Can the Subhuman Speak?
The case for the primacy of voice in Gerber’s work starts to look flimsier when we consider the strange fact that this scripter of epic talkers (Howard the Duck, Vance Astro in the Guardians of the Galaxy, several of the Defenders) found himself repeatedly telling stories about characters who were anywhere from mute to mindless. These include N’Kantu, the Living Mummy, addled by thousands of years of tortured wakefulness and capable of only grunting out a few words at a time; the undead Simon Garth from Tales of the Zombie, who cannot speak and has difficulty formulating thoughts, the title character of Omega the Unknown, who doesn’t say a thing until the fourth issue of his comic, after which he continues to ration his words as if he were afraid of running out.
Gerber’s time with the Living Mummy was brief, and the black-and-white magazine Tales of the Zombie ran for only nine issues (conaining a fair amount of material by other writers); Omega the Unknown was unceremoniously cancelled with issue 10. But the character with whom Gerber first made his mark, and with whom he stayed for 36 issues over four years, was Man-Thing.
Besides being the Marvel character with the most inadvertently hilarious name (his monthly adventures were supplemented by a quarterly comic called Giant-Size Man-Thing, with no one in the Marvel Bullpen realizing quite how the title sounded), Man-Thing stood out as one of the more difficult concepts to make work. His origin was simple enough: scientist Ted Sallis, who had been trying to recreate the super-soldier formula that gave the world Captain America, is murdered in the Florida swamp after injecting himself with the serum. He is transformed into a creature made of muck and slime, losing his identity and his ability to think. Instead, Man-Thing is motivated by his “empathic nature”: he responds to the feelings around him. The one emotion he cannot tolerate is fear: “For whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch.” Man-Thing looks rather scary, so there is a steady supply of kindling.
For a character with literally no personality, Man-Thing (at least in Gerber’s hands) had a surprisingly successful run, somehow managing to maintain a comic series for four years (Adventure into Fear 11-19, 1972-1975, and Man-Thing 1974-1975). Early on, Gerber developed a version of the formula we saw in Tomb of Dracula: treat the headliner like a supporting character. In Fear, Gerber immediately developed a supporting cast (the apprentice sorceress Jennifer Kale and her family, Dakimh the Enchanter, the nefarious F. A. Schist), swapping them for a more grounded group when Man-Thing got his own series (primarily the sad sack Richard Rory, but also Ruth Hart, Sibyl Mills, and a variety of well-developed characters who stayed for only an issue or two). Yet none of this was at the expense of Man-Thing himself, who, far from being a walk-on in other people’s adventures, was usually the center of attention for several pages at a time. Often these pages focused on Man-Thing shambling through the swamp and killing the alligators that seemed to attack either him or random humans every other issue, but they confirmed Man-Thing’s status as the series’ anchor. Man-Thing set the mood,.
Or perhaps it would be better to say that Man-Thing transmitted the mood. The pages that focused on him obliged the reader to slow down, but Man-Thing’s interactions with the other characters centered around his aforementioned “empathic nature.” Man-Thing acted on impulse, but that impulse was rarely his own. Instead, he acted as a surrogate for the expressed and unexpressed feelings of the people around him, and when he inevitably became involved in violent conflict, his protection of the innocent and smiting of the guilty were a funhouse mirror of the superhero fantasy. It was not the readers who projected their fantasies and aspiration on the “hero,” but rather the ordinary people around him. He became, if not their alter ego, something along the lines of their wandering id.
Thus nearly all of Man-Thing’s motivations are not just external, but borrowed. Adventure into Fear 16 brings Man-Thing into the plot on the very first page because “there is [..] tension in the air this eve—a quiet frenzy which draws to it the macabre Man-Thing!” Man-Thing saves the survivors of a bus crash in Adventure into Fear 18 because “[t]hough he cannot fathom their words…he can feel their desperation.”
Over time, Gerber and his collaborators learned to use Man-Thing’s status as an emotional conduit for more than just moving the plot along. Man-Thing Issues 5 (“Night of the Laughing Dead”) and 6 (“And When I Died…”), drawn by Mike Ploog and inked by Frank Chairomonte, explicitly turn Man-Thing into the key element of an extended psychodrama. A clown named Darrel comes to the swamp to commit suicide, shooting himself in the head. Richard Rory and Ruth Hart become entangled in the interpersonal conflicts of Darrel’s carnival troop, whereupon they are all confronted by Darrel’s ghost. Darrel must perform the story of his life before three shadowy figures called “The Critics,” on whose “verdict rests the fate of [his] soul.” In Issue 6, the clown magically transforms Rory, Ruth, the acrobat Ayla, the carnival owner Garvey, and the strongman Tragg into the avatars of people who played key roles in his life (with Rory playing Darrel himself).
The story is not subtle, but it is emblematic of Gerber’s concerns and methods: external struggles exist almost entirely as an expression of internal conflict. Crucially, Man-Thing also has a role: he is young Darrel’s “Inner demon”, drawn always lurking right behind him, visible to the reader but invisible to the other players. In Act I of the clown’s life story, Darrel and his parents sit at the dinner table as Darrels’ father berates him:
“A quite rage wells in Darrel Daniel—and in some mysterious way…
“—that fury is communicated to the slime crawler—
—“who, acting as the personification of Darrel’s ‘inner demon,’ guides the child’s hand—
“—in an act of symbolic defiance.”
We see Man-Thing lifting up Darrel’s right arm to throw a plate at Darrel’s father. Later, when a bully punches Darrel, the “little tough guy... looks into Darrel’s eyes and sees the demon that lurks inside him,” and chooses to run away. Man-Thing, of course, has been there the whole time.
When the critics, unimpressed by this issue-long amateur theater performance, condemn Darrel’s soul to oblivion, Man-Thing (“still acting as Darrel’s inner demon”) fights on the clown’s behalf, beating them over the head and tossing them into the water: “Surely his judgement must be more valid than that of three ethereal bureaucrats! / And especially so, since he does not—cannot—even realize he is making a judgment! He acts purely on what he feels!/ And what he feels, though not in these terms, is that an injustice is about to be committed!”
Though by no means Gerber’s best (or even his best Man-Thing story), this two-parter makes clear that the Man-Thing (along with his vaguely supernatural swampy surroundings) is a vehicle for subjectivity even as he lacks the capacity for thought. Gerber’s heroes tend to be well-read autodidacts who are good with words (Bev to Howard: “Somehow I never pegged you as an intellectual, Ducky.” Howard to Bev: “Don’t call me names, toots” (Howard the Duck 3)). But the crux of his stories is almost always about feelings, the very things that words tend to express with only mixed success. And emotions are the only language Man-Thing understands.
Even as they are externalized, Darrel’s stories, like those of so many of Gerber’s other misunderstood artistic, sensitive males, are the product of an extremely self-absorbed consciousness. [1] Darrel’s soul is spared and Ayla declares “I’m the reason he took his own life! / I never had the courage to defy Garvey—to tell Darrel…/ …I loved him.” She offers up her own soul instead, but the critics spare both her and Darrel. This is a classic male fantasy: the unloved boy will be missed when he’s gone, and the girl he wanted so desperately will regret her coldness and even offer to die. In the twenty-first century, with the Manosphere and the Incels, Darrel’s narcissism looks dangerously toxic, but this is one of Gerber’s blind spots. When everyone around you is acting out your internal traumas, it is difficult to understand them as people in their own right. [2]
Notes
[1] Issue 12’s Song Cry of Living Dead-Man, in which a frustrated poet locks himself in a cabin in the swamp and faces his demons with the help of both Man-Thing and Sibyl Miller, is a particularly unpleasant example of the type.
[2] The two-part pirate storyline in Issues 13 and 14 is even worse in this regard, when an independent, “abrasive” female scientist agrees to live out her life with a satyr in order to restore his youth (“I’m going to stay with him…I’m not sure why, but..I feel I must.”