Comics Fondle

I rarely mention editors because I like to pretend comic books–even mainstream comic books–in the end, succeed or fail based on the content, not the politics behind the content. With Dead of Night Featuring Man-Thing, however, it’s impossible to ignore the editorial “contribution.” Man-Thing is well-written and well-illustrated, but it’s a bad comic. Why? Not just because the MAX Dead of Night line is nothing more than an Ultimates line for horror characters. Also not just because Dead of Night is narrated by the Crypt-Keeper… sorry, I mean, Digger. And it’s not even because the series has a silly pacing problem between issues (the first two issues are relatively standalone, but the third and fourth are directly connected). It’s a combination of all three, but also a fourth item, specific to Man-Thing.

And all these problems are editorial ones–the series is edited by Alejandro Arbona, with Warren Simons supervising.

The origin in the first issue is a faithful retelling of the original (even if the Super Soldier Serum presence makes it feel very Marvel hip, both Ultimates and the Marvel Studios movies), but something about the approach made it look like an adaptation of the Wes Craven Swamp Thing movie. For whatever reason–probably because I was a Swamp Thing reader–all of Marvel’s revitalized Man-Thing attempts feel more than informed by Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. Maybe it’s just me.

Aguirre-Sacasa is a fine enough writer–all of the stories are just modernizations of old horror comic standards, which works–but the imposed structure stinks. The art’s all nice–even the painted last issue is good at evoking the horror tone.

There’s just nothing to really say about the issues. There’s good stuff in all of them, but they’re packaged as a limited series when they’re not. Sadly, these are the kinds of stories older comics would have great covers summarizing… here, Dead of Night goes for Ultimate covers.

Were this Dead of Night series a real anthology book, it’d probably work (Aguirre-Sacasa is good at the done-in-one), but with an emphasis for the limited series, it’s a editorial debacle.

D

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