Halloween’s coming. The late Bernie Wrightson was born 73 years ago. FRED VAN LENTE pits the Bronze Age muck monsters against each other… Hey, it’s a special Halloween installment of Fred Van Lente’s COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH, in which our fearless columnist takes two related-but-opposing titles, chooses a bunch of issues covering several years, reviews them, and then, using a completely infallible set of criteria, decides which is better. It’s your foolproof way of ending any and all such comics arguments — a service from 13th Dimension! This time around, it’s Swamp Thing vs. Man-Thing because: A) Halloween is this weekend and B) It’s the late Bernie Wrightson’s birthday! So let’s have at it! — By FRED VAN LENTE A 1940 issue of the Street & Smith pulp Unknown saw the debut of Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “It,” the great-grandpappy of all swamp monsters, a muck-covered skeleton that spontaneously rises up to destroy whatever it gets its claws on out of nihilistic curiosity. Impervious to injury, It is stopped only when It falls into a fast-moving stream chasing a little girl and the waters tear the substance of It’s body away, leaving only It’s inanimate bones behind. It is “a massive caricature of a man,” Sturgeon writes. “A huge thing like an irregular mud doll, clumsily made. It quivered and parts of it glistened and parts of it were dried and crumbly.” Unforgettably terrifying even today, “It” spawned comics imitators quickly, including one of the more enduring Golden Age villains, Solomon Grundy, who shares It’s origin if not It’s look. The Heap, a mainstay of Hillman Comics’ Airboy Comics, had both. Premiering two years before Grundy in 1942, the Heap’s foundation-corpse came courtesy of German WWI flying ace Baron Eric von Emmelman crashing his biplane into a swamp. The Baron died a second time in the mid-1950s comics purge that wiped out scary comics until the relaxation of the anti-horror provisions in the 1971 revision of the Comics Code. In the ensuing boomlet, Etrigan first shed the form of man, Dracula emerged from his Tomb, Hank McCoy further mutated into a blue-furred monster, and Marvel and DC both dispatched an “It”-style bog-shambler to join the mummies, werewolves, and ghosts haunting 1970s comics racks. The Heap is most obviously the direct visual inspiration for Marvel’s Man-Thing (though this “Man in...
FRED VAN LENTE pits the Silver Age freaks against the Silver Age freaks… Hey, it’s a new installment of Fred Van Lente’s COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH, in which our fearless columnist takes two related-but-opposing titles, chooses a bunch of issues covering several years, reviews them, and then, using a completely infallible set of criteria, decides which is better. It’s your foolproof way of ending any and all such comics arguments — a service from 13th Dimension! This time around it’s Silver Age Doom Patrol vs. Silver Age X-Men, seeing as how the new season of HBO Max’s Doom Patrol is upon us. So let’s have at it! By FRED VAN LENTE Let’s get ready to reeeeeeead cooooooooomics! Greetings, Retrofolk, and welcome to another thrilling installment of COMIC BOOK DEATH MATCH, where we pit two contemporaneous runs of semi-related titles against each other and determine which one is better under a totally arbitrary criteria determined by me, because it was my idea, tough. I am going to make the bold statement that My Greatest Adventure #80, featuring the first appearance of the Doom Patrol by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, is up there with, say, Amazing Fantasy #15 as one of the greatest origin stories of all time. We are deftly introduced to Rita (Elasti-Girl) Farr, Larry (Negative Man) Trainor and Cliff (Robotman) Steele; the accidents that turned them into superpowered freaks; and the mysterious, wheelchair-bound Chief, who brings them together and inspires them to win back society’s approval by fighting on their behalf. They then immediately launch into a race with a great, memorable villain, General Immortus, to salvage an alien spaceship. It’s a deft 25-page classic done-in-one that could really use, I dunno, a remake as a prestige Black Label series (DC, you know where to find me). As it turns out, series co-creator Drake was really impressed by what those Marvel guys were doing across town and, when asked to create a regular feature for My Greatest Adventure, decided to try a strip in the style of the House of Ideas. With the constant interfamilial bickering of its hero quartet and epic storylines, Doom Patrol resembles nothing less than a weirder version of Marvel flagship Fantastic Four. But it would appear that Marvel knows how to read other people’s comics too, because just a few...
Halloween’s coming. The late Bernie Wrightson was born 73 years ago. FRED VAN LENTE pits the Bronze Age muck monsters against each other…
FRED VAN LENTE pits the Silver Age freaks against the Silver Age freaks…
FRED VAN LENTE formally launches a fancy new feature comparing great classic comics!
