The Heap - Volume Three!

In volume three of The Heap from PS Artbooks under a handsome cover from Stephen Bissette, we get some of the very best Heap stories from the hand of Ernie Schroeder who produced these for Airboy Comics from  Hillman Comics way back in the early 50's. After years of struggling for a premise and constant revisions of the approach to the strip, finally there's a focus and a formula which works wonderfully. The Heap's origins as long dead German flying ace Baron Von Emmelman is not forgotten but is relegated to the background and the Heap sprawls the globe finding interesting people and stories. Clunky mechanisms like gods and goddesses are dropped and The Heap is merely allowed to be, a ubiquitous force for good or at the very least a rough justice. In these final days, The Heap finally gets some  cover attention and  is the focus of several.

As can be readily seen The Heap contested with a broad array of monsters and creatures, some of the natural world others from the depths of a magical evil. He beats them all, his prodigious strength and indefatigable power winning the day.

The Heap served as an inspiration for many a swamp creature which rose up later at comic shops all over, but these Heap stories have an elegance and cohesion which often tops the best the later rivals. Man-Thing in particular owes much to The Heap. But The Heap itself would be revived in a many of speaking in later years and we'll take a look at that next week.

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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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The Heap For Cheap!

At my new favorite book store Half-Price Books I discovered for small money two of the three The Heap volumes from PS Artbooks. I found the lovely second and third volumes but alas not the first one. That's fine with me (for now) as I discovered that it is in the second volume that the definitive Heap stories from Hillman's Airboy Comics begin, those drawn and written by Ernie Schroeder.

Schroeder is referred to as "the Good Heap Artist", evoking memories of Carl Barks "the Good Duck Artist". It seems Schroeder never signed his work and so no one for years knew the identity of the artist who so distinctively rendered this memorable character for several years to the end of the run. The two volumes I picked up feature delightful covers, one by Frank Brunner that's been featured here before and another by Steve Bissette, an artist with a long association and deep knowledge of monsters in general and swamp monsters in particular.

Maybe one day I'll find the debut volume. I hope I do, but I don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it even if it sports a fantastic Mike Ploog cover.

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