Man-Thing #18
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeMan-Thing #18, titled 'School's Out!', closes the three-part 'Mad Viking Trilogy' — regarded by collectors and critics alike as one of the most ambitious and thematically charged story arcs of Steve Gerber's celebrated run on the series. The issue delivers a remarkably dark resolution for a Code-approved Bronze Age horror comic: the Mad Viking (Harald Josefsen) kills his own granddaughter Astrid before being dissolved by a chemically transformed Man-Thing, while a mob successfully burns books at Citrusville High School — a bleak outcome in which the swamp creature's intervention comes too late to prevent real harm. That willingness to let civic evil partially 'win' gives the issue genuine weight, and the Mad Viking's portrait of authoritarian, patriarchal rage has struck readers across decades as disturbingly resonant. The issue also marks Man-Thing's permanent departure from the Florida Everglades setting that had defined the series, closing one chapter of Gerber's run and opening a new, urban phase for the final issues of the title.
ComicBooks.com Value
Show all 12 grades ▾
This exact issue on ebay
Raw — FN/VF ▾ $12.95–$24.99 2 listings
Raw / ungraded ▾ $6–$34 20 listings
Sell my copy
Have this issue — or a whole collection? Get a fair offer from us, skip the marketplace fees and the hassle.
We Buy Collections ▸History
Writer Steve Gerber and penciller/inker Jim Mooney produced the issue under editor Len Wein, with colors by Phil Rachelson, lettering by Ray Holloway, and a cover painted by Gil Kane and inked by Klaus Janson. Mooney's arrival on interior art had begun one issue earlier with #17; his workmanlike, grounded draftsmanship was a deliberate tonal shift from the more expressionistic work of prior artists, anchoring Gerber's increasingly literary scripts in a documentary-style realism suited to a story about mob violence and book-burning. The Mad Viking character had been co-created by Gerber and John Buscema beginning in #16 (January 1975), making #18 the concluding chapter of a three-issue arc that Gerber had been building across the concurrent Giant-Size Man-Thing quarterly as well.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Carol Selby, a disillusioned teenager who joins Man-Thing and Richard Rory as they leave Citrusville at the story's end.
- Death of the Mad Viking (Harald Josefsen): dissolved by Man-Thing's altered chemical composition after passing through the Citrusville sewage treatment plant.
- Death of Astrid Josefsen: killed by her own grandfather, the Mad Viking, when she attempts to reason with him in front of the mob.
- Last appearance of Olivia Selby, the 'Mothers for Decency' organizer whose anti-education crusade drove the trilogy's central conflict.
- Man-Thing undergoes a temporary physical transformation — reduced to a being of chemical foam by his time in the sewage plant — and is restored to his normal form when his chemical composition dissolves the Mad Viking.
- The story title is 'School's Out!' Written by Steve Gerber; interior art by Jim Mooney (pencils and inks); cover by Gil Kane (pencils) and Klaus Janson (inks); edited by Len Wein.
- Issue went on sale March 18, 1975, with a June 1975 cover date; a British variant edition also exists.
- The story has been reprinted four times: in Chiller Pocket Book (Marvel UK, 1980 series) #27; Essential Man-Thing Vol. 2 (2008, black and white); the Man-Thing Omnibus (2012); and Man-Thing by Steve Gerber: The Complete Collection Vol. 2 (2016).
Cast · 7 characters
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Eclipso #63 (1978), Essential Man-Thing #2 (2008), Man-Thing Omnibus #[nn] (2012), Man-Thing by Steve Gerber: The Complete Collection #2 (2016), Chiller Pocket Book #27
Key issues in Man-Thing
Variants (1)
Reviews
Reader reviews
No reader reviews yet.