Like many horror fans, you’re probably a bit disappointed with the early cancellation of the DCU streaming service’s Swamp Thing television show. But I have some good news for you! You can find plenty of swampy goodness in the world of comics…

Way back in the summer of 1971, a major comic book company published the story of a scientist performing secret experiments in a lab hidden in the glades of a swamp. When thugs attacked the scientist to steal his work, he dove into the muck with his chemicals in hand. The various liquids mixed together to transform the scientist into an inhuman, organic monster. From those pulpy origins, some of comics’ greatest writers have used the character as a tool for philosophical treatises, satires of religion and government, and good old scary stories.

Wait… did you think I’m talking about Swamp Thing? No, no — Swamp Thing debuted in DC Comics’ House of Secrets #92 in July of 1971. But two months earlier, Marvel Comics published Savage Tales #1, featuring the story of Ted Sallis — a scientist betrayed by his assistant and lover Ellen Brandt, and accidentally changed into the barely sentient Man-Thing. 

Although Swamp Thing is unquestionably more popular — thanks to high profile projects like Alan Moore’s celebrated run, the 1982 Wes Craven movie, and the recent television program — Man-Thing has had an equally interesting history, and might be just what you need to fill that swamp monster shaped hole in your heart. 

Man-Thing’s Strange Beginnings

Like Groot and Thoom, Man-Thing began as a Stan Lee creation. Well, more accurately, the character began as a name that Lee thought was cool and nothing else. But as editor of Marvel Comics, Lee could force creatives to flesh it out. And that’s what he did, tasking Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway to develop the creature for its Savage Tales debut. 

But it was writer Steve Gerber who truly cultivated Man-Thing into a unique comic book creature. Along with Steve Englehart and Thanos creator Jim Starlin, Gerber was one of the hippies driving Marvel’s second generation of creators. Inspired by the social consciousness and philosophical ideas Marvel progenitors Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko infused into their books, Gerber and others took advantage of the medium’s extremes to make bold claims about God and society. 

Throughout the 1970s, Gerber wrote Man-Thing across the many comics in which the character appeared (including every issue of Giant-Sized Man-Thing — don’t even try, all the jokes have already been made). Gerber established the key elements of the Man-Thing, making its home swamp base a multidimensional portal (later named “The Nexus of All Realities”), giving it enemies like the industrialist F. A. Schist and Thog the Nether-spawn, allies such as unlucky dj Richard Rory and the young witch Jennifer Kale, and coining the great tagline, “Whoever knows fear burns at the touch of Man-Thing!”

The Man-Thing gave Gerber a hook on which he could hang all types of stories, little vignettes about the weird and doomed people who found themselves in the swamp. Man-Thing became a key witness in a ghostly trail to judge the suicide of a depressed clown. The creature served as the means by which the self-righteous zealot The Foolkiller ended his own life. It was the manifestation of nature’s revenge against an unscrupulous oil baron. Whatever supernatural thing needed to happen in Gerber’s scripts, the Man-Thing could do it. 

Using a second-person address in the caption boxes, thereby distancing the reader from the monster, Gerber’s narrator describes the Man-Thing as a thoughtless but highly empathetic beast, a creature who only faintly understands why it does what it does. Like the Frankenstein’s monster in Universal classics, the Man-Thing sometimes brings terror and sometimes brings justice, but never with intention. It does not care if you are good or bad — if it senses your emotion, it will come toward you. And if there is fear in your heart, then the touch of the Man-Thing will burn you alive. 

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Gerber and others (including Swamp Thing creator Len Wein and X-Men scribe Chris Claremont) made the Man-Thing into a terrifying force of nature and a vehicle for a wide range of stories, from psychedelic drama to superhero action. 

Man-Thing After the 80s

For a D-list character with no real agency or identity, the Man-Thing has headlined a surprising number of books. Of course, Man-Thing makes plenty of guest appearances, teaming up with Gerber’s other masterpiece Howard the Duck, or acting as a villain of the week when the X-Men or Spider-man find themselves in the Florida swamps. 

But the best of these later appearances occurred in two miniseries that are very much of their time. In the late 80s, DC Comics enfolded its Mature Readers comics under its (recently cancelled) Vertigo Comics imprint, allowing artists to not only experiment with content, but also with style. Comic books like The Sandman and Doom Patrol pushed the medium beyond traditional confines while still keeping one foot in traditional superhero tropes, inspiring creators at nearly every publishing house. 

That influence is clear in the 1997 Man-Thing series, written by the great J. M. DeMatteis (who’s done his share of Vertigo comics) and drawn by Liam Sharp. Veering away from the satire and commentary that Gerber brought to the character, DeMatteis and Sharp went for pure psychological and psychedelic horror, focusing on the guilt Ellen Brandt feels for betraying Sallis and causing his transformation. 

Not unlike “The Anatomy Lesson”, the famed Swamp Thing story that reveals the title creature to be a plant elemental who thinks its a person, the 1997 Man-Thing series troubles our assumptions about the character and the genre. DeMatteis changes Sallis from an innocent victim to a highly flawed and too often reckless man before he became a monster, and Brand from a hateful traitor to a fundamentally good person whose bad decisions led to other bad decisions, decisions she deeply regrets.

But the series never lets the character development get in the way of the horror, thanks to Sharp’s disturbing visuals. Using a slightly exaggerated style and layouts that break up character faces and anatomy into separate panels across the page, Sharp renders the Man-Thing as a pile of creeping vines, always threatening to engulf the other characters and drag them to the swamp. Even when Brandt is simply talking with Doctor Strange, Sharp’s thick and jagged line work replicates the Man-Thing’s tendrils, giving the illusion of the monster’s presence in every interaction. 

On a more lowbrow, but no less satisfying note, the 2007 Marvel Max miniseries Dead of Night Featuring Man-Thing resurrected the titular old Marvel Horror book (one that cribbed shamelessly from EC Comics) to retell the character’s origin. Written by future Archie Horror architect Roberto Aquirre-Sacasa, Dead of Night does not offer much originality for those who read the Man-Thing books of the 70s and 80s. It’s still the story of Ellen Brandt, Jennifer Kale, and the various people who stumble into the swamp. It’s just done a whole lot nastier. Taking advantage of the “Explicit Content” tag given to all Marvel Max books, Aguirre-Sacasa makes Brandt a merciless double-agent, Kale a stripper who uses magic in her act, and he even throws in some flesh-eating zombies. It’s all over-the-top and mean, but very much in the spirit of the 70s horror books from which Man-Thing spawned.  

Man-Thing at the Movies

And then there’s the 2005 Man-Thing movie. Although it opens with the now classic page-flipping Marvel Comics logo, Man-Thing feels very much like a pre-Blade superhero movie, when Marvel sold characters like Captain America and the Punisher to low-budget studios who would slap the name on low-budget cheapies. 

On one hand, Man-Thing is well-suited to the direct-to-video market. After all, despite the high-minded ideals Gerber and DeMattais squeezed into the character, Man-Thing is still fundamentally a giant swamp monster who burns up anyone who fears him. 

And if you squint, you can see some faithful aspects to the Man-Thing movie. Screenwriter Hans Rodionoff gives us a traditional Man-Thing plot, focusing on a new sheriff (Matthew Le Nevez) trying to solve murders occurring in a contested area of Florida swampland, where protesters (including one played by Jessica Jones’s Rachael Taylor) stand off against oil magnate Frederick Schist (Jack Thompson). Rodionoff even names some of the supporting characters after Gerber, and Man-Thing artists Val Mayerick and Mike Ploog. 

But as fun as those winks are, they ultimately underscore the fact that the movie is simply a worse version of stories from the comics. Bad CGI notwithstanding, the Man-Thing has a pretty great design, but budget considerations force director Brett Leonard (The Lawnmower Man) to keep the creature off-screen. Instead, the movie focuses almost entirely on human characters, who range from dull blocks of wood (such as the charisma-less Le Nevez’s sheriff) to the cartoonish (such as the Indigenous characters, who are often written as magical creatures instead of humans). 

Worse, the movie is aggressively ugly. Leonard washes the entire film in either a sickly green or a blinding yellow, which only heightens the bland locations. There are some surprisingly cool kills here and there, and they do sometimes happen on camera, but Leonard punctuates them with frantic edits or lame shaky camera tricks. One can appreciate the desire to add color and dynamism to a comic book adaptation, but it just makes you wish you were reading the comics. 

Simply put, Man-Thing is a bad take on the character. If you like some of Rodionoff’s ideas, you’re better off hunting down the 2004 three-issue prequel miniseries (with excellent art by Kyle Hotz) than sitting through this terrible film. 

Man-Thing Now

Fortunately, the movie isn’t the last we’ve seen of Man-Thing. The character still regularly makes appearances in mainstream Marvel books, trying to look scary while fighting off superheroes. But Marvel did even better by their character by assigning the most recent Man-Thing miniseries to writer R.L. Stine.

Written by Stine and drawn by German Peralta, the 2017 Man-Thing miniseries offers a very different take on the character. The series finds Ted Sallis’s consciousness returned back to him, giving the Man-Thing an internal monologue for the first time. Working as a movie monster in Hollywood, the Sallis Man-Thing is (literally) dragged back to the swamp by his mindless former self and launched into a transdimensional battle to save the Nexus of All Realities. 

Despite its wise-cracking protagonist, the 2017 series is the first to feel like the old Steve Gerber comics: funny and scary, but bursting with weird imagination. Every page seems to be heading in a new direction, and this new smart Man-Thing provides better grounding than the old version, who was sometimes just literal ground.

It’s this ability to mutate the character and use it in so many genres that makes the Man-Thing compelling. So if you need some more green gross monster action, I strongly recommend that you take a dip in Marvel’s swamp. Man-Thing is waiting for you.