"CONDEMNED! EXTREMELY DANGEROUS! OFF LIMITS! TO ALL PERSONNEL!"
The Heap #1 (Skywald, Sept. 1971) by Bob Kanigher, Tom Sutton & Jack Abel
So a woman, fleeing a lion escaped from the zoo, stumbles over the Heap, who apparently is just kicking back in the middle of a field:
After dispatching the lion, the Heap leans over the now-unconscious woman, painfully reminded of his own lost humanity, and, quite frankly, creeping the rest of us out, man:
The woman awakes, and the Heap makes a startling realization:
Just then, a trio of hunters happens upon the pair, and attack, naturally assuming the Heap means to do the woman harm. The Heap responds in kind:
After knocking out the hunters, the Heap takes his leave of both them and the woman, and takes a moment to remember for the sake of the reader the accident that resulted in his current monstrous form:
Eventually, his wanderings take him to a cemetery, where he is accosted by a group of supernatural creatures lead by Master Scythe:
Refusing to join their merry band, the Heap briefly fights them, but they vanish without a trace. This encounter only reminds the Heap of his horrible solitude:
In the meantime, the woman from the beginning of the story is seeking a cornea transplant from a descendant of Dr. Frankenstein, who just happens to have a townhome in the area, and who refuses to perform the operation until he can duplicate his ancestor’s greatest success:
After the woman departs, the Heap, who coincidentally happened upon the doctor’s home in the middle of the moors, wanders in and scrapes a message into the wall (with not bad penmanship, considering):
The Heap pleads with the doctor to restore the woman’s sight, and the doctor agrees, but on one condition (and, from all appearances, the doctor apparently doesn’t recall how things worked out for his famous ancestor):
An agreement is reached, and Dr. Frankenstein immediately begins the operation, in his safe and sterile environment, aside from the HUGE FREAKING SWAMP CREATURE CHAINED TO THE WALL. And say, are those assistants robots?
Why, yes, they are.
After Dr. Declarative finishes his operation, the woman (needing “no recovery period” due to the controlled environment, inc. 1 swamp monster) immediately wakes and reacts in horror to the Heap. Despairing, the Heap goes berserk and busts out of the operating room:
Too late, the woman realizes that this silent monster is the person that rescued her from the lion:
The Heap, not hearing the woman’s calls to wait, rushes out into the lightning storm and pleads for his own destruction:
And sure enough, he’s zapped into powder by lightning, but regenerates:
…And he wanders off into comic book obscurity, eventually to be revived in Eclipse Comics’ Airboy series, retooled into a character for Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, complete with action figure, and one or two stealth appearances as a background character in Swamp Thing.
[…] Sludge, for example, and enjoyed what little of the Heap I’ve been able to read. And I liked this brief Heap revival book from 1971. So I’m all for more swamp critters in my […]
[…] yes, I enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to future issues. Still not a patch on this work of genius, […]
How did I miss this post ? Fabulous! Cheers, Mike.
[…] of my way to seek out Heap comics, though I have picked up some of the latter day revivals, such as this 1971 one-shot I’ve discussed in the past, or this new version from Moonstone, or the Airboy/Mr. Monster […]