Man-Thing Vol 2

Michael Fleisher on his work on Man-Thing Vol.2

From The Comics Journal #56, June 1979.

MICHAEL CATRON: You did the first three issues of the revived Man-Thing. And I got a very strong impression that just about everybody came out of those issues unhappy. You told me you were-to use your words-"heavily edited" on those issues and Marvel finally gave the book to someone else who wanted to do something else with it. What I'd like to know is how you feel about that. Did you feel it was a mistake the way it turned out. and did you learn from that?

FLEISHER: Well, on my part there is certainly no hard feeling about the Man-Thing. What happened is that Marvel wanted to bring back the Man-Thing, which had been, certainly, a fan favorite, and had been one of their most requested characters for a revival, if not the most one requested. And so I read Gerber's Man-Thing stories and I went to Marvel and I said, "Look, if I do it, I'd like to do it differently, and here are the changes I'd like to make." For example, the Man-Thing as he was portrayed in Steve Gerber's series was insane, and he couldn't talk, and he couldn't understand it when others talked. He couldn't think coherently, and he had no memory whatever of having once been a man. And to me, the pathos of being a monster is that you recall the humanity that you've lost. And I thought it was a missed bet to have this character so insensitive to human thought and the environment around him, to the extent that he could be little more than a catalyst in his own stories. So I proposed a series of things I'd like to change, and was given the go-ahead to make' these changes and to write the first issue of the new Man-Thing as if it were the first issue of the Man-Things magazine. In other words, it was to be, for all intents and purposes, practically a new character.

CATRON: A situation that sounds similar to The Spectre.

FLEISHER: Okay. But I think there were people at Marvel who liked what I did and other people who didn't. You see, when Steve Gerber did the series, with all due respect, he overcame some of the problems that I've talked about by cheating. In other words, when he wanted the Man-Thing to understand something, or when he wanted the Man-Thing to do something that involved human volition, he would have the Man-Thing do it, but he would explain it away with some sort of caption. For example, there was a story he wrote in which someone was wounded. ["All the Colors of Hate, II Fear #12] and the Man-Thing bandages the person. Well, when I did one of my stories, I had the Man-Thing bandage somebody, and it was objected to right away: "The Man-Thing couldn't do that, because he-" I said. "Wait a minute, it was in one of these old stories, that's where I got the idea from."

So it became clear to me that the Man-Thing was very vague in everyone's mind. It couldn't be stated very easily, in concrete terms, just what he could do and what he couldn't do. Can the Man-Thing light someone's cigarette with a cigarette lighter or can't he? Can he see somebody's in danger and help them or can't 'he? And I felt that this vagueness would just produce constant misunderstanding and there would be less conflict and difficulty between all of us if I just withdrew.

My personal hunch is that they really do want a reprise of the Steve Gerber Man-Thing-and by the way. I think that if that's what they want, that's what they should have. Do you understand? It's not the way I would approach it left to my own devices, but if that's what the readers would like to read and that's what the company feels their readers want, that's certainly what they should do. But I felt I couldn't give them a good series if I tried to reproduce Steve Gerber, who I think is a very original and distinctive and quite ingenious writer.

So there was a misunderstanding-well, it wasn't really a misunderstanding. I was given permission to make the changes and then I think Marvel had second thoughts about the changes I wanted to make. But the reason I withdrew was because I felt the boundaries of what could be done and what couldn't were so indistinct that we would just constantly be bumping up against one another.