9 of Bill Mantlo's Best Comic Covers

#4 – Rocket Raccoon #1. This four-issue limited series was a spin-off from a more whimsical story Bill wrote for the Incredible Hulk. What begins as a space opera featuring robotic clowns, talking animals and intelligent starships ultimately boils down into something more serious and cerebral – the question of who really is responsible for caring for those who are unable to care for themselves. That the story ultimately centers around the topic of mental illness and impaired thinking becomes more ironic, considering the author’s condition today.
Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.

#5 – Human Fly #1. This was a quintessentially Mantlo effort. Short run, licensed book, quirky 1970s Marvel mania. Where this project gets ironic is in the character’s backstory. Based off of a real-life stuntman who wore a costume and never revealed his identity (though he was later identified as Canadian stuntman Rick Rojatt), the Human Fly survived a near-fatal car wreck and had to reconstruct his ability to move and perform even basic tasks. Bill’s own injuries would condemn him to a similar fate, but once his health coverage ceased, any hope for recovery went with it.
Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.

#6 – Micronauts #58. This full-page illustration caps off Mantlo’s final issue on the Micronauts, the first series for which he really became attached to as a writer. The image circulates online to this day as a sort of farewell to Bill himself, as his transit to the Queens-Nassau Rehabilitation Center and Nursing Home have relegated him largely to the “where are they now” file of comic fandom. Bill’s suffering is largely unknown to the wider public, especially since his medical paper trail, now some 20 years old, seems to have largely disappeared.
Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.

#7 – Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu #8. This was Bill’s first fill-in assignment for Marvel, a job he turned around so quickly that it landed him an ongoing gig writing for it. The title would soon be cancelled, like many of the projects Bill was assigned to. It never bothered him that he essentially was tasked with propping up failing titles for as long as he could. He still took each as a challenge to promote his own agenda of living up to the 1960s ideals that defined him. While writing on Deadly Hands, Bill teamed with artist George Perez to create the White Tiger, the world’s first Puerto Rican superhero.
Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.

#8 – Howard the Duck #30. Howard the Duck was Mantlo at his silliest, a work of pure satire that endeared him to many fans. Howard was Bill’s most direct dialogue with his audience, frequently breaking the fourth wall, and often directly opining to the reader. It is here that Mantlo’s reputation as “The Boisterous One” can be most readily seen. It is a side of his personality that is all but gone now, the result of both his brain injury itself, and, his family contends, years of regression due to a lack of rehabilitative theory.
Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.

#9 – Incredible Hulk #300. In this landmark issue, the Hulk – the Marvel Universe’s avatar of rage embodied – goes berserk and takes on the entirety of the rest of Marvel’s heroes. The story ends with the Hulk being banished to an interdimensional crossroads, where his rage can express itself without causing harm to others, the result of his fellow heroes treating him with compassion rather than aggression. Sadly, it would be an endless sense of anguish and anger that consumed Bill after his accident, making him combative with therapists, and contributing directly to the cessation of his rehabilitation. Like the Hulk, he too was banished to the hinterlands, where he remains to this day.
Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.

#10 – What If…? #21. This was one of the few issues in which Bill contributed to What If…?, a long-running Marvel title that explored alternate ways in which pivotal stories of the Marvel universe could have played out. The stories themselves were not considered canon – they were never part of the official history of any of the characters or concepts they included. But they did lend an imaginative look at how things could have been had history had gone just a little bit differently. “What if?” is now a question Bill’s family and friends have mostly stopped asking themselves, having accepted Bill’s fate as a man in a broken body, out of reach of the rehabilitative care that could possibly bring him to a higher degree of functionality. As Chris Claremont, a fellow comic writer and friend of Bill’s notes, had Bill not been injured, he might have one day run for political office. But as every issue of What If…? notes, the past cannot be changed, and as much as one might wish things were different, we must contend with the world we know.
Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.