Legion of Monsters: Man-Thing #1

Marvel is not known for its horror titles. That’s not to say that they haven’t had some success with the genre. It’s just that readers looking for a darker, gorier thrill might gravitate more towards DC’s Vertigo imprint or, should they be confused by big words, something from Avatar’s endlessly repetitive Night of the Living Dead line. Still, Marvel does have a bit of a tradition in the genre, stretching back to the days when the company, then called Atlas comics, was busy imitating EC and publishing various Tales to Astonish, Mystify, Terrorize, and Inflame Southern Baptist Schoolteachers. It is from this tradition that both Man-Thing, who made his debut in Savage Tales #1 (1971) and Simon Garth, the zombie character created by Stan Lee in 1953’s Menace #5, find their roots.

            Legion of Monsters: Man-Thing features two stories, the first featuring the titular character, and the second starring Simon Garth. Man-Thing hasn’t been seen in a while, unless you were unlucky enough to walk by the direct-to-video film as it moldered on a Blockbuster shelf back in 2005. Created by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, he’s a mindless lump of vegetative matter with no cognitive skills or motivation, so he’s not exactly the most intriguing character. Long-time series writer Steve Gerber took the focus off of this by throwing increasingly bizarre mystical characters at the hero, including, at one point, a guy with a sword that lived in a jar of peanut butter, but here, writer Charlie Huston channels the narrative through the eyes of a more sentient character, a drifter who takes a job as a gardener in Citrusville, Florida. It turns out that her employer, Master Deflyte, is, like most Man-Thing antagonists, a developer with all the unreasonable hatred of the environment of a Captain Planet villain. There’s an element of surrealism to the story, particularly in a strange, ritualized feast where the developer and his industrial compatriots ceremonially devour Man-Thing’s corpse, but it’s a flawed tale that never really succeeds. The language of the narrative is much too flowery, especially considering the blue-collar origins of the story’s protagonist, and it’s already hard enough to make a story about a lump of brainless peat-moss interesting without bogging it down in passages from Wuthering Heights. Klaus Janson’s art is a little too simplistic as well, though he does have some panels during the aforementioned dinner scene that are unsettling, and his final full-page image is gratifying.

            The back-up story, Ted McKeever’s Simon Garth: Zombie, is actually the highlight of the book. Simon Garth has recently appeared in a completely revamped form in Marvel MAX’s Zombie¸ but here he returns to his roots, as a semi-sentient corpse turned inadvertent hero. In this story, Garth is unearthed after an explosion demolishes a city block, and resurrects himself in a morgue in a romantic search for love. McKeever’s prose is gothic without delving into the sort of stuff a 14-year old girl might write after seeing Interview With The Vampire at a sleep-over, and the story manages to hit a few different emotional beats in its short 13-pages. McKeever’s art, dark and twisted while still maintaining a cartoonish element, is as distorted and creepy as the writing, so it supplements the mood of the story well. While neither of these stories is impressive enough to re-ignite much interest in Marvel’s horror line, they do show that the tradition, long-forgotten, is well worth remembering.  

Rating: 6 on 10

Email the author.