The Heap: The Forgotten Swamp Monster of Horror Comics

I first happened upon The Heap in a Skywald Magazine (Psycho #5) while browsing a dusty collection of vintage comic books at a local flea market. At the time I had no idea I was holding the original blueprint for every swamp monster that would follow. Here was a character—this shambling, tragic creature—who predated both Marvel’s Man-Thing and DC’s beloved Swamp Thing by nearly three decades. Yet somehow, The Heap has been relegated to comic book trivia, overshadowed by more famous cousins who got better marketing and more recent adaptations. Today, I want to change that narrative and give this misunderstood character the recognition it deserves.

Who Is The Heap? A Character Lost to Time

The Heap made its debut in Air Fighters Comics #3 back in December 1942. Created by writer Harry Stein and artist Mort Leav, this creature emerged from the pages as a guest villain in the “Sky Wolf” feature—just another monster to be vanquished in a wartime adventure comic. But something about The Heap was different from the typical monsters populating comics of that era. This wasn’t just a generic ghoul or a rubber-suited creature; it was something genuinely tragic.

The character’s origin story is where the magic happens. Baron Eric von Emmelman was a German World War I air ace who got shot down over a desolate Polish swamp in 1918. Rather than die like a normal soldier, von Emmelman’s sheer will to survive—his refusal to let go of life—kept him tethered to the earth even after his body began to decay. Over decades, something extraordinary and horrifying happened. His decaying human form merged with the vegetation, mud, and detritus of the swamp, transforming him into something neither fully human nor fully natural: The Heap.

The Heap’s origin, as told in Air Fighters #3

The Visual Evolution: From White-Furred Beast to Tragic Icon

Here’s what fascinates me most about The Heap’s history: the character actually evolved over its 11-year run in Airboy Comics (the renamed version of Air Fighters). Initially, The Heap appeared as a white-furred, blood-thirsty creature with prominent fangs and an animalistic demeanor. Artist Ernie Schroeder, who took over the character in late 1949, completely reimagined the visual approach.

Under Schroeder’s guidance, The Heap transformed into something far more sympathetic and mysterious. The white fur darkened to murky browns and greens—the colors of earth and swamp. Those menacing fangs disappeared. The creature developed more defined musculature beneath its mossy exterior. Most importantly, The Heap’s behavior shifted from that of a mindless beast to something approaching genuine pathos and emotional depth.

I find this evolution remarkable because it shows how a single artist’s vision can completely recontextualize a character. Suddenly, The Heap wasn’t just a monster to be feared—it became a monster to be pitied. Readers saw it carrying wounded children to safety, its actions driven by fragmented memories of humanity rather than pure instinct.

The Tragedy of a Monster Nobody Asked For

What makes The Heap such a compelling character, at least to me, is the fundamental tragedy built into its existence. This is a being that didn’t choose to become a monster. Baron von Emmelman died in a swamp over eighty years ago, yet his consciousness—or what remains of it—is trapped inside this grotesque form.

The Heap wanders the comics landscape with no clear purpose, often drawn into conflicts by circumstance rather than agency. Sometimes it fights for good; sometimes it causes destruction. But throughout its adventures, there’s an underlying melancholy. The creature seems to understand, on some level, what it once was and what it has become. It’s the kind of existential horror that modern readers have come to appreciate through characters like The Man-Thing and Swamp Thing, yet The Heap was doing this decades earlier.

Comics historian Dick Lupoff captured this perfectly when he noted that The Heap possesses the same kind of tragic appeal as Quasimodo or Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster. “The monster is pathetic,” he wrote, “then he is truly touching and memorable.” The Heap achieved this balance almost by accident, but it worked.

Why The Heap Got Overshadowed (And It’s Not Fair)

Here’s where I get a bit frustrated with comic book history. The Heap deserved to be remembered alongside—or even ahead of—Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. Both of those characters were created in the early 1970s and got immediate cultural attention. Swamp Thing had Bernie Wrightson’s stunning artwork and Len Wein’s compelling storytelling. Man-Thing had Roy Thomas and the entire Marvel machine behind it.

Swamp Thing vs Man-Thing. Art by Nestor Redondo

But The Heap? When Airboy Comics folded in 1953, The Heap essentially disappeared from the cultural conversation. The emerging Comics Code Authority, which cracked down on horror content, would have buried the character anyway, but by then, The Heap had already faded into obscurity.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that The Heap was revived—first by the independent publisher Skywald in their black-and-white horror magazine Psycho, and later by Eclipse Comics in their 1980s Airboy reboot. Neither revival achieved the prominence of the original Hillman run, but at least they showed that someone, somewhere, still cared about this forgotten character.

The Skywald Revival: Darker, Grittier, and Frankly, Weirder

Speaking of the Skywald version, I have to mention this because it’s such a fascinating (if bizarre) chapter in The Heap’s history. When Skywald resurrected The Heap in 1971, they created an entirely new character with the same name. This version wasn’t a German air ace; it was Jim Roberts, a crop-duster pilot who crashed into a vat of nerve gas and chemicals.

The Heap’s origin, as told in Psycho #2 (1971)

What emerged was genuinely grotesque—not tragic and mysterious like the original Heap, but visceral and disturbing. This Heap was described as a “snot monster,” a writhing mass of mucus and putrefying flesh. He ate rats. He had inexplicable reversions to human form. The stories became increasingly surreal and nightmarish, with the Heap finding himself on pirate ships, fighting werewolves, and somehow ending up atop the Empire State Building.

Were these stories good? Honestly, they were chaotic and sometimes incoherent. But were they memorable? Absolutely. The Skywald Heap represents a different approach to the swamp monster concept—less tragic, more horrifying, and utterly committed to comic book weirdness.

The Literary Origins: Tracing The Heap’s DNA

Before The Heap, there was Theodore Sturgeon’s 1940 short story “It!” published in the pulp magazine Unknown. This story predates The Heap by two years and tells of a mindless creature spontaneously formed on the skeleton of a murdered man. Whether Sturgeon’s work directly inspired The Heap’s creation remains debatable—the comic’s creators claimed they hadn’t read it—but the thematic similarities are undeniable.

In 1972, Marvel Comics reproduced Sturgeon’s tale in Supernatural Thrillers #1. This issue, one of the first ever horror comics I owned, inspired the logo for The Longbox of Darkness.

The Marvel Comics adaptation of IT

What’s crucial to understand is that both Sturgeon’s “It!” and The Heap share a common source material DNA: the classic horror archetype of the reanimated corpse transformed by its environment. This became the template for virtually every swamp monster that followed.

Why The Heap Matters Today

Fast forward to the present, and I believe The Heap deserves a modern reassessment. We live in an era where comic book publishers are mining the Golden Age for forgotten characters, reimagining them for contemporary audiences. Watchmen gave us Alan Moore’s take on obscure Charlton characters. The Boys showed us what superheroes could be when stripped of their mythology. We’ve had multiple Swamp Thing revivals, multiple interpretations of Man-Thing.

Skywald’s only color comic, The Heap #1, was cancelled soon after its release. The company focused solely on black and white horror magazines after that.

Nobody’s really giving The Heap a serious modern treatment. Why not? This character has all the ingredients for contemporary relevance: a tragic backstory, environmental themes (a man merged with nature, unable to separate from the land that claimed him), and a fundamental identity crisis that modern audiences understand through characters like the Hulk or Venom.

The Heap could work as a serious graphic novel. It could work as a prestige television series. It could work in the hands of the right creative team that understands how to balance the character’s inherent tragedy with its capacity for action and adventure.

The Legacy of Muck-Monsters

Ultimately, The Heap’s greatest legacy is that it proved comic books could tell stories about monstrous beings with genuine emotional depth. It showed that a creature composed of mud, vegetation, and decomposing matter could evoke more sympathy than pity, more understanding than revulsion.

Every swamp monster that came after—every tragic creature dragged through the mire of its own existence—owes something to The Heap. The character pioneered a sub-genre that comic books have been mining ever since.

Art by Frank Cho

The Wrap-Up: Remembering What We’ve Forgotten

When I read those old Psycho Skywald comic issues featuring The Heap, I’m struck by how fresh and strange they feel. The monster emerges from the fog of history as a genuinely unique nightmare—flawed, weird, and utterly fascinating. It’s a shame that so few modern readers know who this character is.

I’m advocating for a Heap renaissance. Not a reboot or a reimagining necessarily, but a simple recognition of this character’s importance and appeal. The Heap was the first, and sometimes that matters more than we realize.