Obsessively putting our comics in chronological order since 1985.
| 1974-09-01 00:04:30 |
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Monsters Unleashed #5 (Man-Thing)
Issue(s): Monsters Unleashed #5 (Man-Thing story only)
Cover Date: Apr 74
Title: "All the faces of fear!"
Credits:
Tony Isabella - Writer
Vicente Alcazar - Penciler
Vicente Alcazar - Inker
Review/plot:
Ellen Brandt, Ted Sallis girlfriend who betrayed him to AIM, returns in this story. She's undergone plastic surgery and her doctor has fallen in love with her.
We learn that she wasn't a formal AIM agent, but instead was a "$100-a-week secretary who got greedy, that's all". This is according to the smitten doctor, anyway.
In this story she heads back to the swamp and discovers the AIM base that was destroyed by the Man-Thing. Her greed emerges again and she attracts the Man-Thing.
The Man-Thing stumbles into the area, and recognizes Ellen. Ellen also recognizes that the Man-Thing is Ted, and she's able to suppress her fear, so the Man-Thing wanders away.
Some rare Marvel Universe work from Vicente Alcazar.
Quality Rating: C
Historical Significance Rating: 1
Chronological Placement Considerations: The MCP places this way back in publication time, directly after Astonishing Tales #13, which was the last issue to mention Ellen Brandt. I don't see a need for that; Brandt was said to have had "a thousand" nightmares since her scarring, and she's had time to recover from plastic surgery, so i'm dropping this somewhere closer to publication time, in between Man-Thing #8-9 along with a number of other Man-Thing appearances outside its main book.
References:
- Ellen Brandt first appeared in Savage Tales #1.
- It was said in Astonishing Tales #12 that she was subsequently found wandering aimlessly by SHIELD.
Crossover: N/A
Continuity Insert? N
My Reprint: Essential Man-Thing vol. 1
| Previous: Defenders #15-16 | Up: Main 1974 / Box 8 / EiC: Roy Thomas | Next: Tales of the Zombie #7 |
Comments
Ellen Brandt is still Sallis's girlfriend at this point and not his wife.
When Ellen Brandt reappeared in J.M. DeMatteis's Man-Thing run, her face was still scarred. I guess the surgery didn't take. DeMatteis apparently forgot about this story. Either that, or he felt that Brandt got off too easily.
Interestingly, DeMatteis revealed that Brandt was pregnant when she betrayed Sallis. That raises questions- was she pregnant when the doctor performed the surgery? Did the doctor know?
Having just commented in Tales of the Zombie #7's zombie-gator fight and its brutality, I click to this and see this panel of Ol' Carrot Nose engaging in the activity that must have become old hat to him, and it too looks pretty fierce. With the weeds coming out of his head plus the "veiny" bicep, Manny kinda looks like a hippie bodybuilder(two fads for the price of one!).:-)
Very nice black & white pencils & inks by Vicente Alcazar here. Lots of black. Has a nice detailed 3-D look with subtle shadings. More detailed I think than some of the color pencils & inks he later did for Jonah Hex at DC. Has a high-contrast photoreal look to the faces that I don't remember seeing so much on Jonah Hex. It's a whole 'nother trick to do full size magazine black & white pages, as compared to the smaller paged color comics, where an inker loses a lot of detail in the reproduction, but can depend on the color process to do a lot more of the "shading" effects.
