Man-Thing appears for the first time in the magazine-format comic Savage Tales #1 in 1971. Created by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, and artist Gray Morrow, Marvel’s swamp monster super hero is the first of the two swamp creature characters — pre-dating DC’s Swamp Thing by more than a year — but both are based on The Heap, a group of “muck monsters” in Hillman Periodicals from the 1940s and 1950s. Both Marvel and DC’s characters appear in various comics, as well as film and TV shows.
This Day in Halloween: Marvel's Man-Thing appears for the first time in the magazine-format comic Savage Tales #1 in 1971. / Illustration by Haley Underwood