Nice piece on Slate.com on the late, great comic-book writer Steve Gerber. But writer Grady Hendrix gets one thing wrong when writing, “[Gerber] delighted in sneaky juvenile wordplay—for part of his run on Man-Thing the book was called Giant Size Man-Thing.”

Yes, great line, and no, Hendrix is not the first to point this out. But Marvel had an entire line of “Giant-Size” something-or-others, including Giant-Size Avengers and Giant-Size Defenders — indeed, there were no fewer than 29 in all (each, you’ll note, with a hyphen between “Giant” and “Size,” which pleases me greatly). So this wasn’t any wordplay on Gerber’s part; this was the result of the regular title selling well enough to merit a quarterly edition as well. But I doubt that would explain the existence of “Giant-Size Kid Colt,” and my algebra skills aren’t up to the task of solving “Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action.”

By the way, the issue above was the one most prized in my collection. I have a letter published inside. I was 14. Ironically I now relate to it even more, but in a completely different way — most nights, I am The Winky Man, wandering around my bedroom creating chaos in my sleep.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.