Roy Thomas Presents The Heap volume 1

The Heap: Volume 1: Roy Thomas Presents by Roy Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Roy Thomas Presents The Heap Volume 1 collects all of The Heap's appearances from August 1941 to December 1947.

Untold aeons ago, I learned about The Heap in a monster book, possibly Science Fiction's Greatest Monsters. Yadda yadda yadda, thirty something years later I finally read some Heap comics.

This is good shit, especially for the time period. The Heap, progenitor of all muck monsters who came later, is a walking pile of rotten vegetation, barely sentient, his mind that of a downed German fighter pilot named Ulrich von Emmelman, lost during World War I.

The stories are an interesting mix. The first are war stories featuring Sky Wolf that the Heap wanders into. The second wave take place in America and feature Rickie Woods, a teenage boy The Heap has latched on to. These are crime stories with some horror elements. The third wave are crime stories with adventure elements that see the Heap in South America.

It's interesting seeing the genres shift. Since The Heap is almost a piece of furniture at times, he doesn't seem to mind much. The stories are formulaic as hell but also entertaining. Most feature the bad guy running into the Heap and dying at his shaggy hands.

So far, the Rickie Woods ones are my favorite. Picture the Rick Jones Hulk stories if Rick perpetually wanted the Hulk dead. The war stories were my least favorite until the Roman gods Ceres and Mars were shoe horned into things. I did not appreciate the tonal shift, although I did appreciate the resulting octopus fight in one of the stories, one of two in this volume.

I was not in love with this volume but I did LIKE-like it so I'm in for the duration. Luckily, I have the next two volumes on hand. Four out of five shambling plant creatures.

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