Whether through superheroes, horror or science fiction, comic books can express metaphoric truth by making it visually literal.
Take the story Beast Man! in Creepy 11 (Oct. 1966), for example. It’s cover-featured in a beautiful painting that Frank Frazetta later retooled as a poster titled King Kong.
That, however, has little to do with the story by writer Archie Goodwin and artist Steve Ditko, which focuses on a carnival prize fighter, “Gorilla” Ames, who’s haunted by the fact he’s had an operation to replace his ailing heart with that an actual gorilla. He dreams he’s becoming a monstrous, murderous “Beast Man.” But actually, Ames has had neither a diseased heart nor heart replacement surgery (coincidentally, the first successful human heart transplant, performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, was only a year away).
In fact, it was all a hoax to encourage Ames to keep fighting. His symptoms were psychosomatic, subconscious effects of his hatred of boxing. And the promoter Walsh used those symptoms to convince Ames not only that he been cured, but that he now had a heart of an unbeatable fighting animal.
On the story’s last page, Walsh visits the alcoholic vet who’d been his partner in the deception, and finds him torn limb from limb by Ames. Before Walsh’s eyes, and despite Walsh’s protests that it was all a lie, Ames transforms into the hulking Beast Man. They convinced him too well.
“As the bone-crunching hands of the Beast Man close on his crumpling body, Walsh had no time to appreciate the amazing job he has done in rechanneling Ames’s psychosomatic nature … only time to scream!” Goodwin wrote.
“I remember that story well from when it first came out. Everything Ditko did for Creepy was amazing,” recalled Mike Cody. “I remember a story about a collector of occult books that he did that was also amazing.”
“The Frazetta covers alone were worth buying those Warren mags, coupled with the artists and writers they were some of the best deals on the stands,” wrote Bob Doncaster.
“I was especially happy to see Ditko and Colan doing great work in black and white that was different than their more light-hearted work for Marvel,” wrote Richard Meyer.
Despite Ditko’s practiced skill at portraying people in extreme states of anxiety, the Beast Man story is, of course, absurd.
On the surface.
But look a little deeper, and you can read the tale as a clear metaphoric expression of the Placebo Effect.
In World War II, medic Henry Beecher ran out of pain-killing morphine and replaced it with a saline solution but continued telling the wounded troops it was morphine to calm them. The trick worked, and his discovery, the Placebo Effect — suggesting the human mind has unsuspected powers over physical conditions — has been well-documented since.
Recent Harvard research indicates that the Placebo Effect can work even when patients know they’re being given fake treatments.
A study “…examined whether placebos would still work for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients even if they were explicitly told that the pills were inactive,” noted Adi Jaffe in Psychology Today magazine.
“The 80 IBS patients were randomly selected to receive either no treatment (the control condition) or a pill they were told was inactive ‘like a sugar pill’ without any medication in it. Patients in the placebo condition were also told about the placebo effect and that such inactive sugar pills have been shown to produce significant mind-body self-healing processes. The placebo pills were marked with clear labels that read ‘placebo pills’ so that there would be no confusion and so that patients would be constantly reminded that the pills they were taking were placebo pills two times a day. Amazingly, the placebo effect was still found to be present.”
The Placebo Effect was also used to good effect later by Marvel Comics writer David Anthony Kraft in The Savage She-Hulk 9 (Oct. 1980). The cult leader super villain The Word had discovered how to manipulate people through the ruthless use of language.
“Everyone has the power to banish doubt, fear and failure!” The Word boasts on stage. “It’s simple once you know the way — my way — the way of The Word!”
The Word is so good, in fact, that he is able to convince his daughter, Ultima, that she has superhuman strength to rival the She-Hulk’s.
About Author
