5 out of 5

Steve Gerber’s run on Man-Thing is not, by any means, perfect.  It stumbles, it has some half-baked ideas, it’s too big for its britches quite frequently.  But it’s amazing to see the undeniably uniquely talented Gerber grow into his own style over the course of the series, slowly trickling in the tricks for which he’d be known and planting and nurturing the seeds of his mini Gerberverse of characters.

It began wicked early in Gerb’s career – ’73 – taking over right after Manny’s intro and inclusion in Marvel’s anthology-esque mag, ‘Adventures Into Fear’ – copyrighted as ‘Fear.’  Though Steve was getting the chance to flex some superhero muscles on Daredevil and Sub-Mariner around the same time, writing for Man-Thing would be, by the creature’s setup, a much different gig, for scientist Ted Sallis, having mutated in the Everglade Swamps after a failed super-soldier serum experiment, now is no longer human, cannot think or speak or ‘see’ in a traditional manner, and only responds to things due to an empathic nature… from which Steve scripted the tagline for Manny (according to wiki), “what knows fear BURNS at the Man-Thing’s touch,” for fear was the one emotion MT couldn’t bear.  Anger and hate would repulse him, positive emotions attract, but Fear sent him into a rage.  Already rife with good ol’ Gerber symbolism potential.

Obviously there’s some discussion here about Swamp Thing vs. Man-Thing, and Len Wein (ST co-creator) and Gerry Conway (MT co-creator) were, wow, roommates in the 70s, but though both characters would take a ‘literary’ direction at certain points, I think anyone reading the main runs of both titles won’t have any problem seeing the massive distinction between the two.  Essentially, the only remaining crossover is that they both swampies.

Banyboo, ‘Fear’, and Steve establishes an issue-by-issue rapport wherein Manny is sometimes only witness to events which swirl around timely commentary (war vs. anti-war mentalities) or more general social commentary, but acting in some fashion as a pro- or an- tagonist to the action, spurring people to emote their true Emotes via his fear-inducing presence.  And, as a reader would point out in the letters some years later (the real benefit to reading these in original issue format and not collected – letter pages which swing wildly back and forth condemning or praising Steve, though the bulk of the letters seemed to be the latter, else the series wouldn’t have gone on), though horror comics in general would go for that Tales From the Crypt style no-one-wins endings, since Steve’s twist on the formula was to make them dark character studies and not morality plays, when no one would win, it was painting the frown on a much larger palette.

Pseudo-science, spiritual hoodoo, crimes of jealousy and passion – it all got mixed in there.  But it was when Mr. Gerber started to build up an ongoing narrative about a fountain of youth, real estate maven F.A. Schist, and the swamp as the ‘nexus of all realities’ that the series got that extra sparkle that seemed to boost it to its own title, ushered in by the whirlwind cross-reality weirdness of Fear #19 and MT #1, introducing or including some Gerber mainstays of Dakimh the sorcerer, Jennifer Kale his apprentice, Richard Rory, and sure, Howard the Duck.

Once in his own book, Man-Thing would come to embrace the fullness of the Gerber genius – his narrative voice growing stronger and more confident in leaving the tie between word and image to his shifting artists (Mike Ploog seemed to capture the muck of Man-Thing the best in my opinion), and more and more willing to experiment with structure with full on text pages or completely cracked allegorical stories that become strange, beautiful, silly and affecting all at once.

The Giant Size books were a chance to work in some more typical Man-Thing tales (i.e. monster on the rampage) or buffer in larger material that would flow into the main story (GSMT #4), as Steve and his editors were always appealing to their readers to make sure they weren’t going too far out and away from what people wanted from a swamp creature.  The last issue of the giants, 5, would end up being the perfect capsule of how good Steve was at writing this stuff, as it came right at the point Gerbs was getting overwhelmed and so was split into three shorts by three writers – Steve, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman.  Len Wein has the poetic style and understands Man-Thing’s empathic nature, but can’t escape cheesy comic melodrama.  And Wolfman just turns it into a dumb action piece.  Elsewhere, the 68-pagers get back-up reprints from old horror and mystery anthologies.  They’re well-chosen for the series, but, as usual with these style of reprints (to me), feel like filler.

…And it all wound down rather quickly.  It seemed Steve was building to something but then issue 22 is a ‘letter to Len Wein’ about how he couldn’t write the book anymore.  Of course, he can’t take credit for what’s come before – it was all transcribed to him by Dakimh the Sorcerer, and he has to stop writing the series now for his own safety, and there he is, drawn into the book by Jim Mooney.  It’s a little simplistic, but a well-intentioned goodbye and fitting exit from Steve, who often during this era popped off books due to too many obligations.  It wraps up what there was to wrap up and caps and justifies the weirdness of the series.

So while it might not’ve reached the consistent high quality of some of his other runs, and while it’s certainly an example of indulgence at various points, reading Steve’s contributions to Man-Thing from start to finish is such a treat, filled with true surprises from one issue to the next and some honestly touching forays into un-comicy territory.  It also benefits from familiarity with the Gerber style, as it adds to the riches of the evolution from Fear 11 to GSMT 5.  Though the ads and letter pages add to the feeling of reading something displaced from our current time, the stories of course hold their own, so picking this up in the cheaper collected reprint format is totes okayed by me, since that’s what you’re waiting to hear.