Issue(s): Giant-Size Man-Thing #1
Cover Date: Aug 74
Title: "How will we keep warm when the last flame dies? / This mind, this universe / No shortage of evil!"
Credits:
Steve Gerber - Writer
Mike Ploog - Penciler
Frank Chiaramonte - Inker

Review/plot:
I won't tire you with a "giant-size man-thing" joke, so i'll just link to Bow Wow Wow's Giant Sized Baby Thing.

The Glob was Marvel's first swamp monster, and he's bitter about the Man-Thing's popularity and looking for a fight.

Actually, both the Glob and the Man-Thing are mindless monsters, so what we really have is a group of crazy Entropists.

They use their golden brain to summon the Glob to fight off the Man-Thing. Later, they lose the brain, and it falls into the swamp where it allows the Glob to reform himself as an idealized (but mute) version of the person he was before he became the Glob.

He winds up in "Omegaville" a utopian village being built in the Everglades.

Later, the Entropists arrive, seeking their brain. They turn poor Man-Glob into a mud monster, resulting in another fight with the Man-Thing.

The Entropists' leader in this issue is "Yagzan", who gets suffocated by the Glob's mud at the end of this story. His bones will get turned into Jude the Entropic Man in Marvel Two-In-One #42-43.

Omegaville is destroyed in the Glob's rampage.

Gerber madness! And doesn't Ploog draw a cute Man-Thing?

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 2 - these Entropists and Omegaville will appear a few more times.

Chronological Placement Considerations: The MCP places this between Man-Thing #8-9 along with the Man-Thing's appearances in Master of Kung Fu #19 and Daredevil #113-114.

References:

• The Glob previously appeared in Hulk #121 and Hulk #129.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

"Yagzan" is certainly drawn with a strong resemblance to Richard Nixon.

The original rejected cover to this was printed in Swampmen/Comic Book Creator #6.

Yagzan = Jude the Entropic Man.

Sort of.

The Cosmic Cube was used to transform Yagzan's remains into Jude. With Yagzan being a skeleton, it's sort of debatable whether or not they should be tracked as two characters.

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/judetem.htm

It's your call how to handle it, but it looks like Yagzan/Jude should be tagged in two other issues which feature his remains too (Hulk #197 and Iron Man Annual #3).

Thanks AF. For simplicity, i've made one tag to cover both characters, since i don't think Yagzan will be appearing separate from Jude in any future appearances.

Since the Golden Brain *is* the Glob's brain, the implication here seems to be that the Glob's "real" power was always a sort of telekinesis, an ability to create bodies for itself out of surrounding matter. Even when Yagzan uses the brain as a weapon, it creates an electrical ":aura" version of the Glob.

The entropist speaking in the second scan has a head design similar to DC's Silver Age android creation Red Tornado. In addition, Ploog's "Nixon" (Yagzan) looks like a hydrid of two editorial cartoonists' Tricky Dick caricatures: The legendary, 3-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and longtime Nixon antagonist Herblock from the Washington Post, and Australian-born Pat Oliphant (also a Pulitzer winner), who emigrated to the U.S. in the 60's and made his reputation mocking the powers-that-be at the Denver Post. The only thing Ploog leaves out are the five o'clock shadow and the exaggerated ski-slope nose.

How people in comic shops must have laughed the hundredth time some wee laddie came in and asked them if they had a Giant-sized Man Thing.

"No, we're all out of stock but I do have an enormous penis."