Portrait of the Artist as a Teenage Swamp Monster
Gerber’s repeated use of the Man-Thing to externalize the suffering of a misunderstood, alienated male character suggests that, inadvertently, Gerber managed to literalize the title character’s name in a manner completely different from the obvious anatomical puns. This particular plot is gendered: it’s a man thing. [1]
Not always, of course (“Not all man-things”). After beginning 1975 with a truly awful and sexist two-parter about magical pirates and satyrs (Man-Thing 13 & 14), Gerber closed out his run on the title with an eight-issue stretch that was better than anything he had done on the title to date. Issue 15 was an atmospheric one-off that technically didn’t even have Man-Thing in it, and was entirely devoted to the development of St. Cloude, a female character seen neither before nor since. It would be followed by a vicious deconstruction of American masculinity (“Decay Meets the Mad Viking”), the first installment of a trilogy about conservative morality and small-town fascism that somehow avoided preachiness.
In the middle of this storyline (set awkwardly between Issues 16 and 17), Gerber came out with “The Kids’ Night Out,” a long, one-shot story featured in Giant-Size Man-Thing 4. Once again, we have a misunderstood dead man who uses the Man-Thing as a figure of identification and projection, although this time without any magic involved: Edmond Winshed is a 17-year-old high school student who, thanks to a weight problem, spent his entire short life feeling like an outcast. The book begins (after a brief, pointless scene of the Man-Thing rescuing a faun) with Edmond’s funeral; he died of a heart attack while being forced by a sadistic gym teacher to run laps. Unlike Darrel, Edmond will not come back to life, so numerous surrogate throughout the story express his thoughts and feelings for him. The funeral has a whiff of narcissistic wish-fulfillment. Edmond is not there to watch it, but his best friend, Alice, calls out the gathered “mourners’ for their hypocrisy with a righteous vehemence that Edmond himself never managed when he was alive.
Though Edmond is dead, his words live on after him: Alice is the custodian of a notebook entitled “The Book of Edmond,” which she has brings to a meeting of the high school literary magazine for possible publication. When she begins to read it aloud, the next five pages are one of Gerber’s most successful attempts at including text pages within a comic book. [2]. Like the story of Darrel the Clown, “The Book of Edmond” is built on multiple identifications and projections, but with much less hostility. It begins with the words “Maybe you’ve heard of Richard Rory, the disk jockey on WNRV.” Rory is invoked because he has spoken in public about the Man-Thing, whom Edmond sees as a metaphor for his own life. But Edmond (and Gerber) could have brought up the Man-Thing without him. Rory’s inclusion serves to intensify Edmond’s identification with the monster; Rory and the Man-Thing have a connection based entirely on emotion and identification (both our outsiders), and now Edmond is following in Rory’s footsteps by asserting a kinship with the creature from the swamp.
The word “comics” never appears within “The Kids Night Out,” yet the story told in and around “The Book of Edmond” is a clever elaboration of the affective relationships fostered by reading postwar Marvel superhero comics. Where DC encouraged the (presumably young and male) reader to identify with aspirational figures such as Superman, Marvel offered its fans a model for living in the world as a despised outcast (the X-Men, the Hulk, even Spider-Man). And even though “The Book of Edmond” stands out from the rest of the book because of its text-based format, it sells the Edmond/Man-Thing metaphor through the comics medium’s primary superpower: the combination of words and pictures. After Edmond compares himself to the Man-Thing in his introduction, he never mentions the monster again. But he doesn’t need to. Each page is accompanied by an illustration featuring both Edmond and the Man-Thing, keeping their connection firmly in the reader’s mind even while Edmond no longer makes it explicit.
As he explains, the Man-Thing is despised because “[h]e’s made of slime, and I’m just fat./ He scares people. I just make them laugh.” Edmond hopes that his book will do what Marvel Comics’ ongoing tales of pariahs are supposed to: “I’m writing this because if people had been a little kinder, and more compassionate, I might not relate so well to Man-Thing.”
Though Giant-Size Man-Thing 4 is an awkward detour from the ongoing narrative of Man-Thing 16-18, Edmond’s journal demonstrates that “The Kids Night Out” shares a theme with the concurrent monthly storyline. Gerber’s stories are filled with outcasts, but Edmond is the only one whose dilemma is consistently framed in terms of masculinity. As a small child, he loves baking cooking, while his Uncle Sam (!) demands that he hold a hammer and lear to be a man.” In school he is, of course, terrible at sports. And in high school, when Alice gets him to understand that his uncle is afraid Edmond might be in a romantic relationship with his new young wife, Edmond discovers that he actually can be taken seriously as a heterosexual male, and kisses Alice. He realizes that “Sam figured I was finally able to hold that freaking hammer!” Not only is the sexual symbolism obvious, but the illustration connects Edmond’s newfound confidence in his own masculinity with the Man-Thing, who is shown helping him hold the hammer over his head. “The Book of Edmond” models a powerful reading strategy, encouraging us to accept the Man-Thing as, if not our own personal savior, than our guide to expressing our emotions. [3]
It is up to Alice to keep Edmond’s memory alive, protect the book from anyone who might want to destroy it (as evidence that Coach Milner was responsible for Edmond’s death), and even to complete the book itself. The epilogue, written by Alice, describes Edmond’s 30 minutes of afterschool laps in the Florida heat that would end in Edmond’s death. Alice brings the Book of Edmond back to its beginning, proposing a less hypocritical epitaph than the one she expected to see in the high school yearbook: “He was a fat boy, who saw himself more as a monster than a human being. We didn’t know this Man-Thing very well or like him very much. He was killed, and that’s the end of it.”
Alice has inserted herself into the Book of Edmond out of necessity (“He couldn’t write [the epilogue] because he was murdered”), and she had already been an important part of Edmond’s life. Now, however, whether through the mystical properties of the Citrusville swamp (which Gerber established early on as the “Nexus of All Realities”), the power of the written word, or the posthumous realization of Edmond’s identification with Man-Thing, Man-Thing at this point shares some sort of empathic bond with the late Edmond, but also with Alice. After Alice is kidnapped by the adults who want the Book of Edmond destroyed, she faints. On the first page of Chapter 3, the second panel repeats the colorless image of Alice’s unconscious face, this time in the night sky over the swamp. Man-Thing hears a voice, and looks down
…at his own reflection…or something which purports to be.
“The reflection speaks. Its lips move, but no sound issues forth.
“And yet, Man-Thing hears…and seems to understand…this silent plea from within and without him.”
His reflection in the water is that of Edmond, visually emphasizing this mysterious, now three-way link between them and Alice. This link now provides the logic that drives the remainder of the story. Man-Thing leaves the swamp and shambles into town, making his way to Citrusville High School, where he proceeds to rescue Alice and punish Edmond’s enemies. This is unprecedented in the Man-Thing run; while Gerber and other writers had stretched the “rules” governing Man-Thing’s motivations and conduct before, he had never displayed so much initiative before. The result is a grotesque bloodbath: Edmond's young Aunt, who had never spoken up for him, has her mouth burnt shut; his uncle, who had responded to Edmond’s failures at baseball by suggesting that “maybe he needed a fatter bat,” is swung about by Man-Thing until his back is broken, while the sadistic gym teacher who caused Edmond’s heart to fail him has his hands fused together in prayer and a hole burnt all the way through his heart. This is, of course, a classic horror revenge story, but it also just a few notches more extreme than a standard superhero fantasy: an empowered version of the victim beats the bad guys and saves the girl.
But that is not all. While it is true that Alice is put in the familiar position of damsel in distress, it is only after she heroically takes up Edmond’s cause after her friend’s death. The final panel has Man-Thing back in the swamp, looking down at his reflection only to see Alice rather than Edmond. The driving force behind the Edmond-Man-Thing-Alice connection is empathy, which is essentially Man-Thing’s superpower. It is also in noticeably short supply among the families of Citrusville. Edmond’s enemies are, at times, caricatures; not one of them approaches the well-rounded characterization of Edmond himself. This could be a function of space constraints, or of lazy writing, but I suspect it is something more: Gerber grants the gift of subjectivity only to those characters who are capable of identifying with another. That is, despite the frequent self-involvement of so many Gerber heroes, in Man-Thing, at least, selfhood is only truly attained by people who can imagine their way out of their own heads. Man-Thing, who has no “head” in this sense, is the vehicle for expression both subjectivity and empathy.
Notes
[1] in his issue-by-issue discussion of Howard the Duck, Osvaldo Oyola points out the frequency with which Gerber presents male, misunderstood “geniuses” whose bad behavior is justified by the ill treatment he suffered at the hands of others. (“WAUGH and On and On #1: Neither Fish Nor Fowl”)
[2] In addition to the aforementioned Howard the Duck 16, there are text pages in Defenders 23, Giant-Size Defenders 4, Marvel Comics Presents 3 (featuring the Guardians of the Galaxy), Man-Thing 12 (the “Song_Cry of the Living Dead Man”), Man-Thing 22 (told in the form of a letter from Gerber himself), Howard the Duck 8 and 14, Marvel Spotlight 20 (featuring the Son of Satan), and Rampaging Hulk 7 (a Man-Thing story). He would also use them in some of his later work for other publishers, such as the black-and-white graphic novel Stewart the Rat (1980).
[3] In this regard, Man-Thing functions much like the “Magic Negro” character who is so prevalent in white pop culture: the cool/natural/spiritual Black person who helps white people get in touch with their feelings, find love, and learn to dance. In Man-Thing’s case, the best that can be hoped for is two out of three.