The Heap - Volume Two!

Under a simply delightful Frank Brunner cover, the second volume of the complete The Heap gives the reader a real glimpse of the many varied ways in which the Heap saga unfolded in the pages of Airboy Comics. The Heap stories here are of a varied stripe, with the bizarre plant-human hybrid which evolved from the remains of the WWI German flying ace Baron Von Emmelman getting involved or not so much as the stories unroll. The stories of The Heap more and more reminded me of Will Eisner's The Spirit stories, in which the main character is a relatively minor part of the tale but does often show up to play a critical role at some juncture. Devoid of the ability to speak, The Heap is a hard character to write, but whomever the writers are here (they are almost never identified in the credits) they do a dandy job of creating little parables in which The Heap is a weird figure of judgment or personification of nature.

Eventually the single most important event occurs in this volume, about a third of the way through, when "The Good Heap Artist" makes his debut. That artist, long unknown to his many fans in the early 50's when these stories were arriving on the newsstands from Hillman Comics, is named Ernest C. Schroeder. Ernie Schroeder who passed a way over a decade ago now, took the world of The Heap, which had wandered around from genre to genre trying to find a fit for the mossy beast and created a delightful fusion of mystery and myth.

Things still shifted from time to time and Baron Von Emmelmann's long and ever-changing history would come into play, but increasingly the origins of The Heap were less important than his mere being and his presence was ubiquitous as he wandered the globe appearing in stories which often had their beginnings in events centuries before. The best of The Heap stories are modern fables, populated with good and bad people and weird monsters, The Heap no less among them.

Schroeder would continue on the series until its demise. More on those issues next week -- same Heap time, same Heap channel.

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