ONCE YOU'VE DRAWN MAN-THING...

...there will never be an end to the jokes! I'm cool with that.

I look back at my Man-Thing run, with astonishing writing by J.M.DeMatteis, as one of the most creatively successful pairings I've ever had.

For me, that work stands up incredibly well, even today, and both me and Marc remain proud of it. Marc is a powerful, poetic and intelligent writer with a big, compassionate soul, and we had enormous fun on that series. And I was especially happy to have Christie Scheele coloring too. She had colored the peerless Bill Sienkiewicz on his Moon Knight run – which is and was a seminal, inspirational work for me, especially the single “Hit It” story, where Bill first became Bill to my eyes. And you can see his influence in a lot of the Man-Thing artwork, along with nods to Bernie Wrightson, and also Jeffrey Catherine Jones.

The “Atlantis” two-parter, from issues 7 and 8, remains some of my best work ever, I think. I would say that's the precursor to my much later Green Lantern run, even with a 20 year time gap between them!

The above cover takes influence from Glenn Fabry and a bit of Simon Bisley too. These were some of my earliest painted covers, and if I have a ‘slight’ regret across the almost 40 year span of my career, it’s that I wish I had painted more. Here’s another -

Manthing was special in that we were very much trusted as a creative team. I was able to respond to Marc’s scripts in a highly creative way, in terms of layout, design, and creative approach. It was, at first, to be a ‘mature readership’ title, and that led to us creating material that had depth, nuance, and huge concepts. It was a psychological workout, and for all it’s grand, lofty scale - incorporating gods, magic, and the fabric of the very universe - it had a grounded earthiness. The characters felt rounded out and alive…

We also had some of my all-time favourite cameos in Howard the Duck, and Namor the Submariner. I adored drawing Namor in particular…

I would also say that Marc created a criminally under-used new villain in Mr.Termineus. He had this almost Grant Morrison post-punk cool, and manipulated reality in wonderfully poetic ways, leaving me open to try an array of creative approaches. He was always great fun to draw!

Sadly Marvel was going through some upheavals at the time, and even though it launched better than expected – they predicted 20K orders but got 40K – when the sales halved (to the anticipated launch number of 20K) they first folded the titles Manthing and Werewolf by Night into an anthology called Strange Tales, and then cancelled that anthology after only two issues.

Our editor Mark Bernardo said at the time he thought our Man-Thing run was a future classic. It’s been great seeing the love for the series resurface in recent years! And wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a collection, and how about with a proper new ending added by myself and Marc?

Ah, such thoughts are the stuff that dreams are made of!