Several Obscure Characters

 by DarkMark

NOTE: The characters in this story, with the exception of the narrator, are property of Marvel Comics.  No money is being made from this story, no infringement is intended.  Terrible things affect the dreams of those who sue.

 *****

If this happens to me everytime I try to index a comic book, I'm gonna give the whole business up.  So help me, I am.

My name's up there on the credit line.  At least, that's the handle I use while cranking out these fanfic stories.  You might not know it, but I also index comic books, mostly those from the Silver and Bronze Ages.  I've steered clear of most Marvels hitherto, because they've been covered by people like Murray Ward and George Olshevsky.  But there were some series they have not gotten to, and Man-Thing was one of them.

Man-Thing.  You have heard of him, right?  In case you haven't, or if you only know of him from an obscure X-Men crossover, let me fill you in.

The Man-Thing is a swamp monster.  He isn't the first; It, the Heap, and the Swamp Thing all came before him.  You might even prefer Alan Moore's Swamp Thing to him, particularly if you grew up reading Eighties comics.  But that's all right.  Without Man-Thing, I'm convinced that Moore's version wouldn't have been so tasty.

Okay.  To begin: Manny, as he is sometimes affectionately known, started life--if you want to call it that--back in 1971, in a low-circulation mag from Marvel called SAVAGE TALES.  He was brainstormed by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, written by Conway, illoed by Grey Morrow in spectacular black and white, and unleashed in the midst of the book.  He was previously a scientist named Ted Sallis, who had perfected a sort of super-soldier formula and was, like Alec Holland, living in the swamp with a woman.  Only this woman wasn't nearly so nice as Linda Holland; she was a treacherous little bitch.

Turned out the woman had sold out Sallis to AIM, who wanted the formula.  He broke free of them, injected himself with the stuff to keep it away from them, and drove his car off a bridge into the swamp.

Transformation time.

The formula must have not been out of the beta stages yet, or the magical forces later revealed to be working in the swamp must have been on overtime.  Ted Sallis was changed into a huge, greenish-brown, powerful slime-creature with virtually no mind, but an empathic nature that reacted to other people's emotions.  Fear was the emotion that pained him the most, and when he was within range of somebody who was afraid...well, you know what happens if you've read his comic, and if you haven't, you'll find out later.

Suffice it to say that the Man-Thing killed the AIM agents responsible for his plight, later forgave the woman, and, in general, helped out people in trouble who stumbled into his swamp.  He also fought bad guys, ranging from an evil land developer to a demon called Thog.  And yeah, it was in one of his stories that Howard the Duck first came into comics.  When Manny dropped out, Howard's comic dropped in.

All right.  We on the same cursor now?  Good.

Steve Gerber, who took over writing Man-Thing with his second appearance in ADVENTURE INTO FEAR, made the comic his own and produced some of the most effective tales of the mid-Seventies.  He wasn't quite an Eisner, but he was a hellaciously good writer, peopling his sagas with common folk who were in a lot of distress, emotional and otherwise, then bringing them to the swamp, which became a stage for their catalysis and resolution of their problems.

A clown committed suicide and staged a drama with four innocent bystanders taking the parts of people in his life, in an attempt to save his soul from perdition at the hands of the Critics.

A barbarian came to life from the stuff in a jar of peanut butter.

A woman scientist was kidnapped by sky-riding pirates from a bygone century to save them from a satyr's curse.  And so on.

I really enjoyed it. They brought the comic back twice under new writers, but it was never the same as when Gerber was writing it.  He was the only one who could make it last for any length of time.  He'd return to Manny for several later takes, most notably a twelve-parter in MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS.

It was while I was indexing the last ish of Gerber's run, MAN-THING #22, that it all happened.

Steve himself starred in the issue, which was written as a kind of letter to editor Len Wein, explaining why he was leaving the comic.  He had to, because he'd gotten dragooned into an adventure with Man-Thing himself, and he revealed that he'd been fed the story material by Dakimh the Enchanter.  This was akin to the Spirit stories in which the masked man himself told his adventures to Will Eisner, who wrote and drew ‘em up.  Gerber got sucked into a Nightmare Box by Thog the demon, and if it hadn't been for Man-Thing getting sucked into the same box, well, the issue at hand might not even have been written.

Nice denouement.  But the bit that affected me the most wasn't that.  It was a couple of caption boxes on page 4 of the story. Steve was talking to himself, to Len, and to all of us:

"There's a game I play with myself sometimes--trying to remember all the names of the people who've paraded thru these pages.  And you know--I can't.  There really have been that many.  I just wonder--this sounds stupid--where some of them are now.  I may never know."

Huh.  Yeah, Alan, Neil, you may write a better line than that, but there's still enough gut-level truth there to affect me.  And possibly anybody else who reads it.

What becomes of the obscure characters?  Sounds like an old Fifties rock ‘n' roll song, doesn't it?
I don't know.  In the comics multiverse, there are enough significant characters that have died the death, and nobody knows of ‘em now.  Much less the obscuros.  The walk-ons, the one-shot villains, the small-company heroes that nobody knows about once they're gone.  The audience turns over so quickly in this business--you're lucky if you hold ‘em for three or four years--that history is forgotten with nauseating rapidity.

Then there are guys like me.

I've held on somehow since 1963, although I've only read a fraction of current output from the mid-Eighties onward.  Too many titles, not enough money or interest.  But I know about comics from the late Thirties on up, and I do know a lot about their characters.

I could write fict using characters even readers of my generation wouldn't know.  Kielle has challenged me to do such a thing, and maybe I will sometime.  Not tonight, though.

Tonight I have to write about what happened.

I read the 22nd ish of MAN-THING (1st series) and was wondering about the lost, the forgotten, the unsung-anymore characters of Marvel Comics.

Don't ask me why, but I flashed on a couple of characters from an ancient Iron Man tale.  You've never seen them since that appearance, but they were on the cover of the first TALES OF SUSPENSE I ever saw.

One of ‘em was a mad scientist, and his name was Dr. Strange.

Yes, it was.  Really.  Not the sorceror who showed up in the back of STRANGE TALES a few months later, but an honest-to-goodness nutso technologist who came into conflict with Iron Man.  He tried to conquer the world of Jack Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev, came pretty close to it, and was stopped only-just-barely by Iron Man, in his big, bulky, golden suit.  But Shellhead almost died in the encounter, because the current in his suit was shut down, and his injured heart came near to stopping.

The One Last Desperate Chance came in the form of Carla, Dr. Strange's pretty and honest daughter, who threw Iron Man a flashlight.  The big guy busted open the flashlight, held the two batteries within together, and started his systems up again.  Dr. Strange took it on the lam, forgiving Karla her apostasy, but vowing to be back someday.

Well, he wasn't.

I thought some obscuratanist like Bill Mantlo would dig him up for a second go-round with somebody.  If they could do it with the Hijacker, the Living Eraser, and the Toad Men, why not Dr. Strange the original?  (Well, there had been another Dr. Strange, aka Doc Strange, who appeared in the Golden Age from an outfit called Nedor, but don't get me started on that one.)  The reason why, probably, is that they didn't want to confuse modern readers with a second Dr. Strange.  I thought it'd be a neat idea to have him go against the Master of the Mystic Arts himself, but evidently Roy Thomas and his successors didn't agree.

I sat at my computer desk, an open copy of MAN-THING #22 by my side, and wondered.  And grew tired.  And shut my eyes.

The temperature seemed to drop quite a few degrees.

So did the chair.

I fell back, splash, into a pool of water several inches deep, overlaying a bunch of muck.  It was dark.  It was smelly.  It was filled with noises of animals which, if you're lucky, you'll only hear on the soundtrack of a bad movie or TV show.

The coldness and the glop on my back shocked me into standing up straight, my feet squish-squishing in the mud.  I flashed on a horrible cliche: this just couldn't be happening.  It was too pat.  Nobody would believe this.  Not even me.  If I was an editor, I'd reject the story.

But there it was.  Yeah, and I was in it.

The swamp.

Second thought: I didn't wanna be there.

You don't have to ask if I screamed.  There's nothing better to do than that once your reality drops out in favor of another.  I'd been raised in fairly desert country in West Texas and was unused to a body of water much bigger than the county swimming pool.

The only light available seemed to come from two sources.  One of them was the full moon overhead, which was doing a half-creditable job of trying to penetrate through the foilage overhead.  The other was what seemed to be a couple of window-shaped objects in the distance.  It seemed to be a lot less trouble to get to the latter than the former.  I headed for the distant light, as fast as I could squish.

What was I thinking? Snakes, snakes, snakes. I hadn't seen any, wasn't likely to see any in the dark, and damned well didn't want to.  Or feel them.  In any way, shape, or slithery form.  The way I was feeling, if a Man-Thing was anywhere near, I'd be ripe for a barbecue.

All I knew was that I was in a setting that would make a Dean Koontz novel feel tame, and I wanted to get to whatever had solid footing to stand on and light by which to see.  The house up ahead (for it was a house) seemed to fulfill both conditions.  Dracula could have been setting up shop inside.  It wouldn't have stopped me.

I got to the house, which was built on a bit more negotiable land, saw the two windows leaking light behind draperies, and grabbed for the knob of the door which was between them.  I twisted the knob. The thing was locked.  So I pounded on the door, yelling something like, "Open up, open up!  Snakes!  Reptiles!  Open up!"

A voice inside said, calmly, "Go away."

"Like hell!" I yelled.  "Let me in!  Just let me use your phone!  Please!"

About this time my inner jukebox should have been playing, "There's a light, over at the Frankenstein place," but I didn't have time for song cross-referencing right then.  "Go away," the voice said again.

"Please!  Don't you see, I need help!  This is the only place around I can see.  Just let me in, and I won't bother you again, I promise!"

The door clicked open, faster than it should have been able to.  A man stood in the doorway, but he seemed secondary to what he was holding.

A gun.

It was pointing at me.

The guy was probably pushing sixty years of age, had an unbelievable widow's peak, and, dig this, was dressed in a purple outfit.  It came complete with a long, flowing cape and high, flared collar.  His expression was somewhere between medium p.o'ed to utter disdain.

If there'd been mad scientists on our world anywhere except the Defense Department, that's probably what they would have looked like.

"You're very, very right about that point," he said.  He clicked the gun.

"No, mister, please, don't, this isn't my reality!"  At least, I think that's what I said.

"Get in."

"Yes, sir!"

He stepped aside to let me by and I scurried inside.  He locked the door behind me.  I gaped.  Inside, it looked like the front room of a moderately comfortable middle-class house.  A doorway led to the next room.

"Well, what are you waiting for?  Keep walking!"

The advice came from behind me, and since it came from the same source as the one which held the gun, I did what he told me to.  The doorway opened into a hall off of which several rooms could be seen, one a kitchen, another a john, two others bedrooms.  Normal.  Too normal for this kind of place.

There was also a door at the end of the hall.

"Go there and open it," he said.  "Walk through.  If you try to run through and shut it in my face, I'll shoot through it and kill you."

"Uh, right."  Indiana Jones might have figured out a great way to get the drop on this guy by that time, but my instincts ran more towards self-preservation.

The doorway led to a flight of stairs.  The stairs led to what looked like one hell of a basement laboratory.  The lab contained one very large, very dangerous looking metallic globe up on a scaffold with various high-tech devices nearby.  There was also another pernicious cliche in the room.

A woman, of not inconsiderable beauty, tied to a chair.

"Oh, Daddy," she said, "where did he come from?"

"I don't know," said the guy, who had just finished locking the door behind us.  "But he'll never be going back there."

I must've been spending too long on the stairway, taking in the scenery.  My host prodded me in the back with the gun, and I didn't waste much time getting to the bottom of the stairs.  I was directed to a chair facing the girl.  She was in her forties, brunette, dressed in clothes a lot more suitable for tooling around in the swamp than mine.  I could feel the guy yanking my hands behind my back and starting to apply rope to them.  I tried jerking them forward.

He conked me on the side of the head with the barrel of the pistol.  It hurt.  A lot more than I would have imagined.  After that, I let him tie me up as pretty as you pleased.

The girl looked somewhat embarrassed.  "Oh, I'm sorry," she said.  "You really shouldn't have come here.  Are you some sort of government agent?"

"Uh, been called a lot of things in my time, but never that," I said.  "I sorta...dropped in on this reality.  Where are we?"

"You mean you don't know?", she said.

"I mean I have no earthly idea," I responded, with a reasonable tone of reasonableness.

My captor came and stood between us.  "Well, then, my newfound interloper: you are in the Everglades of Florida.  Specifically, you are in a house which I was able to pick up for the proverbial song, due to a curse supposedly put on it thirty years ago by a man who rented it.  It even bears his name.  The name of--"

I said it before thinking.  "Sallis. Ted Sallis."

The guy looked as perturbed as Hannibal Lecter being criticized for his table manners.  "Yes.  And you claim not to be a government agent?"

"I can't claim to much beyond being a working class hero and a part-time fanfic writer," I said.  "Let me go, please.  This really isn't my universe."

Surprisingly, he smiled.  "From another reality? Well, then, the hypothesis I have made concerning this locale is probably accurate."

"Daddy, let him go," said the woman.  "He's not a super-hero.  He couldn't do anything to you."

"He could let other people know I am here, Carla, and that would not be a good thing," he said.  "The world hasn't heard from me since 1963.  Soon, all worlds will know of me, because there will be only one.  And I will rule that. What's left of it, anyway."

I blinked. "Uh.  Mind telling me your name?"

He looked at me coolly.  "I am Doctor Strange."

Jaw-drop time.

"Uh.  Y-you're..."

"Dr. Sandoval Strange, former and present menace to society, inventor of the lightning gun, the world's first viable force-field, and the device you see behind you, the S-Bomb," he said.  "One of these was once detonated in space.  This one--" He pointed to the metal globe on the scaffold.  "--will soon be detonated in hyperspace.  Or hyperreality, if you will."

Carla leaned forward as far as the ropes would allow.  "You wouldn't be from Iron Man, would you?"

"No, sorry," I admitted.  Then I said, "You're the guy who once fought Iron Man, aren't you?  In TALES OF SUSPENSE?"

"In what?"

"Never mind," I said.

Strange poked the muzzle of the gun in my throat.  "Never forget who has the gun around here.  Or the bomb."

"Got it," I said.

He removed the gun.  "For thirty-eight years I have operated in obscurity, never daring to raise my head into the sights of the world's security forces, or of their mundane ‘super-heroes'.  I have watched generations of their battles, seen all the schemes of my competitors come to naught, and all because they were stupid enough to draw attention to themselves before they tried to accomplish their objectives.  If you tell the world you plan to conquer it, they send a super-hero to fight you.  So, the best thing to do is not to tell the world beforehand.  Just do it, and leave the heroes with egg on their masked faces."

"I've been trying to find him for thirty-eight years," explained Carla Strange.  "He found me, in the end."

"You don't look fifty-eight," I observed.

"Thank you," she said.

"Now, I have recreated the S-Bomb with which I once threatened the world," Sandoval Strange continued.  "But in my researches, I came upon the concept of parallel realities.  That we only inhabit one of a multitude of universes, and at several points, crossovers between them can be made.  The Bermuda Triangle, for one.  The Citrusville Swamp, for another.

"This one is more accessible than the other.  It will probably also provide the best results.  After all, the reports of flying demons, barbarian warriors, talking ducks, and even a bog-monster cannot be entirely discounted.  If the government makes enough of an effort to cover something up, trust me...they've got something that needs covering up."

"Such as this swamp," I said.

"Are you trying to be funny?"

"No, no.  Just carry on."

"A bomb of this sort, detonated elsewhere on the planet, would devastate and destroy a large portion of the world's mass, probably shake it out of orbit, definitely lead to the destruction of life on Earth," said Strange.  "A one-shot event, which would possibly doom myself along with the world.  That would be the real tragedy.  But.  If this were detonated within a nexus point, do you know what would happen?"

"Uh, I'm not really a student of the phenomenon," I admitted.

He leaned closer and smiled.  "A total collapse of all realities into one.  The Cosmic Axis would be knocked so far off-kilter that it might cease to exist, or to have any more import than a weathervane.  One world rather than billions.  A stage of chaos, formed of fragments of many realities.  And easily enough threatened...with another S-Bomb."

"So, let me get this right," I said.  "You intend to blow all realities into one, with this bomb."

"Correct," he said.

"And you've got another bomb waiting to threaten the reality that results."

"Also correct."

"Where will you be, when all this takes place?"

He looked at me pityingly.  "Within the force-field I told you about earlier.  Weren't you listening?"

"I could deactivate the bomb if I were loose," said Carla. "But that's an impossibility right now."

"I guess it is," I said.  "What's next?"

"Oh," said Strange, "next I do this."  He walked to a computer device, input several lines of instruction, and hit Enter.  A monitor screen started showing numbers with a colon between them:  10:00.  Then it became 09:59, 09:58, and so on.

I'd seen this scene played in dozens of films from GOLDFINGER on up and some of the intensity is lost when you're just watching it in a theater.

"Then, I do this," said Strange, and, walking to the stairs, began to walk up them.  "Ta-ta."

"Wait a minute," I said.  "Wait just an ever-lovin', blue-eyed minute!"  This seemed to be the right universe in which to use such a phrase.  I will not apologize for it.

He stopped on the sixth step, curious. "Why?  What for?"

"Because you're forgetting the most important part of things that happen like this," I said.  "You've left out the Last Desperate Chance."

"Oh?" he said, dryly.  "Tell me, as I have to leave very quickly: what might that be?"

Around then, on cue, we started hearing some suspicious slogging noises from behind the door at the top of the stairs.  Even he did a double-take.

"That, I reckon," I said.

It was chancy, as there was nothing to stop Strange from shooting me for that impertinent remark.  But he seemed to have his priorities straight.  He rushed up to the top of the stairs and shot directly through the wood, emptying his gun and making a lot of holes in the door.

No more noise.

After a second, Strange seemed to relax, and laughed.

That was when the door burst right in the middle under the thrust of the big, green, slimy, dripping arm that punched right through it.

Strange didn't look as though he had another laugh in him.

He gaped, open-mouthed, speechless, and tried backing down the stairs wildly, clicking off empty chambers of his gun at the newcomer who was shambling down the steps at him.  He threw the gun, and it landed in the monster's chest with a splushy plop.  If he had really tried, I think Strange could have outrun the thing that was coming for him.

But when you're confronted by a creature that looks like it'd be topping 400 pounds even if it went on a diet, a huge, greenish thing with slime and grasslike fur and rootlike things growing over it in place of muscles, and claws and three big carrot-like things hanging down from its face, in the midst of which are two, globular, glowing red eyes, and that conglomeration is coming for you, sometimes you can be forgiven if you forget how to run very fast.

The monster reached out for Strange, who was trying to shriek, and now making a moderate success of it.  I didn't bother shouting up advice, because I knew what was going to happen, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer character.

My fear must've been the bait to lure him to this place.  I was never so glad for being afraid.  Right now, I think Sandoval Strange topped me.  After all, he was the guy whose face was caught in the monster's paw.  He was the guy croaking in terror.  He was the guy whose face was now being blackened and burned and melted away wherever it contacted the green hand.  And now his body, ignited by its fat content, was starting to blaze, and the purple uniform and cape were turning into a regular fire hazard.

I knew that it was going to happen.

Because whoever knows FEAR...
 
 
 

...BURNS at the MAN-THING'S TOUCH!!!!

And smells pretty lousy while they're doing it.

Dr. Sandoval Strange fell down the steps in two pieces.  Man-Thing was still at the top of the stairs.  Both of us were looking at him.  He was just standing there.

The digital clock was still winding down.  Seven minutes were left. 6:59, 6:58, you know the drill.

"Manny!" I yelled, not sure that I really ought to, but there was, after all, the matter of the bomb.  "Down here!  We could use a hand!"

"From...him?" asked Carla, incredulously.

"Yeah, trust me on this.  He always knows the good guys from the bad guys.  He's just like Gentle Ben."

Man-Thing started re-shambling, making his way down the stairs.  "Could you pick it up a bit, please?" I asked.  "We've got a bomb to defuse."

Carla gave me a haughty look.  "Unless you're a lot smarter than you look, I've got a bomb to defuse.  And don't you forget it."

"Sorry," I said.

Finally, Man-Thing was at the bottom of the stairs, and in front of my chair.  Both of its beady, big, red, evil-looking eyes were trained straight on me.

"Manny," I said, nervously, "I know you're smarter than you look.  You've got to be.  I remember how you bandaged up Richard Rory once with leaves.  If you can remember medical training, you know how to get us out of these ropes.  Come on!"

Obligingly, he shambled behind me and started trying to untie me.  But it seemed that the knots were giving him fits.

"Never mind that," shouted Carla.  "Just break the ropes, for Pete's sake!"

He stuck one claw behind an offending rope loop and popped it like a dealer cutting open a bale of newspapers.  I got up and rubbed my chafed arms. "Thanks, big guy," I said.  I thought of trying to shake his hand, but decided not to try him that much.

"Over here," Carla said.  "We've only got a minute and a half.  We have to defuse that bomb!"

The Man-Thing seemed to take his time shambling to her chair, so I went over first and tried to untie the ropes.  But I had about as much luck with the knots as he did.  I felt a big green hand on my shoulder, leaving slime-marks all over my T-shirt.  He shoved me out of the way, and then burst Carla's bonds as well.

She leapt up from the chair. "Come on!  We've only got thirty seconds left!"

"It was three minutes just a second ago," I said.

She pointed at the digital clock.  It read 00:30.  "You feel like arguing?"

Both of us scurried up the ladder of the scaffold to the bomb platform.  Man-Thing tried to follow, putting his hands on one rung.  I waved him back. "Nope, not this time, big guy.  Trust me, unless you want to have this thing drop out from under you when you get on."

Then I turned to Carla.  "How are you going to get this thing shut down?"

"With this," she said, reaching into her hair.

She pulled forth a bobby pin and plunged it into a joint in the metal.  There was a spark and a small pop, plus a small acrid smell.  I looked down at the clock.

It read 00:07.

"Think I've seen that somewhere before," I muttered.

We descended the ladder again.  Carla, unexpectedly, pecked me on the cheek.  "Thank you," she said.  She turned to Manny, stood on tiptoe, and pecked him on the cheek.  He looked embarrassed.  Wiping the slime off her face, she said, "Thank you, too."

I looked down at a charred, football-shaped object with a widow's peak near our feet.  "You're not going to do that to him, too, are you?"

"Nope."  She drew back her leg and kicked the object for a field goal, sending it behind a computer.  "It's all finished, now."

"Well," I said, fumbling for words, "it must be a terrible thing, to have found your father after so long a search and having him get fricasseed like that."

"Oh, I knew he was a fink," she said, matter-of-factly.  "I just wanted to tie up loose ends.  Now that I know what happened to him, I've only got one family member to search for."

"Oh, really?" I asked.  "Who's that?"

"Oh, my third cousin.  He used to be a big-shot doctor, but boy, was he an arrogant so-and-so.  Then he got in a car accident, lost the use of his hands, and turned into a drifter.  I lost track of him, but I've always wanted to find out what happened to him.  Even if he was an arrogant you know what."

"Was his name...Stephen?"

She looked at me. "How did you know?"

"Try Greenwich Village.  It's a good place to start."

Carla brightened.  "You know, that's not a bad idea.  I think I will. Thanks, be seeing you.  And thank you, big guy."  She patted the Man-Thing on the chest, getting green goop on her hand, wiped it off on her dress, went up the stairs and out the remains of the door, and was gone.

I turned to him, as there was no one left to talk to.  "So...what do I do now?"

A voice from behind me said, "Well, I could always send you back home."

I whirled around so fast I almost knocked the pointed hat off the guy in wizard's raiment behind me.

"Kind of a mediocre job, but you served well enough as a fear-beacon," said Dakimh the Enchanter.  "Now, I think the Cosmic Axis will be safe for a good while longer."  He made a mystic gesture towards the bomb on the scaffold, and it disappeared.  I didn't have the heart to ask him where he'd sent it.

"You're going to send me back to my own dimension?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said.  "Any objections?"

"No, no, none at all," I said.  "Not a one.  Is this really the way it went with Gerber?"

He nodded, soberly.  "Gerber, Claremont, and now you.  Always a step downward.  Next thing you know, I'll be grabbing some kid in a first-grade reading class."

"Good.  Anybody but me.  Now, how do I get back?"

He raised both arms and sent forth a burst of mystic energy.  "Try repeating, ‘There's no place like home.'"

Wizard, Man-Thing, and secret mad-scientist's lair vanished from my sight.  The light of his magic energy burst was so bright I had to close my eyes.

Temperature rising.  More familiar smells, sounds, and tactile sensations.

I opened my eyes.  I was back at my computer desk again.

Don't ask for confirmation as I have washed the outfit I wore then and swamp-monster stains are harder than hell to get out.  I doubt we'll even see Carla in a certain sorceror's comic.  You just have to take this story on faith.

Or not.  It doesn't matter to me.

But I do know one thing.  Yeah, I've indexed Swamp Thing.  And I've indexed Man-Thing.  But, even though Gerber wrote it...

...it's going to be a long time before I get to indexing Sludge.

Trust me on this one.

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