Muddying the waters

In Savage Tales #1, cover-dated May 1971, Marvel comics readers were introduced to Man-Thing, a shambling swamp creature created when a chemist working in a laboratory in the swamp had a terrible accident with some of his chemicals, and fused with the muck of the swamp. In House of Secrets #92, cover-dated July 1971, DC comics readers were introduced to Swamp Thing, a shambling swamp creature created when a chemist working in a laboratory in the swamp had a terrible accident with some of his chemicals and fused with the muck of the swamp.

Man-Thing—created by Stan Lee, who came up with the name, and Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow—has the earlier cover date, which would seemingly make Swamp Thing the imitator, although complicating things a bit was the fact that one of Man-Thing's creators, Conway, was living with one of Swamp Thing's creators, Len Wein, at the time. Wein also wrote Man-Thing stories in the early'70s.

Despite the many similarities, the fact that the two characters came out almost simultaneously has generally been regarded by people who care to think of such things as just one of those weird coincidences that occasionally occur when you have two rival comic book companies who share a city, talent pool and audience. (The other most prominent example is probably Marvel and DC's dueling teams of outsider superheroes lead by middle-aged men in wheelchairs, The Doom Patrol and The X-Men, which debuted three months apart in 1963).

I've recently been working my way through Showcase Presents: Justice League America Vol. 5, and had just arrived at JLoA #91, which contains this panel: Forgive the poor scan (The Showcase Presents line is full of great blog fodder, but very, very difficult to scan images from if they fall too close to the middle of the book). As you can hopefully make out, the narration box refers to Solomon Grundy as "The Macabre Man-Thing."

Writer Mike Friedrich is quite enamored of the expression, using it over and over during the course of the two-part story that begins in JLoA #91 and continues into JLoA #92. In fact, I counted five references to Grundy as a "Man-Thing" in Friedrich's narration (followed up by "Marshland Monster" and "Swampland Savage").

These two issues were cover-dated August and September of 1971, mere months after Man-Thing appeared in a Marvel comic, although JLoA writers have been referring to Grundy as a "Man-Thing" for years prior (Also of interest: Friedrich dedicated his two-part story to Roy Thomas, who, as we already mentioned, helped create Man-Thing, although Friedrich's dedication was for introducing him to the Golden Age JSA characters, and thus not swamp monster related). Here's a panel from a collection reprinting the Gardner Fox-written "Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two!" that was originally published in 1966's JLoA #46 and #47 (which I discussed at some length here):That's Fox calling Solomon Grundy "The Macabre Man-Thing" some five years before Marvel's Man-Thing appeared in Savage Tales. Did Stan Lee steal, or unknowingly appropriate, the nickname of a DC swamp monster to give to a brand new Marvel swamp monster?

Maybe...but probably not. A Marvel's 1960-published Tales of Suspense #7 featured a story called "I Fought The Molten Man-Thing!," which was also the cover feature:Jack Kirby drew that particular story, and Stan Lee edited that comic, and thus might have written or dialogued that story. So maybe Stan Lee borrowed the name from himself...or from Kirby...? But let's not get into that here. Anyway, that's as far back as I can trace the etymology of the name "Man-Thing."

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Speaking of Marvel and Showcase Presents: Justice League of America Vol. 5, it was interesting to come across this panelin a DC comic. It's from JLoA #95, which contained the story "The Private War of Johnny Dune!" (Also written by Friedrich, and, like the black and white Grundy panels above, drawn by Dick Dillin and Joe Giella).

Johnny Dune is a Vietnam vet turned protest singer with the ability to control people with his voice. Where did he get this miraculous super-power? He was apparently born with it. He was a mutant.

Mutants are, of course, Marvel's thing, and though there are mutants in the DCU, and one does see the word used to refer to characters here and there throughout DCU history, this is a pretty rare example of a Marvel-like mutant. That is, an otherwise normal-looking person getting a super-power during a time of stress basically for no reason other than possibly genetics. Super powers in the DC Universe generally require an origin of some sort.

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Justice League of America #91-#92 is of interest for more reasons than the number of times their writer called Solomon Grundy "Man-Thing." They're also the story in which Robin Dick Grayson gets a new costume from his older, extra-dimensional counterpart that none of the readers seem to like very much.

Those issues were one of the annual JLA/JSA crossovers, in which the Justice Leaguers of Earth-1 (i.e. the "real" DC Universe of the time, where the majority of the line was set) and the Justice Society members of Earth-2 (a parallel universe where the Golden Age characters lived). The JSA brought along their Robin this time, and he meets up with his Earth-1 counterpart, who has torn his uniform.Luckily, he has a spare:Dick seems to like it okaybut I guess readers didn't. Near the end of the story, Robin thinks to himself, "Well, back to my interrupted case--and my original uniform! Funny thing, though--I kinda like this one--I just may keep it!"

A narration box at the bottom of the same panel asks, "What do you think, readers? Would you like Robin to switch to this new costume? Write us--Let us know!"

I assume few wrote in to say he should keep it, as this is the only time I've seen the costume. It looks better in black and white than in color, I think, but I don't care for the Gambit-like mask-thing. Interesting to see the ways in which it presages some of the Nightwing costumes he'd wear years later, especially in the gliding feature.

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Finally, here's a splash panel from the first page of JLoA #94, one of the several pages in it drawn by Neal Adams: The narration begins like this: "A simple man...a simple face."

Man, that face is many things, but simple it is not.

Review: The Charles Addams Mother Goose

The opportunity to edit and illustrate a selection of Mother Goose rhymes came at a good time for Charles Addams, according to biographer Linda H. Davis’ Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life.

By the mid-‘60s the New Yorker cartoonist’s income had dipped significantly due to the cancellation of The Addams Family TV show, and he was always reluctant to try his hand at a different medium than cartooning.

His fellow New Yorker artist Robert Kraus had just founded an imprint for children’s books, however, and wanted to launch with the work of the magazine’s cartoonists, staring with Addams choosing his own nursery rhymes and illustrating them how he saw fit. The Charles Addams Mother Goose was thus published in 1967.

The result? According to Davis, the historical record seems mixed. The New York Times “gave the revered cartoonist a rare snide review,” stating that it was “purely a joke; the gruesomeness is familiar, safe and temporary.” The royalties, Davis said, were scant. Simon and Schuster republished in 2002, and that’s the edition I read. For whatever it’s worth, it was only with some difficulty I found a copy. The library I go to most often didn’t carry it, and the Columbus Metropolitan Library system only has one copy.

I was quite glad when I finally did get my hands on a copy, although it’s difficult to honestly, objectively assess a book like this so many decades after its publication, when a reader approaches it fully aware of the artist’s reputation and influence.

It’s certainly a welcome work, for the opportunity it affords to look at Addams’ art in a new context (i.e. a context other than single image New Yorker cartoons or the occasional painted cover of the same magazine), and yet it’s also a rather awkward work.

The particular nursery rhymes are almost all completely beside the point; they’re all only there to give Addams something to match an image to, and many of these images comment on the rhymes in a way to completely change them.

“Pease porridge hot, Pease porridge cold” is illustrated by an old witch stirring a cauldron of something with a tentacle, a humanoid hand and two eyeballs poking out of it, while two bird-legged little goblins away with long wooden spoons.

“Wee Willie Winkie” becomes some sort of monster, with the cadaverous look of Lon Chaney’s opera phantom, and Nosferatu-esque fangs and ears, dressed in a nightcap and gown knocking on a window like an apparition.

And, for perhaps the best example, here’s Addams’ Humpty Dumpty:


The fact that something hatches from the broken egg man certainly changes the nature of that little nursery rhyme, doesn’t it?

Addams’ efforts to transform, or at least recontextualize the rhymes, is admirable, particularly when he succeeds as well as he does with the Humpty Dumpty illustrations. Less successful are his forced efforts to involve the Addams Family. Wednesday and the mean little boy in the striped shirt we know as Pugsley play the children, Grandma plays Mother Goose herself, as well as a variety of old ladies throughout, and Uncle Fester is give a good half dozen or so roles to play, many of them rather far outside his range.

For example, here he is as the Jack who built the house that Jack built:


The weird family appear as themselves in one full-page black and white illustration, streaming from outside their familiar Victorian manse and into a graveyard just across the street (illustrating the rhyme “Girls and boys, Come out to play, The moon does shine, As bright as day…”), but more often than not they are cast like actors and actresses into different roles, so that Wednesday plays Little Miss Muffet, for example, and Pugsley Pretty John Watts and Tom, Tom, the piper’s son.

And that, above all else, is what makes the book somewhat awkward. Addams doesn’t pick a strategy and stick with it, but offers more or less straight illustration on one page, then an episode of The Addams Family plays Mother Goose on another, then offers a humorous cartoon version of a rhyme (Like the “American Gothic” couple performing “Three Blind Mice”) and then attempts to twist a rhyme into a different narrative.

Based on what’s here to see, any strategy would have worked perfectly well, but vacillating between all four makes for a somewhat frustrating book.


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The 2002 version contains a six-page “The Charles Addams Mother Goose Scrapbook” including a few photos of Addams from various points in his life, the covers of the various collections of his cartoons, a drawing of a train he did at age four, and an unpublished illustration meant for the book:



The scrapbook includes a few sentences of text beneath this image, saying, “For reasons unknown, this piece was deleted from the book at the last moment.” I can’t tell if that’s mean sarcastically or not. That is a mushroom cloud on the horizon, right? And the shepherd and his sheep are fleeing into a bomb shelter in the face of an atomic bombing? If so, it seems clear why that image might have been cut, although an image of a post-nuclear war landscape did make the cut. (Oddly, in the Davis biography I was referring to, this image is reproduced in black and white, where it loses its menace, and Davis doesn’t seem to read it as a mushroom cloud, referring to the shape on the horizon as “an ominous tomato-red twister mov[ing] in.”)

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Finally, since we talk about DC Comics super-characters here so often, it wouldn’t seem right to discuss The Charles Addams Mother Goose and not share his two-page, seven-image version of the Solomon Grundy rhyme, chopped up a bit to make scanning of it possible (in the original, Monday through Thursday ran across the top of a two-page spead, and Friday through Sunday beneath them), and, obviously, they don't include the weird shadows that trying to scan the pages without damaging the book resulted in.






I'm not sure exactly what S.G. took ill with, but any disease whose symptoms include mushrooms growing out of your head and climaxes in the disintegration of the afflicted sure is a pretty scary one.