Customer Reviews

Essential Man-Thing - Volume 2 (Essential (Marvel Comics))

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

At last, the rest of Steve Gerber's superb run on Man-Thing is out in the essential format.
The first half of this book really is essential, as it showcases some of Gerber's best work on this strip, including the classic stories 'The Kids's Night Out' & 'A Book Burns in Citrusville' ( dealing with school bullying & censorship respectively ). Most fun is Steve's last script on the regular series 'Pop goes The Cosmos', where he guests himself alongside the mindless muck monster, a tricky proposition in a lesser writer's hands.
Gerber was writing comics for adults decades before it became fashionable, and this is one series that should always be in print, in my opinion.
For art buffs, you also get the likes of Alfredo Alcala, John Buscema, Tom Sutton & the massively underrated Jim Mooney, whose sedate, mannered art always bounced brilliantly off of Gerber's insane surrealism.
Unfortunately, after the halfway mark, the quality takes a bit of a nosedive.
Marvel brought back Manny in the '80's, and at first gave him to longtime Jonah Hex writer Micheal Fleisher, who contributes some interesting scripts for the first three issues, but then they gave the book to Chris Claremont....
Claremont has always been my least favourite writer, his work at best soporific, and at worst, plain cringeworthy.
His time on the book seems to be spent doing lame riffs on Gerber's original stories, bringing back characters and then having no idea what to do with them. He even closes the run the exact same way Gerber did, by clumsily inserting himself into the story, but by that point I'd had enough of him.
No one but Gerber ever seemed to know how to write Man-Thing properly, but he somehow could always make mindless creatures compelling. ( See also Essential Tales Of The Zombie! ) Just one reason why he was great.
Buy this absolutely, I can't recommend the first half too highly, but after the Fleisher stories, you don't need to read anymore.
( As a sidenote, I notice on this volume that Marvel are now copying the DC Showcase look on the spine, which now makes the Marvel part of my bookshelf look really crap. Should've stuck with what you had, boys...)

This is a mixed bag, some good stories, some not so good. While there's only so much you can do with a mindless - though empathic, voiceless character that is limited to a near uninhabited geographic environement (unless you count the trip to the Himilayian Mountains where he was mistaken as a Yeti??? - an issue from this collection)

Reading through this you get the sense that it takes a special persepctive and talent to write a good Man-Thing story and its even rarer to be able to do it issue after issue

Just to reiterate what a previous reviewer said. The first half of this book contains some of the best work Steve Gerber did on this title, culminating in an extended storyline that begins with the "Book Burns" story and covers everything from politics and censorship to emotional vacancy and far-out sorcery. A fitting end to a classic run on a character that doesn't get its due nearly enough anymore.

The second half of the book, written by Michael Fleisher, is just total crap. By-the-numbers comic book adventures with the mute, unthinking Man-Thing just shoe-horned in like a walking plot device.

Still, the book is very much worth buying for the first half. Overall, the quality of Gerber's writing is much better issue-to-issue in this book than it is in the sometimes-spotty Volume 1.

I wanted to give this collection a five star review but in the end I had to drop to four. The stories in this collection are not as consistently excellent as the first volume. Man-Thing works best when he is part of the scenery and a story develops around him. Some writers start really forcing things to happen in the plot to get Man-Thing into the stories they want to tell which doesn't always work. Lots of great artwork to be found in these pages and I enjoyed seeing Man-Thing's Handbook to the Marvel Universe entry included.

Never was a serial title better suited to showcase its supporting cast,
rather than its star. This dependence of our murky leading upon the emotions of those around him is the key ingredient to Steve Gerber's success. Backed by able artists such as John Buscema, Alfredo Alcala, and Jim Mooney, Gerber tells tales where every thing and every one is there for a reason.

The Giant-Sized story that starts us off---a foray into sword and sorcery fantasy---ties into the run at the end of the first series, returning Thog the Nether-Spawn from Man-Thing's earlier run in FEAR. His human proxies---the accountant Ronald Duhl, the terrifying Scavenger and his sister the magazine editor---each have compelling personal stories, with poor Richard Rory, Gerber's alter ego, caught in the middle. Bullying, book burning, manhood and degeneracy (shades of Aladdin Sane!), and very personal, desperate struggles are the main body. It is more than horror or mystery, and while it's a book dependent upon suspense and character studies, it is not without its bizarre action.

With a "meh" MTIO drawn by John Byrne and a memorable MTU by Claremont/ Byrne, we find Manny mixing it up with popular Marvel superheroes; upon the return of his book in 1979, we get an adventure-style book, which once again settles into an imitative vein when Claremont takes the veins from Fleischer. While I somewhat enjoyed the return of Gerber's action concession via the ghost pirate Captain Fate, the second cast never attains the off-beat and literary flavor of Vol. one.

Don Perlin's rendering is dull by contrast, but he does his usual workman-like, competent job storytelling. Not to knock Claremont, but it's obvious the magic of his efforts went towards his X-Men of the times. His attempt to insinuate himself like Gerber did in the last issues of both volumes is decent but not very coherent and quite derivative---my main slam on the second volume. It's like going Taco Bell because your favorite Mexican restaurant is already closed. But Gerber's stories, so adult and clever, are not to be missed; you'll never have an experience like it anywhere else in superhero comics.