Product Description

With Captain America, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and the Thing around, it's hard to stand out in a crowd - but somehow, the Man-Thing manages it! Citrusville, Florida, faces censorship, prejudice, psychosis, and ghost pirates in stories as relevant today as they were more than twenty years ago! Sorcery, snowmen, and super-soldier serums! Demons, dementia, and D'Spayre await - but have no fear, because, well, if you do... Man-Thing (1974) #15-22 and (1979) #1-11, Giant-Size Man-Thing #3-5, Marvel Team-Up #68, Marvel Two-in-One #43, and Doctor Strange #41

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239533 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Customer Reviews

A book burns on amazon
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...)

Eclectic Collection of Marvel's swamp creature
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