Long, long ago, I attempted to persuade my high school English teacher that comics could be a means of serious artistic expression, just like prose fiction or film. She looked at me with disbelief, for this was the 1970s, and in those pre-Internet days, I knew no one who thought that comics could be serious literature. But I was certain that they could, and I brought evidence to my high school teacher to prove my case. Exhibit One was a Man-Thing story written by Steve Gerber, who passed away last week after a lengthy illness.

According to one school of thought, the 1970s was a dreadful decade for Marvel. It is true that in the 1970s most of Marvel’s top tier titles, such as Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, ran well-intentioned but second or third-rate imitations of Stan Lee’s superhero sagas of the 1960s. But if you knew where to look, the 1970s was an extraordinary innovative period in Marvel history. Away from the flagship titles, a new wave of young writers, their imaginations fired by the great comics of the Silver Age, were taking Marvel and the comic book medium in new directions, putting the stamp of their own creative personalities on genres from superheroes to sword and sorcery to horror and more. There were Roy Thomas’s Conan the Barbarian, Steve Englehart’s Avengers, Captain America and Doctor Strange, Doug Moench’s Master Of Kung Fu, Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel and Warlock, Don McGregor’s Black Panther and Killraven, Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula, and the resurrected series that would transform the industry: Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “new” X-Men.

Of all of the 1970s new wave writers, perhaps Steve Gerber had the most distinctly individual voice. Gerber continued working in comics on and off over the decades, and was writing a new series about DC’s Doctor Fate at the time of his death. But his groundbreaking, most influential work was in the 1970s, when he wrote an eclectic assortment of series for Marvel, including Defenders, Guardians of the Galaxy, Tales of the Zombie, and his co-creation, Omega the Unknown.

Gerber did not create Marvel’s swamp monster, the Man-Thing, but it was he who made the series memorable. Anyone who has subsequently worked on the character has labored in Gerber’s shadow. It was a horror series, but the nature of its title character, a creature lacking human intelligence, gave Gerber the opportunity to shift its focus to the human characters who wandered into the Man-Thing. More than any other mainstream comics series of its day, Gerber’s Man-Thing focused on psychological drama, and not just on individual character studies but on portraits of American society in the 1970s. Other Marvel “new wave” writers gave personal touches and viewpoints to genre stories, but Gerber’s best work of the period was so personal as to verge on the autobiographical, however fictionalized.

Marvel has collected Gerber’s early Man-Thing work in Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1. Looking through this thick paperback, you will see Gerber’s rapid development as a comics writer. By the time the Man-Thing series spun out of Adventure into Fear into a comic book of its own, Gerber had become a master of comics storytelling. This week I am examining two of these tales, which I believe to be enduring classics.

Let’s begin with the two-parter, “Night of the Laughing Dead” and “And When I Died!” from Man-Thing Vol. 1 #5 (May 1974) and 6 (June 1974), drawn by the foremost Man-Thing artist, Mike Ploog, and inked by Frank Chiaramonte.

In the opening pages Man-Thing rises from the waters of the swamp, as if from the subconscious mind, and trudges forward. Gerber’s narration recounts that this monster was once a human scientist, Ted Sallis, whose one little experiment went awry.”

Like Bruce Banner, Sallis was working on a military project, heedless of its potentially destructive consequences: in Sallis’s case, he was working on: recreating the “super-soldier” formula, to create a race of superhuman soldiers for the government. (I wonder what Gerber thought of Marvel’s Civil War, which led to the U. S. government coercing superheroes into its service.) Just as Banner’s gamma bomb turned him into the Hulk, a monstrous embodiment of destructive power, Sallis’s experimental formula transformed him into a nearly mindless swamp creature, a distorted caricature of a superhuman.

Through his Faustian bargain, Sallis forfeited his prized intellect. The Man-Thing is a being of physical power but only primitive consciousness. Gerber was particularly interested in this theme of the disconnect between the mind and the body in contemporary humankind.

Further, as Gerber’s narration informs us, “as if to compensate for all it stole from you, the swamp gave you back an ability mankind lost in its infancy. . .that of psychic empathy.” The Man-Thing is a creature governed by emotions: he senses and even shares the feelings of others and responds to them. Reduced to a minimal level of intellect, the Man-Thing ironically has greater comprehension of the emotions of others than normal human beings do, a kind of empathy that the human Ted Sallis sorely lacked. Gerber’s narrator tells the Man-Thing, “You can feel what others feel. . .You can understand those feelings. . .And the mote of humanness left within you can act on that understanding.”

As the narration tells us this, we see instead another figure trudging forward: a circus clown, who looks utterly miserable. Gerber seems to be suggesting that the Man-Thing will be capable of understanding this clown. Moreover, perhaps Gerber meant for us to identify the Man-Thing with the clown, both pitiable figures walking through the swamp, and both, as we shall see, brought to the bottommost point of human existence. This swamp, “the festering marshland,” as Gerber puts it, is a visual metaphor for a world of despair.

Of course, the image of the weeping clown is a familiar archetype from I Pagliacci and so many other works. But Gerber, as we shall seem went beyond cliché in his handling of the archetype. For one thing, he surprises the reader by having the clown, merely a page after his entrance, commit suicide.

His counterpart in misery, the Man-Thing, is the only creature who hears and responds to the gunshot. As the creature stares at the corpse, Gerber’s narration concisely and affectingly contemplates how much killing there is in the world, for a variety of reasons, “even, incredibly, for. . . pleasure.” The Man-Thing becomes the clown’s sole mourner. Dimly recalling the ritual of funeral, the creature lifts up the clown’s corpse, in Ploog’s macabre variation on the Pieta, and seeks a place to bury him.

No longer capable of reading, the Man-Thing is mystified by the clown’s suicide note: “Laughter is dead, futility!” This may seem at first a cliche. But, again, Gerber moves beyond the obvious. Another of his themes is whether art–not just comedy–offers a means of transcending the sorrows of existence.

The scene shifts to Richard Rory, Gerber’s semi-autobiographical character, and his friend Ruth Hart, who are being hassled by a motel clerk. Reading this scene now is a reminder that society did not always accept the idea of unmarried couples rooming together. There’s another reason that the clerk objects to Rory, whom he sneeringly calls “Joe College.” Rory complains, “I hate people who make ‘education’ sound like a dirty word.” Gerber’s comics did not indulge in the anti-intellectualism of American pop culture.

Soon Rory encounters a circus owner named Garvey, who brutally strikes down a high wire performer named Ayla Prentiss when she insists they go looking for their missing clown. Rory goes to her defense, but this is not a superhero story, and his heroic moment is short-lived: another circus performer, a strongman named Tragg, overpowers him. Ayla accompanies Rory and Hart and tries to persuade them to help her find “my clown,” whose name is Darrel Daniel. “I loved Darrel. . but I betrayed him,” she confesses, and as a result “He stopped laughing. . .stopped living. . .just wanted to die. . . .”

Then Darrel’s spirit, still in clown costume and make-up, appears, first to Ayla, Rory and Hart, and then to Garvey and Tragg, causing the latter two to crash their truck as the spectral clown watches “gleefully.” So here are more familiar archetypes: the vengeful ghost and the scary clown, most famously embodied in comics by the Joker, merged into a single figure.

But Gerber develops the figure of Darrel yet further. As part one of this story ends, the clown’s spirit appears before the cast of characters–Rory, Prentiss, Hart, Tragg, the Man-Thing, too, and Garvey, who joins them in the following issue–and proclaims, as if he is now the circus’s ringmaster, that “we’re going to have a little show, my friends! And you–all of you–are going to be the actors! We’re going to play out the story of my life–and death–with the swamp as our stage–and my soul at the mercy of the critics!”

There are so many tales of ghosts who remain on Earth because of traumatic events in their mortal lives, which they reenact over and over as spirits. Here Gerber combined this idea with the Shakespearean concept of the world as a stage and ourselves as players upon it.

But Gerber goes still further, for at this point his story takes on a metafictional dimension. As a clown, Darrel is a kind of artist, and here he becomes a playwright and director as well, staging the story of his life. It is implied that every man is the author of his life, that each of our lives are works in progress, completed with our deaths, when our lives are judged by any higher powers that may exist. Thus through Darrel’s “play,” Gerber presented a variation on the idea of judgment after death.

When a person dies, his or her fellow human beings look back upon the life of the deceased and judge its value; indeed, this is what we are doing right now in reading and contributing to appreciations of Steve Gerber upon his passing. But even during our lives, we are continually being judged by the people around us. What sort of public impression do we make? How truthfully does it reflect our inner selves?

Furthermore, Darrel the clown is like the author of any work of art that contains personal, even autobiographical themes, and thus, certainly like Steve Gerber himself. The artist creates his work of art out of his ideas, emotions, and elements of his or her own life, and then presents them to the public, to the world at large, his audience and the critics.

It’s interesting that Gerber, then a full time comics writer, should put such emphasis in critics in this story, since back in the 1970s mainstream critics did not write reviews of comics; the only comics “critics” were writing for comic book letter columns (like myself) and early fanzines. But of course, in a sense, everyone in the audience is a critic, who decides whether what he or she sees is good or bad. When the artist creates a work with such personal meaning to him and presents it to the audience, he or she is not only offering the work up for judgment, but himself or herself as well.

So the play of Darrel the clown is a powerful dramatic metaphor, indeed. It begins in the following issue, in which Darrel announces that his “set” will be the circus. Life as a mad circus is another familiar trope, and Gerber would use it again in his final storyline for the original run of Howard the Duck, casting Howard as a clown who fights back against his oppressors.

Darrel explicitly casts the Man-Thing as a visual metaphor: “You, Man-Thing, shall portray my inner demon–the force within me that laced my laughter with bitter tears–and drove me to self-destruction.” The narrator observes that though the Man-Thing cannot comprehend language, “the swamp beast seems to nod.” The Man-Thing comprehends emotions, you see, and feels repelled by evil. Therefore, it is significant that he sides with Darrel, signaling that the clown is not the villain he might seem to readers at this point.

Darrel then transforms his other “actors” into figures from his childhood. Ruth explains that they’re not just playing these characters: “we’re actually going to be these people from Darrel’s past!” As I observed earlier, in ghost stories the specters are often obsessed with repeating events from their past. I am reminded of how in Dark Shadows ghosts sought to mesmerize mortals into thinking themselves to be people from the ghosts’ own mortal lives. Gerber just makes the role-playing metaphor explicit.

Darrel casts Rory in the role of the clown’s boyhood self. Since Rory is considered Gerber’s stand-in, this may suggest that Darrel, too, is to some degree an autobiographical figure, emotionally and psychologically.

Through the clown’s casting of other roles, Gerber makes an acute psychological observation: relationships that one has an adult can mirror those he or she had as a child. Hence Darrel casts the brutal Tragg as “the bully who was my bane in youth,” and Garvey, his cruel boss at the circus, as his insensitive father. Perhaps the real point is that Darrel, consciously or not, perceives Garvey, whom he blames for his suicide, as another father figure who failed him.

In “Act I” of the clown’s play, Darrel the child hints that he wants to go to the circus. His father Milo forbids it and insists on forcing Darrel into a way of life that the boy finds anathema: constantly working to become rich. Milo condemns the circus as “dirty,” “foolishness,” and “fit for animals only.” Since we know that Darrel grew up to be a circus performer, Milo is condemning his son’s creative ambitions. Milo is bent in forcing Darrel into an identity, a role in life, that is not true to the boy’s nature. If the father succeeded in imposing his will on Darrel, he would stifle the boy’s spirit. “I’m not allowed to have fun,” Darrel the boy tells his father. Later, afflicted with self-doubt, the boy wonders, “Nobody else is laughin’–why should I be able to?”

One of Gerber’s recurring themes is his rebellion against society’s attempts to compel everyone into a sterile, soul-destroying conformity. Like many who grew up in the 1960s, Gerber opposed the American mindset that prized monetary success as a measure of personal worth. The boy Darrell bitterly tells his father, “All you know how to do is count your money!”

Darrel becomes so estranged from his father that, as a teenager, he laughs at Milo’s funeral. A psychiatrist diagnoses Darrel as “a tortured soul. obviously in turmoil over a multiplicity of moral and emotional crises.” But, the shrink adds, “this is America–1951! That makes you normal!” Darrel’s sense of alienation thus becomes a malaise afflicting postwar conformist American society.

Darrel reached a turning point in his life on “the day after Robert Kennedy was shot–the day I went looking for a circus.” In 1974 Gerber did not have to explain to his readers that this was the third of the political assassinations of the 1960s–the murders of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King–that shocked and disillusioned Americans. At this low point Darrel embraced his vocation: “I had at last decided what I wanted what I thought the world needed most”–to make people laugh again.

In real life, after working unhappily in advertising, Gerber figuratively joined the circus by moving to New York and becoming a comic book writer, back in the days when mainstream American culture accorded no respect to the comic book medium.

Darrel succeeded for a time in his chosen artform. He won an appreciative audience, perhaps symbolized by the love of his fellow performer Ayla. “It made me feel good about myself for the first time,” the clown declares.

But then Darrel learned that his supposed benefactor, Garvey was coldly exploiting him (You can’t buy laughter,” asserts the clown), and worse, came to believe that Ayla merely pretended to love him on Garvey’s orders. You would expect that this would drive Darrel to despair. But look at the specific form that despair takes: it affects his vision of the world, and therefore his art. “I changed my act–made it evil!” recalls Darrel, to such a degree that Ayla says that it was “frightening the customers.”

In the end, Darrel says, “The act was scaring me, too–showing me a part of myself I hated.” Art had been his salvation; now it was destroying him. “The laughter in me was dead,” which is what his father had wanted. Unable to accept life without laughter or love, the clown killed himself.

Darrel’s ghost had already characterized this play of his life as a “tragedy.” But the three mysterious, hooded critics do not agree. They now cast off their robes and stand revealed as representatives of heaven, hell, “and the realm between.” Speaking as if they were drama (or comics?) critics, they “judge your [Darrel’s] drama –your life–a moral and artistic failure,” accusing him of not showing “sufficient motivation” for his suicide. Claiming he is “neither a good man nor bad” they sentence him to “oblivion.” By coincidence or not, this is reminiscent of the Button-Molder’s scene in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. Since Peer, too, is adjudged to be worthy neither of heaven nor hell, the unearthly Button Molder decrees that his soul will be melted down like other flawed goods. Although Ibsen leaves Peer’s ultimate fate uncertain, what may save him is the redemptive love of a woman named Solveig.

How does one truly judge the success of a dramatic work of art? Though Brecht might disagree, isn’t one measure the degree to which the audience members identify with the lead character and see themselves reflected in his or her personality? And doesn’t an actor attempt to comprehend the psyche of the character he or she plays? Gerber’s surrogate, Richard Rory, not only portrayed Darrel in his play but “became” Darrel. Moreover, Rory was in a sense an audience member as well, watching the play take place around him. Now he protests the “critics’” decision: “I lived his life! I can vouch for him! His soul doesn’t deserve to perish!”

Moreover, Darrel’s play is still going on: the Man-Thing, still playing his part, “still acting as Darrel’s inner demon,” battles the three “critics.” The Man-Thing has an advantage to playing a part: the narrator informs us that his “empathic nature enabled him, for a time, to become [Darrel’s] soul.” Moreover, the Man-Thing has specifically become Darrel’s “inner demon,” his spirit of rebellion against repression, fighting back against this unjust judgment. The Man-Thing is also an audience member for Darrel’s play; the narrator says that Darrel’s soul “touched” the Man-Thing, as if it were a touching performance.

Characteristically, Gerber, in his narration, dismisses the three unearthly “critics” as “bureaucrats,” as if even the management of the hereafter has become yet another system unresponsive to individuals’ needs.

It it would be a shallow superhero comics cliche if it were the Man-Thing’s sheer brute force that saved Darrel. Instead, as in Peer Gynt, possible redemption comes through a woman’s love for the protagonist. But Gerber’s Ayla is not a moral paragon like Ibsen’s Solveig. Ayla confesses not only her love for Darrel but also her guilt for lacking “the courage to defy Garvey” and to admit her love to Darrel. Remember, she remained silent when Garvey claimed she only pretended to love Darrel, not realizing the clown was eavesdropping; had she told Garvey then and there that she did love Darrel, he would not have fallen into his downward spiral. Now Ayla offers to sacrifice her own soul to the “critics” in exchange for Darrel’s. This is enough to placate the critics, and the judge from heaven signals that Darrel has been redeemed. The clown’s autobiographical drama succeeded by touching the heart of the key member of its audience, Ayla. (And this ending, in which a woman’s sacrifice, motivated by love, saves the seemingly damned hero, reminds me of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.)

Gerber’s narration leaves the other witnesses to Darrel’s play–and the readers–with a chilling warning: “to wonder what sort of drama they will be able to stage when each meets his own circle of critics.” Each of us is the playwright/director of his or her own life.

As Ploog shows the Man-Thing submerging back into the waters of the swamp, Ayla delivers the story’s final lines, memorializing Darrel by asserting “That a man who can inspire laughter. . .and joy. . .is the holiest man of all.” That’s rather over the top, but Gerber’s belief in the importance of laughter and joy is surely the motivating force behind his most celebrated comics series, a comedy about a talking waterfowl.

Gerber reworked and reexamined themes from the clown storyline in a later story with a memorable title: “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man,” with art by John Buscema and Klaus Janson, from Man-Thing Vol. 1#12 (December 1974).

Sensing “the dull, muted agony of a mind in torment,” the Man-Thing is drawn to an abandoned insane asylum, where he sees “a lone man, pale and wan,” unshaven, writing by candlelight, “living on beans and canned meat. . .rarely sleeping, rarely leaving this one tiny room.” It is an archetypal image of the lonely life of the writer, although this one is particularly, self-destructively driven by his inner demons.

This man is named Brian Lazarus, whose Biblical last name suggests that this will be a story of spiritual death and resurrection. But at this point in the story, there is no glimmer of hope.

Darrel the clown’s art turned so “evil” that it frightened even himself. Lazarus is struggling to express himself through his writing, but he is unable to achieve control over his art; “It’s no good–its not right,” he soliloquizes. “No matter how I try, the words just won’t say what I want them to. Or maybe they do–and I just can’t tell anymore!” But Lazarus feels he must continue to try, because writing is his means of defense against a growing pain. “The hurt is afraid of truth,” he declares.

There enters a well-dressed man, who might be a servant, since he has come to escort Lazarus to “them,” yet he calls Lazarus “Brian” and exudes a sinister authority. Lazarus resigns himself to meeting with “them,” and his guide significantly says, “you know you can’t escape them. You don’t even want to, deep down–or you’d never have brought them with you.”

Then the Man-Thing sees Lazarus beset by a horde of figures–all everyday people, but with wild expressions on their faces, tearing at Brian’s clothes, as his head tilts back, eyes bulging in terror, mouth agape in a silent scream. Brian’s agony is no longer “dull” or “muted.” And what do these human vultures want? They demand that Lazarus pay his bills, pay the rent, or pay a parking ticket. This is the constant barrage of the everyday demands of living in contemporary American capitalist society, the necessity to earn and pay out money for the necessities of life, and they are driving Brian Lazarus insane, “each demanding a bit of soul or flesh.”

Watching, dimly recalling his former human existence, the empathic Man-Thing recognizes that “he has had the same experience, felt the same way Brian Lazarus feels now.” Seeking to aid Lazarus, the Man-Thing seizes one of Brian’s assailants, only to see the figure literally fade into nothingness.

Brian Lazarus is a creative artist who not only suffers from emotional and psychological turmoil but who has lost control of his art. So his creative imagination instead produces these apparitions that embody the demands of society and torment him. Even his well-dressed guide was a figment of his imagination, which has turned against Brian, the creator himself.

As an empath, the Man-Thing is capable of perceiving Brian’s hallucinations. Indeed, since the Man-Thing recalls somehow once having the same experience and emotions, Gerber is establishing Lazarus as a kind of double or counterpart to the Man-Thing. Perhaps, by extension, Gerber is suggesting that everyone feels some of Lazarus’s anguish and fear of the the burdens of everyday existence in modern times. But most of us don’t react in the extreme way that Brian Lazarus does. We must probe more deeply for the source of his madness, as the story proceeds to do.

The hallucinatory assailants vanish, and, after his initial fright, Lazarus strangely accepts the silent Man-Thing as his confidant (but inasmuch as they are counterparts of one another, this seems right). Lazarus speaks of the work he is writing, his “Song-Cry,” and, again significantly, acknowledges his responsibility for the torments he is suffering. “I had to explain how iI let the hurt get me,” Brian tells the Man-Thing. As an artist, and like Darrel, Lazarus seeks an audience for his art–even if it’s only one person–who will understand what he wants to express: “somebody who’d listen without asking for something. . . if I just got the words down. . . they’d find their way to someone. . . .” (Why, it’s rather like those of us who write blogs and columns on the Internet, hoping that our ideal readers will find them.)

Gerber then segues to the familiar figure of Richard Rory, with his new friend Sybil Mills. This sequence reminds the reader that Rory too is connected with the arts: he is a disc jockey, selecting rock music to play for his own audience of listeners, and he promises to dedicate a song to Sybil. But though he kissed Sybil goodbye, she has no intention of pursuing a relationship with Rory: “I make it a practice not to involve myself too deeply with anyone–ever.” Sybil distances herself from her own emotions.

Thus, when she sees Lazarus staggering along the street in the driving rain, Sybil’s initial reaction is to keep her distance. But when Sybil realizes “he is on the verge of collapse,” her better nature prevails, and she “rushes to his side” and “guides him to her quarters.” So now Brian has a new guide who is neither imaginary nor sinister.

Lazarus the writer has led such an isolated life that all he initially says he wants from Sybil is to hear somebody’s voice.” But it soon becomes clear he needs to talk, and to talk to someone who (unlike Man-Thing) can talk with him.

What Brian begins talking about is his love of art, in this case. music. (Notice that Brian calls the text he us writing his “song-cry.” Remember, too, that Gerber earlier reminded his readers about Rory’s connection with music.) “I used to love music–more than anything else,” Brian tells Sybil. “I used to say that anybody that didn’t like music was dead.”

Although Sybil earlier was unresponsive to Rory’s offer of a song, this time a shared love of music forges a closer connection between Sybil and Brian. “I like music, too. Very much,” Sybil tells Lazarus, adding, “I’m a dancer.” Indeed, she spends the whole story wearing her dancer’s leotard. Dance and music are important parts of Sybil’s identity. Like Brian. she too is a creative artist.

It seems that the first symptom of Brian’s growing psychological anguish was losing his ability to appreciate art. He tells Sybil that one day, significantly, upon coming home from his job, he started playing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, “and it just sounded like noise to me. Ugly, ugly, ugly noise. That’s when I knew. . .I was dying.” Art–his ability to appreciate it and his ability to create it–is at of the core of Brian’s identity, too. But he is losing his capacity to perceive the beauty, the order, and the literal and figurative harmony in art.

The problem was that his alienation from the rest of life has hampered his artistic capabilities. “My whole life. . .became one gigantic, impenetrable wall of noise.” It’s not just the demands that his boss and others out on him. Lazarus tells Sybil that “the lies were the worst. . .by far.” Before he worked for Marvel. Steve Gerber was an advertising copywriter, and so is Brian Lazarus. Brian took the road that Darrel forsook: the path to riches in the business world. But for Brian that meant lying about the destructive product he was paid to sell, even though an artist’s duty is to tell the truth. “I was on my way to being a very rich liar,” Lazarus confesses, before he “ran out screaming.”

Then comes Brian Lazarus’s manifesto, the “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man” itself, which Gerber presents as a text piece, accompanied by Buscema and Janson’s somewhat surreal illustrations (including one of Brian with an arrow through his skull, crying out in agony, like the later Steve Martin gag, but played for horror). This was not the only time that Gerber experimented with the comic book format like this, introducing text passages in the midst of a sequential art narrative, mixing his media.

The point of the “Song-Cry’ is that the pursuit of money in the rat race in the business world destroys the author’s identity as an artist, turning him into “a living dead man,” a corporate zombie. “Sleep, synapses. The world has no use for you today. Or ever,” Lazarus writes, as if his career of telling “lies” for profit has rendered him as mindless as the Man-Thing. “Kill your mind!” Lazarus exclaims in his “Song-Cry.” He writes that he has become “a crumb in the loaf of industry, makin’ life without identity, on the river island of eternity,” suggesting the insignificance of such a life when weighed on a cosmic scale.

Brian’s “Song-Cry” is like Darrel’s play: a deeply personal work of art through which its creator reaches out, seeking understanding from his audience. “There was no one to tell, no one who wanted to listen. No one who could really understand,” laments Lazarus. He asks Sybil (though he is also looking out towards us, the readers), “What about you? Do you understand?” Sybil admits that she doesn’t, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t try. . .or listen,” as she takes Brian’s hand. His “Song-Cry” has succeeded in moving Sybil, his audience of one: “You touched something in me. . .that I wasn’t even sure was there. I think. . . care about you.” Brian’s “Song-Cry” has awakened emotions in Sybil that she formerly tried to suppress.

The late Ingmar Bergman made a film, Hour of the Wolf (1968), about an artist who was going mad and who hallucinated seeing various tormentors. By the film’s end, the artist’s wife, because she cares for him so deeply, has begun to see his hallucinations as well. The same thing happens here. On the brink of overcoming his insanity, Lazarus suffers an abrupt relapse, and this time Sybil sees the phantasms as well, and the demonic apparitions attack them both.

Again suffering psychic pain through his empathic power, the Man-Thing returns to combat the apparitions, only to recognize that “the phantasms are not the enemy. His assailant is Brian!” This reminds me of Number Six’s discovery in the surreal last episode of The Prisoner, in which he finally confronts his mysterious nemesis Number One. Of course the apparitions embodying Brian’s fears spring from his own psyche. The fact that he is a writer with a creative imagination presumably enables them to take such vivid form.

But these phantasms and the terrors they represent are not beyond Lazarus’s control: the well-dressed man said that Brian did not want to escape them.

As the Man-Thing battled the phantasms, “thought-bursts” erupted in Lazarus’s mind. One was “To survive among them. . .you must become them. . . .To survive, you must die.” Lazarus considers himself the “living dead man”: he has figuratively “died.” It was really his true identity as artist, as individual, as a person with a capacity for love, who “died.” Another of the ‘thought-bursts” makes another allusion to the Beatles: “You can’t be the Walrus if they want you to be the system. They are I!!” That is the point at which the Man-Thing turned to attack Brian. Lazarus had persuaded himself that he had to become part of the “system” to survive in life, rather than remain true to himself. The phantasms are really Brian punishing himself for his decision.

Brian needs a psychic shock to break free of his inner demons. and he receives it when Sybil risks her life to shield him from the Man-Thing’s wrath. Suddenly Brian is concerned for someone other than himself. Earlier Lazarus wrote that he thought he had become “like a burned-out machine. . .a dead computer.” Thus Gerber returned to his theme of the mind disconnected from emotion. Lazarus certainly feels terror and despair, but not empathy (the Man-Thing’s specialty) or love for others, until Sybil is nearly killed before his eyes.

Lazarus tells Sybil, “You should’ve let him hit me. I’m already dead.” But Sybil tells him he’s wrong: “You feel–you care. Dead men can’t do that!” Sybil is Lazarus’s counterpart: she would not allow herself to empathize or love, either. “I wasn’t sure I could care that much. . .even about you,” she tells Brian, but by risking her life for him, “now I know I can.”

It is the recognition that someone cares deeply about him, and, surely, Brian’s own response towards her, that resurrects Gerber’s Lazarus from his “living dead” state. The narration tells us that “Brian’s attackers vanish, along with the madness that gave them life.” People don’t overcome insanity so quickly in real life, of course, but in the context of this tale, this exorcism of Brian’s inner demons seems right.

It is appropriate that Steve Gerber did comics for DC’s Vertigo line later in his career, because the best Marvel horror series of the 1970s, and Gerber’s Man-Thing most of all, foreshadowed the sophisticated, character-driven approach that Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and other Vertigo series would take to supernatural fantasy in the 1980s and 1990s. (You can see Neil credit Steve’s work as an inspiration here) Even so, there was nothing else in the 1970s like Steve Gerber’s psychologically acute, intimately personal, powerfully emotional work in comics, and there is nothing else quite like it today.

But that’s not what Steve Gerber will be best remembered for. Steve Gerber was also unequaled in modern American mainstream comic books as a master satirist, as we shall see next week when we will turn to his most iconic creation, Howard the Duck.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Comments: 2 Comments

2 Responses to “Comics in Context #214: The Essential Steve Gerber” lliiy Says: February 19th, 2008 at 9:40 pm Thanks for the great and motivating post! I fully agree with you especially on letting your subconscious mind help you achieve success. Do check out http://www.subconscious-mind.org, they have a whole host of interesting and helpful articles. Rick Says: April 7th, 2008 at 11:02 am Thanks for this thoughtful examination; I was not aware until reading this of Gerber’s death. I also did a paper on the literary merits of comics for a high school English class in the ’70’s, but was fortunate to have a more encouraging teacher. And I also remember Gerber as a writer whose work helped confirm my belief that you could tell any kind of story in this medium. I had forgotten these tales, and it’s surprising how over 30 years later their truth of the destructive nature of American culture on truth, art and the individual is even more powerful to me now than then – no doubt the difference between the 50 year old with plenty of experience in the conflicts and compromises of life, and the teenager looking at it all through eyes still largely untainted. I’m reminded of they lyrics to Greg Brown’s song “America Will Eat You’, which expresses this lyrically about as well as anything I’ve heard. A good story well told doesn’t do much for us if we just passively consume it and move on to the next distraction. Thanks for helping us “do business” with these tales, and come out the richer for it. Rick B. Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ