Movies - Man-Thing

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The Man-Thing is a fictional comic-book creature created by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, and featured in various Marvel Comics titles, the most prominent written by Steve Gerber.

Man-Thing is a large, vaguely humanoid, slow-moving muck-monster living in the Florida Everglades near the Seminole reservation. Unlike the intelligent and plant-based Swamp Thing of DC Comics, the Man-Thing is a nearly mindless mass of slime with no particular affinity to any living thing, but who nevertheless often becomes an accidental hero as it stumbles upon various crime and horror scenarios. It is able to sense human emotions, and is enraged by fear and automatically secretes a strong chemical corrosive; anyone clutched by the Man-Thing is prone to be chemically acid-burned, hence the series' tag-line, "Whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing's touch." Though fear is understandably most people's response to the creature, typically only villains end up meeting an acidic death at its hands.

Origin

The Man-Thing first appeared in Savage Tales #1 (1971), written by Thomas and Conway and illustrated by Grey Morrow. This story explained the creature's origin, which was roughly similar to Swamp Thing's: A biochemist, Ted Sallis, while fleeing from evil agents who wanted his formula for a miracle drug (later defined as the "super-soldier serum" used by Captain America), drowned in the swamp and was transformed into the Man-Thing by a combination of his own formula and magical forces extant in the area. Sallis's mind was apparently extinguished, although it was later shown that he could briefly return to consciousness within his monstrous form.

Man-Thing in comics

The character next appeared in a story by Conway and Morrow in Adventure into Fear #10 (1972) and continued in that series for nine more issues, with Steve Gerber taking over as writer starting in #11. Gerber expanded on the notion of the swamp having mystical properties and made it the "nexus of all realities", thus supplying numerous demons, ghosts, time-travelling warriors, etc., to serve as the Man-Thing's antagonists—though he continued to encounter non-supernatural villains as well, including land developers, fascist vigilantes, and common criminals. The Fear stories introduced a large supporting cast, including the demon Thog, the benevolent sorcerer Dakimh, and several humans who became allies of Dakimh and the Man-Thing, thus circumventing the difficulty of having a protagonist with no mind and no goals.

Beginning in January 1974, Gerber wrote his own Man-Thing series, illustrated most often by Val Mayerik at first and later Mike Ploog. The series became Marvel's chief non-superhero fantasy title, and — again like DC's Swamp Thing — was flexible enough to accommodate horror, fantasy, science fiction, crime, and occasional crossovers with superhero characters. Gerber also wrote five longer issues of a parallel series, Giant-Size Man-Thing, whose apparently unintentional double-entendre title became a common joke among comics readers (a "giant-size" comic is one with more pages than a standard comic book).

Man-Thing #22 was the last of the series, and justified its end with an unusual device: Gerber appeared as a character in the story, and admitted that he had not been inventing the Man-Thing's adventures but simply reporting on them. After witnessing the near-end of the universe—in which the minds of literally everyone except Gerber, Dakimh, and Thog were destroyed but then restored—Gerber decided he had to move on to other things. He continued to write cameos appearances for the Man-Thing in other Marvel titles, as well as a Marvel Comics Presents serial, through 1989.

A second Man-Thing series began in November 1979, written by Michael Fleisher and Chris Claremont and illustrated by Jim Mooney and Don Perlin; the series lasted through issue #11, in which Claremont not only introduced himself as a character as Gerber had, but temporarily became the Man-Thing. The character was revived in a third series in 1997, written by J. M. DeMatteis and illustrated by Lian Roger Sharp, for eight issues.

In his first Ultimate Marvel appearance, Man-Thing teamed with Spider-Man in Ultimate Marvel Team Up #10, unwittingly saving the superhero from the Lizard.

Man-Thing appeared as a cameo in the short lived Martial Art comic Shang-Chi in issue #04 "Swamp Monster", Man-Thing was accompanied with a man called Lu Sun who look after it. The Man-Thing saved Shang-Chi and Lu Sun life from Fu Manchu's assassins at the end just when Shang-Chi fell into a sandpit trap. The assassins died from being burned by Man-Thing when they attacked it while in fear.

Superhuman abilities

The Man-Thing possesses a variety of superhuman powers that are derived from the interaction of the scientific formula created by Ted Sallis and the mystical energies of the Nexus of Realities.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Man-Thing ]

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