IN PRAISE OF GERBER

Marvel recently released a new Marvel Masterworks volume, collecting more of Steve Gerber's classic, iconoclastic run on Man-Thing. I wrote the introduction to the book and you can read it below.

Much as I adore 1960s comics—the innocent, inspiring DCs early in the decade and the Marvel explosion led by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Steve Ditko—the 70s might be my favorite comic book decade. The 60s saw Jack, Stan, and Steve breaking new ground in sometimes radical ways (just as the Beatles, Dylan, the Who, and others were doing in rock and roll; it was a revolutionary time all around), building a new foundation for the comic book form as they constructed that impressive skyscraper called the Marvel Universe.

The following decade saw an astonishing influx of new talent to the industry, hungry young writers and artists who were raised on, revered, those classic stories, and wanted to not just build on that foundation, but construct some dazzling new structures of their own. The result? Seminal works like Roy Thomas and Barry Smith’s Conan, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing, Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula, Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu, Steve Englehart’s Doctor Strange (with Frank Brunner and Gene Colan), Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and… Well, I could go on, it was truly an embarrassment of riches: a staggering body of work by creators at the very top of their game. These are the books that kept me reading comics at a time when I might have left them behind—I’d just turned 16 when the new decade dawned—and the creators I still hold in highest regard.

But if I was forced to pick my favorite comics of the 1970s, I’d choose the works of two very different talents: Jack Kirby, the medium’s elder statesman, who proved, with his interlocking Fourth World books at DC, that he remained universes ahead of everyone else (and we’re still trying to catch up), and the man I’m here to laud and celebrate: Steve Gerber.

I first came across Gerber’s work in an issue of The Incredible Hulk, plotted by Roy Thomas and scripted by Steve. Truth is, when I’d see a new writer’s name in the credits, I’d wince a little. No matter how talented, it usually takes time for a storyteller to find their level, to become comfortable with the format, and it often showed. Looking back, there was nothing particularly memorable about that Hulk story, but something in Gerber’s voice—and he had one, right from the start; not many writers can do that—impressed me. He seemed comfortable, at home, in the medium; he didn’t stumble out of the gate, he sprinted confidently ahead. I’ll have to remember this guy’s name, I thought. I’ll have to pay attention to his work. And I did.

It became clear, very quickly, that Steve Gerber was a mold-breaker. He had, as noted, a unique, individual voice at a time when many of Marvel’s writers—even the very best of them—were burying their individuality beneath a layer of Stan Lee-isms. Gerber stepped into the Marvel Universe, looked around at the towering structures that Kirby, Lee, and Ditko erected, bowed in deference to their collective genius, and then started kicking those towers down with ferocious glee.

I could write an entire essay about Steve’s work on Defenders (where he blew the superhero genre to pieces and never bothered to put it back together) or Howard the Duck (the first overground-underground comic book: If you weren’t around then, you simply can’t fathom the impact Howard had on the comics landscape), or just about any of his 70s Marvel work (which in no way denigrates the superb work he did later; this era just happens to be my favorite because that’s when I discovered Gerber). But we’re here to discuss the stories in this volume from my favorite Steve Gerber series of all: Man-Thing.

According to legend, Man-Thing was created by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow at a time when the comic book business was becoming enamored of the horror genre (the loosening of the Comics Code had a lot to do with that). Around the same time Manny oozed out of the swamp in the short-lived black and white magazine Savage Tales, DC launched their own bog-beast with Wein and Wrightson’s “Swamp Thing” story in House of Secrets. By 1972, both characters had their own ongoing features and, from this reader’s perspective, Swamp Thing was winning the competition: There was a gorgeous pulp-poetry infusing Wein’s prose and a horrifying elegance to Wrightson’s art. Their collaboration remains a high point of the medium. It would have been easy for Gerber to take his cues from Len and Bernie when he took over the Man-Thing feature in Adventure Into Fear #11—but, being Gerber, he went off in a very different direction.

Man-Thing (it didn’t take long for the character to get his own book) essentially became a stealth anthology series. Yes, there were recurring characters like aspiring sorceress Jennifer Kale and down (and down and down) on his luck Richard Rory, but the story was the star here and the looser format allowed Gerber to ignore, and shatter, the medium’s expectations. To follow his unique muse wherever it led him.

I suspect Steve was a fan of Rod Serling and his anthology series, The Twilight Zone, because you can feel the influence of episodes like “The Shelter” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” in his Man-Thing work: stories, driven by a kind of righteous fury, that thrust people into desperate situations, forcing both their inner demons and inner angels to the surface. Stories where characters speak in feverish, frustrated, wildly poetic monologues, illuminating themselves, and the human condition, in the process. (Brian, in this volume’s classic “Song Cry of the Living Dead Man,” may be the single most Serlingesque of all Gerber’s protagonists: The direct descendant of Gart Wiliams of “A Stop At Willoughby” and Martin Sloan of “Walking Distance.”) In a way, Man-Thing himself is the Serling figure in Gerber’s tales: Rod as swamp monster, shambling onto the stage when necessary to introduce and sum up the drama.

This is not to suggest that Gerber was copying Serling: The man was sui generis and Man-Thing became an ongoing vehicle for his compelling and idiosyncratic worldview. Looking back, it seems that the muck-monster’s swamp home was—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not—a representation of Gerber’s own psyche; each character who stepped on the stage another aspect of that psyche. But if all the Man-Thing stories offered were a form of self-therapy, they would have soon been forgotten. What made them unique was Gerber’s constant inventiveness and, more important, his ability to dig deep into his characters, to drill down into their emotional and psychological core. And that’s what drives these stories more than anything: raw emotion. It’s the force that touches Man-Thing himself, for better and worse, again and again. When I teach writing classes, I tell my students that a great story requires the writer to thrust a (metaphorical) knife deep into their chest and bleed onto the pages. Gerber did that every issue: The stories were profoundly personal and, simultaneously, universally relatable. They made me feel, touched my heart—sometimes elating and sometimes devastating me. And that emotional authenticity is, I think, the main reason Gerber’s Man-Thing stories still resonate today.

Yes, a lot of it is fairly bleak—Gerber is turning over rocks in both the collective consciousness and his own, and finding the worms and maggots hiding underneath—but there’s also an undercurrent of hope, of reaching for the light, as well. Ayla’s love is what redeems Darrel the Clown’s soul; Sybil’s sacrifice heals Brian’s shattered consciousness.

But these are comic books and they’re not created in the vacuum of a writer’s mind. In comics, great stories require great artists to bring them to life on the page, and Gerber had some truly brilliant collaborators. The early tales in this collection were drawn by the masterful Val Mayerik, whose offbeat, atmospheric style perfectly suited the tone of Steve’s work (I had the pleasure of collaborating with Val in the 1990s, on a stand-alone story for Marvel’s short lived Amazing Adventures anthology called “Pogrom”: It was sensitive and difficult subject matter and Val handled it with grace and power), but the bulk of the stories were brought to life by one of my favorite artists, and favorite people, the great Mike Ploog.

Long before I ever met Mike and collaborated with him on Abadazad and The Stardust Kid, I was a huge fan, floored by his Marvel work—most notably on Ghost Rider, Kull the Destroyer, Weirdworld and, of course, Man-Thing. Mike was right at home in Manny’s mystical swamp, because the Ploog Universe literally dripped with mood, mystery and wellsprings of emotion. His monsters were touched with humanity and his humans were often a hairsbreadth away from becoming monsters themselves. More important, Mike was a master storyteller who could deliver the big gut-punching moments, but also understood the importance of letting the eye flow, subtly and easily, from panel to panel: leading the reader on with a gesture here, a facial expression there, each panel an integral part of a larger tapestry.

Looking back, it’s amazing that Mike was even working at Marvel, because he didn’t fit any company molds: Ploog, like Gerber, was unique. A one-off. A very singular beast. Yes, you can see the influence of Will Eisner—Mike apprenticed with Eisner, after all—but Mike absorbed that influence and created his own unmistakable visual stamp. (Frank Chiaramonte inked many of Mike’s Man-Thing stories and it was that rare, magical case of a penciler and inker who were perfectly matched. Even the best inkers can sometimes obscure the strengths in a pencil artist’s work, but Chiaramonte inked Ploog as if he was channeling Mike himself. Look at the issues where it’s all Ploog and there’s hardly a difference. They were an extraordinary team and it’s a shame we didn’t get more of them.)

One of Marvel’s founding fathers, the legendary John Buscema, brought several of the stories in this volume to life, most notably the aforementioned “Song Cry of the Living Dead Man.” I can only imagine what Buscema—who, despite the brilliant work he did in the genre, was never a huge fan of superheroes—felt about this story. It must have been baffling in some ways, but it also must have been liberating. He clearly pours everything he’s got into it, stretching his formidable storytelling talents into new realms. Klaus Janson’s inks, oozing and dripping with marshy mood, only heighten the power of the story.

“Song Cry,” along with the Darrel the Clown two-parter collected here and the “The Kid’s Night Out” (which will appear in a future Masterworks) are, for me, the peak of Gerber’s Man-Thing work. But, really, it’s all peak. Remember: This is pre-Epic Comics. Pre-Vertigo. Pre-Moore and Gaiman and Morrison. But those innovative imprints, those wonderfully disruptive writers, couldn’t have existed without Gerber. Steve was out there dancing alone on the creative precipice—then leaping off it into unknown dimensions. Without realizing it, he was clearing a path for all of us who followed. How lucky we were to walk that path he cleared, then branch off onto distinctive paths of our own.

I only met Steve Gerber once, in the mid-1980s: I was in Los Angeles on business, visiting with Marv Wolfman, and he invited Steve to join us for dinner. I’d love to say Steve and I hit it off instantly, became best pals, and stayed in touch for years after—but that’s not what happened. We shared a pleasant meal, said goodbye, and never encountered each other again. But I didn’t have to be friends with the flesh and blood Steve Gerber in order to know the man. I got to know him, intimately, through his extraordinary stories—many of which are in this equally-extraordinary collection.

And Mr. G—wherever in the multiverse you are: Thank you.

©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis