I was never that into superhero comics.
As a little kid growing up in the Sixties and early Seventies, I started out reading Harvey comics like Hot Stuff and Richie Rich, or Gold Key comics like Scrooge McDuck. Just whatever random stuff caught my eye on the comic racks at the drugstore.
As I got interested in girls I read a lot of Archie (those bikini babes!) and also developed a taste for humor magazines like Mad, Cracked, and National Lampoon, but as for Marvel and DC…somehow the men-in-tights concept just didn’t do it for me.
Yet there was one Marvel comic that I loved, and which remains vividly imprinted on my memory to this day.
It was called Man-Thing.
Man-Thing, written by the late, great Steve Gerber (whose Howard the Duck was another brilliant oddity), begins with scientist Ted Sallis inoculating himself with the only existing dose of Super-Soldier Serum (the same stuff that created Captain America) to keep it out of the hands of terrorists. Only instead of becoming a superhero, Ted crashes his car into a swamp and is transformed into a hulking, mindless slime-monster—the Man-Thing!
(It suddenly occurs to me that by naming the scientist Ted, Steve Gerber may have been paying homage to author Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote a terrific short story (“It”) about a bog monster very similar to Man-Thing.)
Man-Thing (“Manny” to his friends) has no ability to talk or even really think; his chief faculty is that he is acutely sensitive to the emotions of others.
Positive emotions make him docile, harmless, even helpful; negative emotions make him violent—or worse, trigger the nasty reaction in the comic’s tagline: “Whatever knows fear BURNS at the Man-Thing’s touch!”
I always thought this was a bit of a Catch-22.
Who wouldn’t feel fear when confronted with a hideous 8-foot-tall swamp monster? I mean, even the most sympathetic soul is gonna have some misgivings.
But what I liked about Man-Thing was that he is not motivated by notions of good and evil: negative emotions are psychic torture to him, so he lashes out to make them go away. He is just a catalyst for evil to destroy itself.
And there were lots of negative emotions during the early Seventies: deep anxieties fueled by Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold War, the Kent State shootings, all of which contributed to the loss of trust known as the Generation Gap.
Steve Gerber created Man-Thing out of a desire to tackle such issues, and they all came together to powerful effect beginning with Man-Thing #17, “A Book Burns in Citrusville!”
Citrusville is the fictional Florida town near Man-Thing’s swamp. It’s a deeply polarized Southern burg where the parents are enthralled by a homophobic, “traditional values” nutcase called the Mad Viking, and the youth are rebelling by flocking to a mincing glam-rock fusion of David Bowie and Alice Cooper: “Star” Spangler.
Naturally, these two extreme opposites must eventually collide, leading to the climactic book-burning of the title, wherein the local citizenry raid the school library for its trove of “filth” and brutalize the students trying to stop them. Meanwhile, Man-Thing is captured by rednecks and tossed into a tank of acid, where he disintegrates. Everything seems hopeless—can this really be the end?
O ye of little faith…
This is still potent stuff today–perhaps just as potent as it was in 1975, when the comic came out.
So why did Marvel make a Man-Thing movie in 2006 that completely ignored the most powerful, outrageous, and relevant aspects of the comic in favor of its far less interesting elements of schlock horror?
Probably the same reason Lucasfilm made such a botch of Howard the Duck—they didn’t get it.
Just as with that disaster, instead of making Man-Thing the witty, Verhoeven-esque satirical masterpiece it should have been, they decided to dumb it down—way down—so there would be no chance it would be mistaken for some kind of smartass art film.
They succeeded.
Boy, did they ever succeed.
Well, Marvel (or should I say Disney?), now is the time to do it right.
You gave the Hulk three chances to succeed; let’s see you make a Man-Thing movie that honors the memory of Steve Gerber.
Here’s a thought: get Tarantino to direct it!
And while you’re at it, CGI was invented for Howard the Duck, and I know the perfect voice for him: Paul Giamatti!
After all, he more or less already played the character when he did American Splendor…which is also set in Cleveland.
Wait a second, was Harvey Pekar the model for Howard the Duck?
Oh my God, it all makes sense now!
Walter Greatshell is the author of the Xombies trilogy and the thriller Mad Skills, published by Ace Books, as well as the novels Enormity (under the name W.G. Marshall), and Terminal Island, both published by Night Shade Books. Visit his website: www.waltergreatshell.com
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