Man-Thing! You make my heart sing!

You kids today complaining that your Seven Soldiers or your Final Crisis or your Batman R.I.P. is too confusing and difficult to read...pfui. Why, in the good old days, we took the mind-boggling confusion that comic books dishes up for us and gobbled it up with butter and jam. Grant Morrison? Sure, he can write a comic book that throws in metacommentary, nanotechnology, fifties Batman stories and Jezebel Jade, but he's a mere piker compared to the master of gonzo superhero comics, the late great Steve Gerber, who tosses in everything including the kitchen sink...and a revolver-firing duck to boot. Don't believe me? Read and learn, o clueless ones!

Imagine this: The year is 1973, and NASA launches the last of America's deep-space probes. In a freak mishap Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William 'Buck' Rogers...oh wait, I've gotten mixed up again. The year is 1973, and on your local drugstore's comic rack you can find the premiere issue of one of Marvel's most unusual comic books: Man-Thing, who was aptly known as the "muck-crusted mockery of a man," even long before Michael Jackson tried to lay claim to that title. Hey! It says #1 on the front, so it must be the beginning of a brand new saga and storyline. Plunk down your 20 cents on the counter of Mister Gower's drugstore and run back home to the treehouse to peel open the fantastic Frank Brunner front cover, and prepare yourself...wait, no, you simply cannot prepare yourself...for the weirdness within:


All panels from Man-Thing #1 (January 1974), written by...oh, just look at the credits above, okay?

What...wha...huh? What the Sam Scratch is goin' on here? Maybe we've come in on the middle of issue two or three...



Nope. That's issue number one, all right! To be fair, this is continued on from Manny's feature in Adventure into Fear #19, but still, hoo-whee! That's one user-unfriendly first issue. Oh well, it oughta be easy to pick up as we go along...I mean, it's not like Gerber's gonna get too crazy in ish one, is he? Is he?

Okay, on page two we got a proto-He-Man and Howard the Duck springing into action...



Huh. Altho' it wouldn't premiere for more than another year, here's barbarian Korrek doing his Monty Python and the Holy Grail impersonation. It's only a flesh wound!



Well, that oughta be enough violence for everyone...until Howard the Duck starts firing a revolver!



I think, deep within each one of us, we've all heard a duck crying out "Why aren't you dead?"



Okay, if that's not enough, set the scene for an omniversal gathering of beings from across every reality. Yes, years before Chris Claremont got into the elderberry wine and was creating multiple Excaliburs (Excalibii?) getting together to have a lovely Sunday roast and watch the snooker on the telly, Steve Gerber brought together a host of warriors under the omniscient all-high-and-mighty Sylvania light bulb. Hey, wait on the female sacrifice until after the port and cigars, cavemen and cavaliers and Vikings and beekeepers!



Everybody who's anybody is there to greet the coming of the Overmaster. Not to be confused with the Ovenmaster (GE's new radial range for '74!), the Overmaster is jockeying to take control of all realities by murdering teenage bikinied Jennifer Kale, who is (I kid you not) Ghost Rider's cousin. Which Ghost Rider? Both of them. Lucky that flaming skulls don't seem to run in that branch of the family, I guess. In the meantime, the Overmaster is heralded on stage by a Twi'lek dancing girl. Well, beats workin' for Jabba, I guess:



Suddenly, for no apparent reason: Daredevil and Black Widow!



And...they're gone again. Let's give 'em a big hand, everyone...Daredevil and the Black Widow! (Yayyyyyyyy!)

Okay, obligatory Matt Murdock cameo out of the way. Turn the book sideways now as Steve-O gets everybody on stage for the big Cossack number:


Click picture to embiggen

Wow. Superheroes, knights, centaurs, dinosaurs, battle wagons, war elephants, fighter planes, shock troopers, and apparently John F. Kennedy's Dallas motorcade to the rescue. Oh, and hey, look, there's Man-Thing, too! I was wondering what happened to him.

How do you wrap a plot like this up? Well, Steve Gerber takes a page from Mission: Impossible and shows us that yes, even satanic demons wear rubber masks to disguise their features:




Then there's a mystical fight or something between Dumbledore and Voldemort. When the dust has settled, the Balance of the Force is restored and the Genesis Planet is no more. Oh, yes, the true gods of all reality are revealed...to be dogs:



So, there ya go, huh? Man-Thing #1. One. Freaky. Mamajama. Of a comic book. But, you know, I bet things will calm down by issue #2...there's not bound to be any exceptional weirdness in the second ish, is there?



...well, except for an alligator getting beaned with a cup of coffee.

Steve Gerber. Ya gotta love him. The comics world is all the poorer without his way-out wacky worlds.