The Comic as Nightmare Box
Gerber’s last four issues of Man-Thing were meant to be a new direction for the series; they were also intended to constitute a five-issue storyline (FOOM). The book’s cancellation meant that Gerber had to wrap up the story quickly in the final issue where he completely changed the format and made himself the book’s narrator (as well as one of its participants). While the result is on the messy side, it nevertheless allows Gerber to use the end of the Man-Thing book for one last (and novel) exploration of subjectivity, this time implicitly commenting on the role of art in general and comics in particular in the constitution of empathy and selfhood.
As a result of Man-Thing’s death and resurrection in the previous two issues, the monster no longer needs to stay in the swamp to survive. So he takes a road trip in Richard Rory’s van, a monochromatic Mystery Machine with Rory as Shaggy, Carol Selby as Velma, and Man-Thing as a moss-encrusted Scooby Doo. The change in location facilitates an even more significant alteration to the book’s storytelling, which now has much more room for variety and experimentation. The captions follows the consciousness of multiple characters in a single issue, at times resembling the mini-biographies Marv Wolfman provided for Dracula’s victims but with much greater variation in voice, style, and the representation of interiority. Narrators appear for single chapters, never to be heard from again. Even the plot is much more complex, along the lines of Gerber’s storytelling during his last year on The Defenders.
The key to these last four issues (which, unfortunately, do not have an overall title), is a McGuffin Gerber calls the “nightmare box.” “Nightmare Box” is also the title of Issue 20, which begins charting the peregrinations of one of these devices across state and dimensional lines. Rory’s van collides with a car driven by a demon courier desperate to get the box to its destination. The courier dies, Carol is injured, Rory is arrested for kidnaping, and Man-Thing is left holding the bag (or, in this case, box).
This nightmare box is one of many—in fact, it is the last one needed to secure mutliversal domination by Man-Thing’s perennial antagonist, Thog the Nether Spawn. If we have not spoken of Thog so far, it is because there is absolutely nothing interesting about him. He’s drawn to look like a classic red devil figure, and his motivations, personality, and dialogue have always been one-note. Interesting things can happen because of the Nether Spawn, or around him, such as the gradual collapsing of the multiverse in Fear 19 and Man-Thing 1 that, among other things, led to the arrival of Howard the Duck in our world. After this particular defeat, Thog realized not only that Man-Thing was the primary obstacle to his conquest of all reality, but that he would have to confront the monster on its own terms: “He would attack the monster at its most vulnerable spot—its empathic nature./ This time his weapons would not be sorcery—but emotion” (Man-Thing 22). The nightmare box would be a container for “emotional energy,” filled by “someone with essentially the same empathic powers as Man-Thing—/ —and more, someone to whom these powers were a vast liability.”
The exposition-heavy final issue of Man-Thing at last reveals what, exactly, the readers have been reading over these past few months: a tragedy taking advantage of a group of people whose profound emotional flaws are the key to the creation and functioning of the nightmare boxes. Thog is filling boxes all across the multiverse, but the one we have been following is the result of a triadic relationship among three characters whose connections are initially difficult to discern.
The first of them is Robert Nicolle, who calls himself the Scavenger. Robert was born with the inability to feel pain or pleasure, cutting him off from every basic human connection. Robert is both the apotheosis of Gerber’s alienated male character type while also its antithesis. Most such men and boys in Gerber’s work mirror back the experience of both Gerber himself and the implied (awkward, male) adolescent reader: if only people could get past their unassuming exteriors and see the sensitive genius buried inside! Unlike the classic superhero fantasy, Gerber’s men do not suddenly develop a physique to match their inner strength and beauty. If they are to “win,” it is because of their wit, intellect, and, of course, empathy. By contrast, when Robert takes off his mask, he turns out to be “not a troll. Not some gargoyle. Just… a very…pretty…man…./…who hates all of you for what you did to me” (Man-Thing 19). Unable to feel sensation in his own body, Robert also feels no empathy for those around him. Though his condition is the result of a random mutation, he blames the entire world for his suffering, and seeks out women whose life force he can drain in order to finally feel something. Robert’s striking good looks are appropriate, because he is the bizarro version of a Gerber hero, whose self-absorption and need for supportive women turns him into a vampiric precursor to the Incel.
Consider his victims: though one of them is a random, middle-aged woman, the other two are young wives daring to leave their homes and their profoundly disappointing husbands. Each of these women gets a moving vignette in close third-person limited narrative captions clearly intended to render them sympathetic. In issue 19, Colleen Sanders leaves behind her sleeping husband and two children, imagining how she would try and fail to justify her actions. Even in her own mind, Colleen can’t put her reasons into words, but we are left with the sense that her claustrophobic life is causing her profound existential despair. Her plight puts a Seventies feminist spin on the familiar alienation of Gerber’s male characters.
Colleen has absolutely no connection to the plot, and yet Gerber is at great pains to make the reader accept her interiority. He repeats this exercise two issues later, with another unhappy wife, but this one has an actual connection to the events of the story. Her name is Elsbeth Duhl, and we first see her standing at her apartment window, telling Roland, her accountant husband, that a helicopter has dropped a “gorilla” in the park (the “gorilla” is actually Man-Thing). Roland wants nothing more than to be left alone: “I have more important things to do than listen to your whining. / “I’m an accountant, not a psychiatrist.” Where Colleen’s husband was in some way merely insufficient, Roland is hostile and emotionally abusive.
The next two pages follow Elsbeth as she leaves her building and walks out onto the street. As action goes, this hardly counts. But it doesn’t matter, because the real action is going on in her head:
“She doesn’t wan’t to be “Mrs. Dull” anymore.
“She’s sick of having to explain that it’s spelled D-u-h-l. “
After twenty-five years of marriage, Roland has patience only for equations and number, not for words or emotions: “In time, accounting became his religion.” Though this sounds like a metaphor, it proves accurate, as Roland its working day and night on the mathematics that will allow Thog to use the nightmare boxes for his schemes of conquest. Miserable as she is, she has no idea that cosmos-altering events are unfolding around her. Instead, After she ponders the dangers that might await her outside the building: the “gorilla” could kill her: “And wouldn’t that upset Roland’s neat little world!/ Wouldn’t’ that take his mind off Thog!” The second page of her internal monologue is entirely focused on whether or not she dare step into the street. For a medium whose primary genre is defined by action, this exploration of Elsbeth’s dilemma is defiantly novelistic, if not…dull?:
“It is alive! It sees her! She should be afraid! She should turn and run back inside!
“Why does she feel giddy instead? Why does she long to race toward the beast—into its arms?
“And then it comes clear: it’s the unpredictability. The sense of adventure. The breaking of the rut. Whatever happens it cannot be…Duhl. She steps gingerly off the curb…
“…and immediately regrets her decision.”
In a genre that has long exploited the figure of the “girl victim,” Gerber’s last installment of this horror series does it best to render the victim more real and more complex than any of the victimizers. The problem for both Elsbeth and Colleen, though, is that horror is nonetheless the genre into which they have wandered. Elsbeths’ sudden impulse to race into Man-Thing’s arms suspends her somewhere between girl victim and damsel in distress, because Man-Thing is both monster and hero. He is also the antithesis of the device at the center of her husband’s obsession: the emotion-collecting nightmare box.
Unfortunately for Elsbeth, despite the time Gerber spends making her a real person, for the men in these stories she is nothing but a repository of emotional energy—emotional labor in its potential rather than kinetic form. The Scavenger grabs her as soon as she steps off the curb, announcing “Thog said I could have you! He said he’d reward me for devouring you!” Before he kills her, the Scavenger tells him her life story. Like so many other male characters in Gerber’s work, he turns a woman into his audience. But as he relates the highlights of his miserable existence, she remains silent. She does not emote, or empathize, or in any way try to make him feel better. Her lack of cooperation breaks the paradigm of male complaint and female sympathy, but only because it reduces that dynamic to its absurd essence: the Scavenger drains the life out of her, leaving behind a skeleton next to whom he can sleep the night away.
Elsbeth’s sad journey from personhood to raw material points to the magic behind the Nightmare Box. As Gerber (now the in-story narrator) explains in issue 22, the Box requires three different people fulfilling three different functions: the Scavenger, devoid of feeling, gathers energy from his terrified victims; the phlegmatic Roland Duhl serves as a neutral conduit, and the Scavenger’s sister Dani, whose emotions are so violent that they frequent manifest themselves in bouts of almost mindless violence. She uses the box to drain off her excess feeling, leaving her able to function in the everyday world. Dani doesn’t know that Thog has created a link between her and her brother, causing the emotions siphoned from his victims to flow into her: “So her seizures came more frequently, and she filled lots of nightmare boxes.”
To wrap up his story quickly, Gerber resorts to a familiar kind of metafiction that some readers might find trite: he inserts himself into the story as both character and narrator. All of Man-Thing’s adventures turn out to be “true,” dictated to him by Dakimh the Enchanter (a frequent figure in Gerber’s Man-Thing comics). Issue 22 (“Pop Goes the Cosmo!”) is his letter to Marvel editor Len Wein explaining why he has to leave the bool: “To put it bluntly, I’ve become too personally involved” In a sense, this has always been true, as Gerber’s Man-Thing stories wear their autobiographical emotional content on their sleeves. “Pop Goes the Cosmos!” makes this truth literal, and in doing so, affirms Gerber’s aesthetic strategy for the Man-Thing comics: like the Nightmare Box, they are a vehicle for both sparking and absorbing emotion in the people who hold them. It’s fitting that Thog employs an accountant to coordinate his mater plan, because this last issue reminds us that Man-Thing comics are all about investment. Granted, it is emotional investment, precisely the kind that Roland Duhl is incapable of making, but the point still holds.
Gerber’s appearance in “Pop Goes the Cosmos!” is only the beginning of his “involvement.” After several pages that both recaps previous events and explain to the reader what was actually going on, Gerber finds himself physically in the possession of the missing Nightmare Box. One page later, the Nightmare Box gains possession of Gerber himself. As soon as the box is dropped off by a mysterious stranger, Gerber is attacked by demons in Thog’s employ: “One of them uttered a spell of some sort…and I was sucked screaming into the Nightmare Box!”[1] Whereupon Thog casts the same spell on the Man-Thing: “So there I was—face-to-face for the first time with the hunk of muck I thought I knew so well.”
Gerber has been dragged into his own story twice now --first by Dakimh, then by Thog. But his presence in the Nightmare Box (and also the story) is justified as an object lesson in the importance of emotional bonds and commitment tempered by rational distance. At the end of the previous issue, one of Thog’s henchmen drilled a hole in the Man-Thing’s forehead, which somehow awakened the consciousness of Ted Sallis, the man the monster used to be. While Gerber is making friends with Man-Thing (or Ted), Thog is carrying their Nightmare Box to the top of a pyramid composed of all the other Nightmare Boxes, at which point the plan is supposed to come to fruition. But, as Dakimh explains:
“You are the fatal flaw in his plan—both of you.
“'For you,' Dakimh continues, ’name this box unlike the others. You both are creatures of reason as well as emotion.
“And if you are able to hold your emotions in check—
“Thog will being for quite a surprise.”
The pyramid collapse, and all of reality with it. An enraged Thog confronts Man-Thing, and his excess emotion causes the monster to regress. Mindless once again, he senses Thog’s fear. And, as we know well by now, whatever knows fear, burns at the Man-Thing’s touch.
Thog’s entire plan defended on fighting a creature of pure emotion with even more emotion, but this scenario left no room for reason. Rushed as the final issue of Man-Thing may be, it is also an explicit statement of the series’ implicit mission statement: balancing emotion (the Man-Thing) and consciousness (the first-person or tight third-person limited narration) to produce a sense of subjectivity unrivaled by previous mainstream comics.
Note
[1] The man who knocks on Gerber’s door and gives him the Nightmare Box introduces himself as a friend of Dakimh. Gerber asks if they’ve meant, to which the man responds “In the shadows of the city.” He wears a red cap, a sweatshirt, and a cape made out of an old towel. Even by comics standards, he is an obscure reference, although his only previous appearance took place just the year before. In the first issue of Haunt of Horror, a black-and-white, non comics code Marvel magazine that would only have been available at specialty shops, Gerber published a seven-page story called “In the Shadows of the City,” with art by Vincente Alcazar. Narrated by the strange man who would eventually give Gerber the Nightmare Box, the story virtually attacks the reader. It begins “In the shadows of the city, there lurks someone who wants to kill you!! Me….I want to kill you!” Most of the story shows other characters reacting the horror of his mere presence: they can see that he is a murderer at heart. The story is something of a stunt, but it does overlap with “Pop Goes the Cosmos!” in at least three significant ways. First, the two comics share a narrative form: first person addressed to “you,” the reader (or Len Wein). Second, the murderer is yet another variation on Gerber’s alienated male protagonist taken to a deliberately unpleasant extreme. Finally, there is the question of empathy. The murderer does not simply lack it; he enjoys terror of others. Man-Thing’s touch burns anyone who fears him but the monster is mindless; he does not choose to scare or hurt people. Far from mindless, the murderer is all subjectivity, and he derives pleasure from the fear and pain of others.