The Monstrefact: Marvel’s Man-Thing

Published Apr 3, 2024, 9:19 PM

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses Man-Thing from the world of Marvel Comics…

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hi, my Name is Robert Lammin. This is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in non mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time. Let us return to the pages of Marvel Comics to consider a true monster. Man Thing. It's not to be confused with DC's swamp Thing, but he stands as something of his spiritual twin sibling, So both man Thing and swamp Thing are hybrid swamp based humanoids created through an explosive collision of humanity, mad science and swamp water. Both characters hit the comics for the first time in nineteen seventy one. However, most commentators seem to see it merely as coincidence and point to very differences in the characters. Plus Marvel's walking swamp creature the Heap, predates both of them, dating back to the early nineteen forties, as does the muck Monster It from Street and Smith Comics. Still, these various swamp beings become linked. They have a kinship, and you'll even find a panel in Alan Moore's swamp Thing run visually suggesting kinship between swamp Thing, man Thing, the Heap, and others. But I've already talked about swamp Thing on the Monster fact, so let's get serious about man Thing. As pointed out by Kelly Knox in the book Monsters Creatures of the Marvel Universe, man Thing started off with a human scientist named Ted Sallus. Now, like a lot of Marvel comic books, scientists, Ted worked on super soldier serums, at least until enemies tried to take it from him. Ted then injected himself with the serum and accidentally wrecked his car in the Everglades and was also exposed to extra dimensional forces in the process. So what emerged from the swamp was neither man nor Thing, but man Thing, a humanoid swamp creature that would become the guardian of the Nexus of Reality, where science and magic converge. Man Thing boasts incredible strength and can throw down with the toughest of physical opponents, but some of his most impressive powers are due to his empathy. Man Thing is so empathic that negative emotions in others can cause him physical pain and distress, especially when he senses fear. This will also cause him to lash out violently at individuals in the throes of fear and lay his burning hands upon them. Man Thing's burning hands are fascinating superpower, brought to life most wonderfully in the twenty twenty two MCU Werewolf by Night special, which captures it as a kind of holy fire that incinerates Ted's victims. On one level, this seems to be just another version of various magical tales in which creatures feed off of fear or sense fear in others, as if it is an actual energy or a quantifiable substance. Man Thing's abilities, however, are frequently explained in terms of chemistry. NOx attributes his burning touch to chemicals in man Thing's body and sumeric and wallace in marvel anatomy. The authors here presume that this chemical secretion is something akin to sulphuric acid, that it's excreted through man Thing's pores. I suppose we might compare this ability to the self defensive secretions of various natural world organisms, and given man things plant based physiology, we have to acknowledge that certain plants do secrete acidic substances through their roots, in some cases to dissolve rocky soil, and in other cases to eradicate competition. But what about this notion that a monster like man, thing, or even a natural world organism can quote sense fear. It's a common trope, but is there anything to it. Certainly there is no true sixth sense for fear in which humans or other animals can tap into an otherwise invisible video game fear meter. Fear, like other human defined emotional states, is hard to quantify in animals and subject to human testing bias, as Ralph Adolf's discussed in the twenty thirteen Current Biology article The Biology of Fear. Some argue that fear is a mere psychological construct and something we can't apply to animals as we cannot truly know their minds. On the other hand, neuroimaging in rodents would seem to reveal a clear fear network in their brains. Ad also stressed a distinction to be made between the conscious human feeling of being afraid and fear as a functional state of an organism. This state exists in relation to fear inducing stimuli, which for humans at least can be in the present past or in imagined future, and induces fearful behavior. Fear in both cognition and behavior is largely adaptive, and it is because fear can help us survive, though of course, all of this can become maladaptive as well. Now, man things relation to fear is interesting in light of all of this. He acutely fears the effects of another organism's fear, but the source of his own emotional distress in this scenario is not the fear inducing stimuli that caused the original distress, but the distressed organism itself, which he may then incinerate with his burning hands due to a fear response chemical secretion in his own body. So there's a lot to unpact there. But hey, still a pretty great swamp monster and I'm always down for a cool swamp monster. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff Toble your Mind dot com.

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