I've got a Giant Sized Man-Thing for ya baby...

Noah Berlatsky and Tucker Stone are blogging their way through the classic Man-Thing series of Adventure into Fear and Man-Thing, and given that I was reading those front and center when they were coming out, I realized that someone had to go along and blog with them on this (especially since they're doing all the scanner work so that I don't have to).

First off, they have parts 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 up already.

And lets face it, someone clearly dug through the half price trades bin at the con and picked up that Essential Man-Thing trade.

Of course, I couldn't wait to see what they said about the bizarre acid trip that is Fear #19 and Man-Thing #1. Here are the comments on Howard the Duck's first appearance:

Oddly enough, the Conan-stand-in [Korrek] seems to share my feelings, because he likes and respects him immediately as well. Considering that most of Korrek's speeches and actions so far have painted his character as an aggressive jump-first type of character, it makes Howard that much more interesting when you see him tell the barbarian to shut up. Why does Howard get to order around Conan and treat Man-Thing like a retarded golden retriever? Gerber doesn't say. He doesn't need to. Howard gets to do that stuff because he's Howard The Duck.

Now, this is the fun of revisionist history here, knowing that Howard became a media sensation, as well as getting spun off into his own book, but at the time, we were simply witnessing all weirdness that Gerber and Mayerik could come up with. Any you know what? It made as much sense as Crisis on Infinite Earths did all those years later. What is intersting is Gerber's take on the entire thing, which is to almost to admit that the insanity level would be so high that the rational being would basically have to either lose his marbles or just roll with the entire thing.

Tucker wonders why Howard is there at all. The answer is simple, as simple as Ben Grimm in the FF: someone needs to be the voice of reason and ground the whole frikkin' thing or it really does spin so far out of control that we, the reader, could really care less. Howard allows Gerber to have his cake and eat it too: all the weirdness that Gerber's right brain can come up with, his left brain can make a clever, Give me a fucking break." kinda comment, and thus the story moves.

As far as villans go, the Nether Spawn was pretty fun, even if he didn't have the snappiest lines of all time, he was rather sinister if you bought into the whole panethon that Dakimh did. Anytime i drive around California and see "Dog is my co-pilot" bumper stickers, i'm reminded of Man-Thing #1. After all these years, scary I know, but that's the way my brain works.

After basically lambasting Gerber for some real by the numbers issues of Fear, I'll be interested to see what Noah and Tucker think about the issues when Gerber finally gets his brain wrapped around the sorts of stories that he wants to use Man-Thing for. Man-Thing #5 is about where is gets good. Steve creates a level of Brechtian pathos that most comics would never even dare attempt, let alone create on page after page. The death of the clown? Either brilliant pathos or inspired lunacy depending upon your vantage point. Hard to say where they will fall.

Part of it, of course, is the art. Val Mayerik did a good job, but was always inked so roughly that it missed the mark of being anything classic. When Ploog comes on, things get better by leaps and bounds, even if they would never hit the high notes that Wrightson would hit on Swamp Thing. Brunner's Man-Thing covers hint at how devastating the creature could have been in the right hands.

Looking forward to the next post from Tucker and Noah...

Steve Gerber: In Memoriam

I never met Steve Gerber in the flesh, but there is a strong feeling that I have met a good deal of his psyche along the way the many titles that he wrote for Marvel in the 1970's. They were some of the most ideosyncratic and unusual titles that Marvel ever published, and just like the 1970's cinema, were part of an explosion of writing and art that we naively thought would continue on and on.

Steve passed away 48 hours ago, and I have yet again lost one of those people that I swore I would search out to thank for some of the more general moments of weirdness from my childhood. Over at Steve's blog, Mark Evanier is playing host and, thankfully, still making jokes about the elf with the gun. Here is my personal bit, one fan's take on Steve.

I have no need to list Steve's accomplishments in the crazy world of comics, that is readily available elsewhere, but instead want to talk about a couple of those works. Steve's run on the Defenders, for instance, was as bizarre and off beat as anything in modern comics until, perhaps, the Vertigo line of superhero revamps. Morrison's Animal Man is, on the flow chart of comtemporary comics, a straight line from Gerber's Defenders. Steve, for all that weirdness, had the knack for finding the memorable human moment in all of the chaos, and I still find
it amazing that mainstream Marvel would let Scorpio commit suicide pretty much almost on camera in the book. Even with the classic word balloon screw up where the Nick Fury LMD hands Scorpio the gun, it doesn't diminish the fact that this was a powerful adult moment in what had been kids entertainment.

But I don't think that Steve ever saw it just as kids entertainment. In the Gary Groth interview posted over at www.tcj.com, Steve warns about the perils of too much escapist entertainment in society, and sees his work on Howard as anything but pure escapism. Allegory yes, but escapist no. Steve was clearly a very sharp and interesting man, acerbic clearly, but very sharp, which is why it was interesting to see him do Void Indigo with Val Mayerik. At the time, it looked like a complete brain fritz on their part, content-wise, as it was such a departure from what was out. Ten years later, it would have looked tame next to Vigil's Faust, thus proving that Steve was ahead of the curve when it came to adult allegory. For the record, I'm still not convinced that it was the greatest long lost series, but it would have been a rather interesting trip.

While everyone across the internet is talking about Steve Gerber, inventor of Howard the Duck and Omega the Unknown, I will cross the picket lines and put in my two cents: I didn't like Omega and don't that that is the great long lost series either. Howard is brilliant, no question about that, and I love those duck comics with a great deal of passion. For my money, the Man-Thing contains some of his best and most innovative work. After all, how easy is it to make a series about a swamp creature with no personality or brains? This should have been the shortest damn series in the world, but instead we got an astonishing collection of stories, not entirely always successful it is true, that ranged from satire to adventure to twilight zone style endings. You literally never knew what the book would do next. Fear #19 and Man-Thing #1 were a fairly standard multi-dimensional adventure story, complete with steve ditko backgrounds, but they included a barbarian clearly a parody of Conan and/or Kull, and a talking duck. Man-Thing #4 and 5 gave us the death of a clown cast as such high tragedy as to be worthy of Tennessee Williams or Samuel Beckett.

This should have been a book about nothing, and instead it became the perfect venue for Steve to experiment with how obliquely he could actually involve his mucky protagonist. Man-Thing #15 is a perfect example. An old girlfriend of Ted Sallis buys a candle in the shape of the Man-Thing, which a jealous boyfriend has mixed with heat activated drugs. In the set up of the story, the jealous former boyfriend accuses her of only liking "broken things": her current boyfriend is blind, she has a 3-legged dog from the pound. Not your typical comic story, but it is the touches that bring it to life in my memory. The blind boyfriend comes in and comments that she's wearing clothes from across the room. When she asks him how he knows that, he says, "you move differently when you're naked." which is just such a great little observation that it makes the story work that much more. Can you imagine that line coming out in the middle of the Secret Wars?

Giant Size Man-Thing #4 may be one of the most laughed about comic book titles of all-time, but it should stand as an example of a great '70's comic. The Brunner cover is a beautiful piece of rule breaking (Brunner's comment on the cover from Comic Art Fans: "Marvel hated the cover because it was just mood, not 5 people punching each other."), the lead story is a powerful bit of writing: the revenge of the picked on, the bullied, from beyond the grave with the Man-Thing as the instrument of vengence. Considering that comics in the 1970's were not the things of the popular kids, but the outcasts, the ones picked last for kickball the story had a great deal of resonance. Gerber's experiment with text passages from the diary of the deceased in typeset form, as well as full page montages to work with the text makes for a dense, powerful story.

And when all that is done, we have the introduction of Garko the Man-Frog.

Gerber pushed boundaries in more ways than just content, but form as well, and he muses about that in the Groth interview. I haven't read Gerber's interview about leaving Marvel since that issue was published in 1980, but what stands out is how he understood the potential of the form, and where comics could be going. That it took 20 years to get there isn't his fault. I'm very pleased to see that he achieved success as a writer in television after his comics career was over.

I think that i'll go home and savor the Kidney Lady tonight and have a good laugh now that I know that she was real. I'm sure that she might have still been roaming around when I was working in Times Square. I'm sorry that I never got to buy you that drink that I owed you Steve. Rest in Peace.

In Review Of: Howard the Duck by Templeton, Bobillo and Sosa

Harken, y'all, to the strange tale of Howard the Duck. Not only was he thrust into a world that he never made, he was given life at a comic book company that had no time for funny animals (or funny fowls for that matter). Even actually funny funny animals.

Me? I know funny. Trust me, I know funny.

Born on Duckworld, but really born in the far stranger land called the early '70's brain of Steve Gerber, Howard had a quick walk-on in Fear #19, in a book already held hostage by the character the Man-Thing, and he was really there to simply be goofy and make the un-real limbo of... uh... unreality seem all that more strange. He also got a few plum lines along the way, and was unceremoniously thrown aside.

Except that people liked the Duck. Certainly not Stan Lee and editorial powers that were at the time, but it is hard to argue with success. Marvel was building their early-70's line up of 2nd generation heroes by their 2nd generation of writers and artists and the books were, to put it mildly, spinning blindly out of control. The House that Stan and Jack had built was being turned in to something rather different in the odd corners: Gerber, Starlin, Englehart, Weiss, Moench and McGregor were running rampant.

That Howard survived to return in 2007 is a minor miracle. Templeton is spinning a fun yarn, and perhaps will take a huge amount of flack for not being Steve Gerber, but then, so did Bill Mantlo on Howard's abortive B&W book. The reality is that Gerber's Howard was a bizarre run through of Gerber's neuroses and pet peeves mixed with an often hysterical dose of the back side of the Marvel Universe as it stood then. When he was fired off of the book by Jim Shooter in a personality clash, Bill Mantlo was given the opportunity to run with the book, in a less censored arena: the Black and White magazine.

Bill did his creative best, and the magazine took a few issues to settle into a rhythm, but a couple of the final issues had Michael Golden and Marshall Rogers turning in inspired turns on the art. Bill’s approach to the book was less didactic than Gerber’s, but by the end of Gerber’s run, things had become less funny, and Howard’s depression over being stuck in the city of Cleveland was starting to rub off on the reader: despite the inspired parody “Star Waugh” in the mid 20’s issues, we were tired of being trapped in this series. Mantlo’s run, while reviled at the time, is actually funnier and edgier than it appeared at the time.

Templeton opens his series with all the usual motifs of Howard’s banal existence: stuck being a cab driver, the lovely yet slightly ditzy Beverly his companion, the oddball play promoter, bizarre scientists from A.I.M. and scientists that happen to be the worst shots in the world hunting him. It really is an opening right out of either Gerber’s or Mantlo’s run. And that’s ok. Really it is. This hasn’t gotten to go-around for over 20 years, and its new to most of its audience.

Lets face it: there really isn’t a different way to write Howard. Howard’s story is the story of the “other”, but he doesn’t really want to be the other, he just wants to blend in so that things can be easy for once. And it allows him to be the crusty commentator, the sole voice of reason and the occasional straight-man all in one. Bobillo’s art is inspired when Howard is on stage, occasionally a bit simple on some of the other areas of the story. Templeton, whose comedic work I still remember from the great “Even Teddy Bears Get the Blues” story in the Critters collection, is a natural to write this. He has the timing and the lines. The only thinkg that I wish on the story: that people remember Beverly wasn’t a ditz when she first showed up. Mantlo and Gerber wrote her far more intelligently that we’re seeing her here. I love the character, for her grit, her humor and her steadfast love of Howard, and I hate to see her merely comic relief.

Is this fun? Absolutely. And if you don’t pick up this series you’re missing out. So get out there and support some comic fun in your comics!

Blast from the Past: Void Indigo

Happened to run across this, a link to plot for Void Indigo #3-6, Steve Gerber's much reviled, overlooked and, now infamous, work from the early '80's. Along with Val Mayerik, Void Indigo simply was too different to succeed back then; the sex combined with too many disturbing images, too much weirdness in the story about the coming of the Dark Gods, just pretty too much everything.

Of course today it would sell buckets.

But back then it was a total of one graphic novel, god knows how long it too Val to paint the entire thing but I hope he got a good page rate, and two issues of Marvel's Epic line.

And it was an odd failure. Steve, in his post-Howard the Duck and Man-Thing days, kept branching out and trying new stuff: not all of it was successful, but I give him major points for trying back then as a fan. As a professional now I appreciate the amount of work that he was putting out. In any case, you're bound to have some successes and some failures along the way.

Comics back in 1980 were a bizarre mixed bag. You certainly had a number of creators that had grown past superhero comics, Gerber, McGregor and Starlin for instance, that were trying to say different things, deeper stories and were looking for venues to do so, but the publishers needed reliable outlets for their magazines, and there needed to be an audience to buy this stuff.
And there wasn't yet any of these things. And yet still they tried, through Marvel's epic line, through the first Graphic Novels, to bravely determine if anyone would buy stories about love and revenge and aliens and death where the good guys didn't always win, and things weren't always so clean at the end. God bless the pioneers.

So yeah, Void Indigo. I always kinda wondered what would have happened next. Now I know. god bless the internet for keeping things like this around.