...and it's a bit beat-up and torn, but Giant-Size Man-Thing #1, "How will we keep warm when the last flame dies?" Written by Steve Gerber, art by Mike Ploog, inks by Frank Chiaramonte. And once you get past the jokes about the title, man, what a weird book.
As is often the case, the Man-Thing seems to lurch around the background of his own book: a cult that worships entropy wants to stop an environmental group from setting up an experimental commune in the Everglades, so they use the power of the Golden Brain. As you do. The entropists summon up a golden demon, but the Man-Thing defeats it and the Brain is lost. In the swamp, the Brain vaguely remembers it used to be the Glob, and fought the Hulk once; but grows itself a new body with seemingly no memory and joins the environmentalists.
The head of the entropists, having handled the Brain before, is able to assert control again, and reverts it back to the Glob and sets it to destroy the commune, Omegaville. Man-Thing intervenes again, tearing the Glob to pieces. The head cultist tries to get the Glob back into the fight, but it instead covers him, smothering him to death.
Maybe it's because I've been watching old Hammer horror movies this week, but it's like the seventies were full of weird pseudo-hippies and/or vaguely satanic cultists. And monsters. Also this issue, reprints of silly old Marvel stories; a Stan Lee/Steve Ditko story with a jewel thief and an ice monster hoax, a Jack Kirby one where a scientist abuses super-speed, and Goom, the Thing from Planet X!
Really though, weren't all those stories by Gerber trippy?
ReplyDeleteStill, best comic title EVER!