?" at Robot 6, making it two weeks in a row! That's my personal record for managing to participate in the blog's weekly feature, I think. I kinda-sorta reviewed two books there that I won't be reviewing on EDILW, if you want to go check it out (Also, other Robot Sixers Brigid Alverson, Corey Blake, Tom Bondurant, Mark Cardwell and special guest Brian Cronin run down their recent reading).

The above image is Kevin Nowlan's painted Man-Thing, from the pages of The Infernal Man-Thing, which was a rather disappointing book. I didn't really care for Nowlan's emaciated, extremely human-looking Man-Thing...looks a little like what Man-Thing might look like if recreated by a theater company for a stage show, doesn't it? (For contrast, compare it to Arthur Adams' Man-Things or Men-Thing from the covers of the same series).

And this here is maybe my favorite panel from the other book I discussed there, Star Wars Omniubs: A Long Time Ago... Vol. 2:

Note how artists Carmine Infantino and Gene Day render Leia's outfit from the original film; it's basically the same in design, but apparently made of spandex, superhero-style "boob socks" and all.

Also, in the plot for this story, Luke and R2-D2 are on the surface of a planet doing some diplomatic stuff, and the rest of "the Star Warriors" (as they're so often-referred to in these late-70s/early-80s comics) are aboard the Millennium Falcon, listening in by hooking C-3PO's nipples up to the on-board computers.

Muddying the waters

In Savage Tales #1, cover-dated May 1971, Marvel comics readers were introduced to Man-Thing, a shambling swamp creature created when a chemist working in a laboratory in the swamp had a terrible accident with some of his chemicals, and fused with the muck of the swamp. In House of Secrets #92, cover-dated July 1971, DC comics readers were introduced to Swamp Thing, a shambling swamp creature created when a chemist working in a laboratory in the swamp had a terrible accident with some of his chemicals and fused with the muck of the swamp.

Man-Thing—created by Stan Lee, who came up with the name, and Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow—has the earlier cover date, which would seemingly make Swamp Thing the imitator, although complicating things a bit was the fact that one of Man-Thing's creators, Conway, was living with one of Swamp Thing's creators, Len Wein, at the time. Wein also wrote Man-Thing stories in the early'70s.

Despite the many similarities, the fact that the two characters came out almost simultaneously has generally been regarded by people who care to think of such things as just one of those weird coincidences that occasionally occur when you have two rival comic book companies who share a city, talent pool and audience. (The other most prominent example is probably Marvel and DC's dueling teams of outsider superheroes lead by middle-aged men in wheelchairs, The Doom Patrol and The X-Men, which debuted three months apart in 1963).

I've recently been working my way through Showcase Presents: Justice League America Vol. 5, and had just arrived at JLoA #91, which contains this panel: Forgive the poor scan (The Showcase Presents line is full of great blog fodder, but very, very difficult to scan images from if they fall too close to the middle of the book). As you can hopefully make out, the narration box refers to Solomon Grundy as "The Macabre Man-Thing."

Writer Mike Friedrich is quite enamored of the expression, using it over and over during the course of the two-part story that begins in JLoA #91 and continues into JLoA #92. In fact, I counted five references to Grundy as a "Man-Thing" in Friedrich's narration (followed up by "Marshland Monster" and "Swampland Savage").

These two issues were cover-dated August and September of 1971, mere months after Man-Thing appeared in a Marvel comic, although JLoA writers have been referring to Grundy as a "Man-Thing" for years prior (Also of interest: Friedrich dedicated his two-part story to Roy Thomas, who, as we already mentioned, helped create Man-Thing, although Friedrich's dedication was for introducing him to the Golden Age JSA characters, and thus not swamp monster related). Here's a panel from a collection reprinting the Gardner Fox-written "Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two!" that was originally published in 1966's JLoA #46 and #47 (which I discussed at some length here):That's Fox calling Solomon Grundy "The Macabre Man-Thing" some five years before Marvel's Man-Thing appeared in Savage Tales. Did Stan Lee steal, or unknowingly appropriate, the nickname of a DC swamp monster to give to a brand new Marvel swamp monster?

Maybe...but probably not. A Marvel's 1960-published Tales of Suspense #7 featured a story called "I Fought The Molten Man-Thing!," which was also the cover feature:Jack Kirby drew that particular story, and Stan Lee edited that comic, and thus might have written or dialogued that story. So maybe Stan Lee borrowed the name from himself...or from Kirby...? But let's not get into that here. Anyway, that's as far back as I can trace the etymology of the name "Man-Thing."

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Speaking of Marvel and Showcase Presents: Justice League of America Vol. 5, it was interesting to come across this panelin a DC comic. It's from JLoA #95, which contained the story "The Private War of Johnny Dune!" (Also written by Friedrich, and, like the black and white Grundy panels above, drawn by Dick Dillin and Joe Giella).

Johnny Dune is a Vietnam vet turned protest singer with the ability to control people with his voice. Where did he get this miraculous super-power? He was apparently born with it. He was a mutant.

Mutants are, of course, Marvel's thing, and though there are mutants in the DCU, and one does see the word used to refer to characters here and there throughout DCU history, this is a pretty rare example of a Marvel-like mutant. That is, an otherwise normal-looking person getting a super-power during a time of stress basically for no reason other than possibly genetics. Super powers in the DC Universe generally require an origin of some sort.

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Justice League of America #91-#92 is of interest for more reasons than the number of times their writer called Solomon Grundy "Man-Thing." They're also the story in which Robin Dick Grayson gets a new costume from his older, extra-dimensional counterpart that none of the readers seem to like very much.

Those issues were one of the annual JLA/JSA crossovers, in which the Justice Leaguers of Earth-1 (i.e. the "real" DC Universe of the time, where the majority of the line was set) and the Justice Society members of Earth-2 (a parallel universe where the Golden Age characters lived). The JSA brought along their Robin this time, and he meets up with his Earth-1 counterpart, who has torn his uniform.Luckily, he has a spare:Dick seems to like it okaybut I guess readers didn't. Near the end of the story, Robin thinks to himself, "Well, back to my interrupted case--and my original uniform! Funny thing, though--I kinda like this one--I just may keep it!"

A narration box at the bottom of the same panel asks, "What do you think, readers? Would you like Robin to switch to this new costume? Write us--Let us know!"

I assume few wrote in to say he should keep it, as this is the only time I've seen the costume. It looks better in black and white than in color, I think, but I don't care for the Gambit-like mask-thing. Interesting to see the ways in which it presages some of the Nightwing costumes he'd wear years later, especially in the gliding feature.

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Finally, here's a splash panel from the first page of JLoA #94, one of the several pages in it drawn by Neal Adams: The narration begins like this: "A simple man...a simple face."

Man, that face is many things, but simple it is not.

Click to better scrutinize my poor penmanship and limited understanding of Photoshop's eye drop and paint tools

(Cross-posted here and at Blog@Newsarama)

I think it's time I admit to myself I have a problem...

Far be it from me to question the cover copy of a 34-year-old Marvel comic, but I have a hard time believing anyone asked, let alone demanded that Man-Thing battle Spider-Man, Daredevil, The Thing and Shang-Chi simultaneously.

Ten things I really liked about Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1

1.) The way Man-Thing fights alligators. I flirted with doing a whole post about this subject, complete with a bunch of scans, but maybe I’ll just mention it here. There’s certainly something exciting about seeing a monster fight alligators, but the way Man-Thing fights them just fascinates me. Being a brainless, personality-less creature unable to speak or do much of anything beyond shamble around, empathize with the emotions of others, fight things and burn whatever he touches that knows fear, fighting alligators is a wholly meaningless activity to Man-Thing. He’s so blasé about it. He fights alligators the way I make my bed or wash dishes or brush my teeth: It’s just one routine part of his day.


2.) The copious amounts of well-drawn cheesecake. I know I make fun of DC and Marvel for their exploitative imagery of women fairly often, but that’s not because I think there’s anything wrong with drawings of sexy, scantily clad women, it’s because when DC and Marvel do it it’s a) often highly inappropriate (involving minors, sexual violence, brutality, or children’s characters), b) extremely poorly drawn , c) meaningless to the story and in some cases actively distracting from the story being told (see Benes’ JLoA run for a few hundred pretty good examples), d) really, really gross (sexualizing zombies and mortally wounded aliens, couching the scene in terrible violence, etc). or e) some combination of a-d. There’s plenty of cheesecake throughout this book, from Gray Morrow’s femme fatale Ellen’s flimsy negligee (which she wears in a shack…in a swamp) and the shredding her outfit goes through when she runs afoul of Swamp Thing, to the lurid covers of the issues of Monsters Unleashed included.

(I guess her top got caught on the steering wheel during the car accident...?)

But Morrow and the other artists can draw realistic looking women quite well, it’s not like Man-Thing was being published alongside Marvel’s Swamp Monster Babies at the time, and the stories are almost all melodramatic soap opera horror stories about a tragic swamp monster set in a Florida swamp—scantily clad women don’t seem all that out of place, or threaten the integrity of the stories, as the whole endeavor is already intended to be lurid and exploitative.


3) The protagonists for a large chunk of these stories are essentially Satanists. For about a dozen comics in this collection, from Fear #11 through Man-Thing #2 or so, the sympathetic humans consist of teenager Jennifer Kale, her little brother Andy, and her grandfather, who looks a little like Stan Lee and runs a cult. The young Kales steal his magic book and summon a demon, setting off a chain of events that endangers all reality, and yet they’re all pretty sympathetic; Steve Gerber never really writes any “Stay in school and say your prayers, kids!” moral. It’s just the story of some kids who visit head shops and draw pentagrams to summon demons in the swamp for fun, and the cloak-wearing adults who practice forbidden magic on the weekends. I bet parents in the '70s loved it when the kids brought copies of Man-Thing comics into the house.


4.) Ka-Zar shows up for some reason. Man, talk about whiplash. This volume goes from the first Man-Thing story, by Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas and Gray Morrow, to a two-parter from Astonishing Tales written by Thomas and Len Wein and drawn by John Buscema featuring Manny and Ka-Zar vs. AIM, and then snaps back to a Conway story illustrated by Morrow and Howard Chaykin. I haven’t read many old Ka-Zar stories, but here he’s written rather Namor-like, only he’s from a jungle instead of from underwater, and he rolls around with his “brother,” a saber-toothed tiger named Zabu.


5.) Steve Gerber will write whatever the hell Steve Gerber wants to write. For the most part, the narrative of this volume is essentially on on-going, episodic swamp opera, with Man-Thing coming to the aid of various counterculture types (hippies, devil-worshipers, bikers, Native Americans, environmentalists) from mad scientists, industrialists, worse devil-worshipers and bikers, and the ever-present threat of alligator consumption. But there’s no genre he won’t tackle, and make work in the context of the book. Man-Thing repeatedly finds himself transported to sword and sorcery worlds, is later cast into a weird psychodrama involving the ghost of a circus clown and otherworldly judges who decide what form of eternity human souls must spend, he fights a traditional superhero and a traditional supervillain in different stories, and, toward the end of the book, he’s shanghaied by ghost pirates.


6.) Rory Regan. I love that guy. For some reason (Gerber?), I keep finding him in all of my favorite Essential books.


7.) My favorite sentence of dialogue ever. There’s this one scene where a recurring wizard character from the sword and sorcery fantasy land shows up, and lays his hand on the stunned Jennifer Kale’s shoulder. She spins around and says, “Who--? YOU?!” and he responds, “Aye--I!” I love that line.

The wizard also refers to Man-Thing as "The Man-Object" all the time.


8.) Mike Ploog. Artist Mike Ploog provides the bulk of the art in this volume, followed closely by Val Mayerik. Both are great—in fact, I don’t think there’s any bum art in the whole thing, thanks to Buscema, Morrow, Rich Buckler, Pat Broderick and Alerdo Alcala—but Ploog’s exaggerated, slightly cartoon-y art is tops. And, as I’m sure has been repeatedly pointed out, his name is just so perfect for stories involving swamp monsters.


9.) Daredevil and Black Widow’s guest-appearance. The back of the book boasts, “Guest-starring the Fantastic Four! Ka-Zar! Daredevil!” While technically true, DD and Black Widow appear for exactly two panels, literally just swinging through—in one dimensional portal and out another.


10). The complete randomness of the themes and subject matter. It’s not just that Gerber would find a way to put Man-Thing in different genre settings if it struck his fancy (or if some Marvel editor was like, “Ghost pirates are big this summer! Do a ghost pirate story!”, I guess), but the individual stories would be about almost anything. One issue it’s the environment, then it’s mental illness, then it’s a Superman parody, then it’s an elderly couple’s marital problems, then it’s a critique of religious zealotry, then it’s back to the environment, and hey, how about a moral passion play centered on bus crash in the swamp? There’s a real sense of an issue-of-the-week nature that creeps into these stories, at least between the longer story arcs involving the Nexus of Reality, similar to the vibe I get from those old Denny O’Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics. Of course, I love those. Judged by today’s standards, I suppose a lot of these stories might not hold up on their own—they certainly seem pathetically juvenile when compared to what Alan Moore would do with DC’s muck-murker within a decade—but I find these stories utterly charming and, like a lot of Gerber’s work for Marvel during the period, a bit ahead of their time in terms of aspiration, if not always execution.