- "I can hear them. I can feel their pain. Pain is a great communicator, Damien. It knows no boundaries. It's not intimidated by the vast expanse of sea. It is the tie that binds us together -- we children of Arcane. Not love, but pain. It is all we've ever known."
- ―Crassus
| Un-Men | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Un-Men | |
| Films: | Swamp Thing (1982) The Return of Swamp Thing |
| Programs: | Swamp Thing (1990) Swamp Thing (1991) |
| Comics: | American Freak: A Tale of the Un-Men Swamp Thing Vol 1 Swamp Thing Vol 2 |
| Representatives: | Cranius; Damien Kane; Ophidian |
| 1st appearance: | Swamp Thing, Vol. 1 #2 |
Un-Men are a fictional race of subhuman featured in comic books published by DC Comics. They first appeared in Swamp Thing, Volume 1 #2 in January, 1973. Versions of the Un-Men have also appeared in the 1982 Swamp Thing feature film as well as the 1990 Swamp Thing live-action TV series. Un-Men are not distinguished by any one particular characteristic, other than being only barely recognizable as human, and sometimes... not even that. Although most Un-Men are sentient, they biologically resemble the most hideous of monsters, often depicted with massive deformities, accentuated or minimalized physical characteristics such as distended cranium, shriveled limbs, additional limbs, tentacles, mis-placed eyes or ears, etc.
History[]
The evil scientist Anton Arcane manipulated the genetic stock of random humans, creating a subspecies race of mutated freaks. These freaks, termed the Un-Men, often followed Arcane's orders, but were typically too dim-witted to think for themselves. Arcane's earliest experiments with the Un-Men took place in Berlin, Germany in 1945 when Arcane served as a Nazi officer. He used human resources from concentration camps to stitch together his first prototype experiments. [1] Decades later, Alec Holland, better known as the Swamp Thing, first encountered the Un-Men while fighting Arcane in his ancestral castle in Bavaria. [2] He later encountered an older group of Un-Men living in the swamps of New Orleans. [3]
Second Generation[]
Swamp Thing and the Un-Men!
In February of 1969, the United States government sent a team of scientists under the auspices of the United States Army to New Orleans to investigate Un-Men sightings. The project leader was a geneticist named Doctor David Manguy. They rounded up a group of Un-Men and sequestered them inside of an old barracks. Manguy's team performed various experiments on the Un-Men including, but not limited to, vivisection. While the motives of the other scientists remain unknown, Manguy believed that by studying these tortured creatures, he could divine a means to cure all physical deformities. To this end, the team began breeding Un-Men, giving rise to a second generation of abnormal mutations. With fresh genetic stock to work with, Manguy developed a serum that would isolate and ultimately destroy the trace elements that caused random physical deformities. Of the second generation of Un-Men, only thirteen survived the process, and of those thirteen, only one appeared to respond positively to the treatment - Damien Kane. Kane appeared as a normal, healthy baby boy. The United States Army monitored Kane for the next two decades. They never revealed his true origins to him, and even fabricated his past, telling him that his parents died in a plane crash over Central America. In 1994 however, that process that kept Kane's human appearance began to go into regression. He was brought to Doctor Manguy's office, and the guilt-ridden doctor finally told Damien the truth about his Un-Men heritage. [4]
Notes & Trivia[]
- The concept of the Un-Men was first developed by writer Len Wein and artist Bernie Wrightson.
- Small, diminutive creatures, who may possibly be Un-Men made a one-panel cameo appearance in Swamp Thing, Volume 1 #1 on the final page. Their first full appearance however was not until issue #2.
- Some Un-Men are known to possess unique physical characteristics such as telescoping eye-stalks, facial probiscus, tails, insectoid limbs, bi-sected or distended abdominal regions, superfluous vestigial limbs etc.