Monster Mondays: Giant-Size Man-Thing #1, the Glob, and Richard Nixon

Marvel’s house ads in May 1974 trumpeted the arrival of their newest Giant-Size monster comic.  By this time, they dropped the pretense of calling it Giant-Size Monsters or whatever…

Giant-Size Man-Thing!  The greatest comic title of all time!

The cover by Mike Ploog was enough to make any Man-Thing devotee want to buy this comic.  We had never seen Manny fight another swamp creature before.  The Glob was an old character from the Hulk, but he was really a take-off on Hillman’s the Heap character.

The story inside did not disappoint.  There were two slimy slug-fights superbly illustrated by Ploog.  Sadly, this was one of the last Man-Thing stories by Ploog.  He left the title soon afterward to draw the Planet of the Apes series.

Steve Gerber created a really funny set of villains called the Entropists.  “Entropy, Entropy, all winds down!”  The Entropists are the enemies of environmentalists, because they state:  “What we wish is unimportant!  Entropy is the natural way of the universe!  We are born…we expend our life energies…we die.  To prolong the life of a man, or a world, is to defy natural law, to instill false hope.”  The leader of the Entropists, Yagzan, looked remarkably like Richard Nixon!

Dean Mullaney commented on this in the letters page of Giant-Size Man-Thing #2.  Gerber seems to indicate in the letters column that there were targeting another president, but I think this must be a red herring.  Yagzan was Nixon. 

There was a few people who could their letter published in nearly every issue of a title, Dean Mullaney was one of them.  Later, we’d watch Dean rise to become the publisher of Eclipse Comics, where he’d publish a number of things by Steve Gerber, such as Stewart the Rat and Destroyer Duck. Nuff said.