The Heap - Volume One!

The original swamp monster of comics was named "The Heap". He appeared in the unlikeliest of places, the Hillman series Airboy Comics.  The series wasn't a series at first, but the Heap showed up first as a guest-star of sorts in the adventures of Sky-Wolf, a series by writer Harry Stein and artist Mort Leav. This genesis is detailed in a very thorough introduction by Roy Thomas, who gives us a brief history of swamp monsters in general and the Heap in particular. In this three-volume series we will have at our fingertips all the relevant Heap material from his earliest days. The first volume, detailed in this post, features a wonderfully lush Mike Ploog cover featuring The Heap and Airboy battling some sort of crab monster.

It is in a Sky Wolf story that we first meet the shambling monster who was once upon a time a World War I German flying ace named Baron Von Emmelman. His plane went down in the swamps around Warsaw after a ferocious dogfight and his will to live overcome the clutch of death and his essence merged with the mire to create something new and at first quite terrible.

The Heap proved quite popular and the shambling brute makes a come back. This time he is colored reddish (his hue will be subject to frequent changes in the early days) and in his early appearances he has two fangs which allow him to present as a predator of some sort. This aspect of the character as most other details will change and alter throughout the run.

The Heap will come back several times before being awarded his own ongoing series. When that happens it gets even stranger. We are introduced to a new character, a youngster named   Rickie Wood, a normal enough American lad with a fascination with airplanes. His model of a World War I fighter attracts the attention of the Heap and that lure proves to be a bit of a spellbinder as the Heap hangs around with Rickie for several stories, at times appearing to help the kid and others seeming to threaten him. Rickie for his part appears to be pretty scared of the Heap, though at other points he uses his great power when he begins to realize the power his model has.

Eventually this somewhat tiresome gimmick is dispensed with as is Rickie and the Heap becomes the pawn of the gods, quite literally. The goddess Ceres takes command of him plopping him around the globe to become embroiled with people and events. For a short time he follows a botanist named Drake and later still just sort of shows up when events call for him.

It's all too clear that the writers (all unknown for the most part) didn't really have a clue what to do wit the Heap. His image and essence were compelling but finding a mechanism to bring him into the story was proving to be tricky. You almost get the sense reading these early tales that different writers came up with different premises and each was given several issues to see what clicked.

Eventually the Heap would find his way, but that wouldn't happen until the second volume of his nifty PS Artbook series. More on that next week.

Same Heap time, same Heap channel.

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