Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Marvel relished the “Abominable Snowman” theme in the late 1950s and early 1960s, revisiting it many times. Even the Incredible Hulk dressed up like the Abominable Snowman in one rather ludicrous scene.
The Abominable Snowman or Tibetan Yeti is “…a mythical monster resembling a large, hairy, ape-like being supposed to inhabit the Himalayas at about the level of the snow line,” according to Britannica.
Think of him as an icy precursor of Bigfoot.
One of the best of those Marvel stories was Steve Ditko’s I Captured the Abominable Snowman! (Strange Worlds 1, Dec. 1958).
When a thief becomes obsessed with glorifying himself by capturing the Abominable Snowman, his trail leads him to a Himalayan monastery and a lama whose ancient eyes see right through him, and who feeds the thief and warns him to leave.
“Show me where he is or I’ll wreck this temple!” the crook threatens.
“You have chosen your path — reason will not balance your greed. Come with me,” the lama replies.
When the Snowman arrives, the lama transforms him back into a tearful, grateful human — and the thief into the Snowman.
Marvel’s short fantasy stories almost always rely on an ironic inversion. Here, it’s the fact that the “monster” is really a punishment for — and a means of slowly rehabilitating — extremely selfish and greedy men.
The story was so good, in fact, that Marvel rewrote it twice, with slight variations. The Comic Book Database notes, “This story is retold in Strange Tales (Marvel 1951 series) 72 (Dec. 1959) as I Am the Abominable Snowman! drawn by Paul Reinman, and in Tales to Astonish (Marvel, 1959 series) 13 (Nov. 1960) as I Found the Abominable Snowman! drawn by Jack Kirby. In each retelling there is a somewhat different mechanism by which the wicked protagonist becomes the snowman.”
The Yeti was a popular topic at the time. That same year, Abominable Snowman stories appeared in Prize’s Black Magic 6, in DC’s Rex the Wonder Dog 42 and even in DC’s The Adventures of Bob Hope 54. A text article on the subject could be found in Classics Illustrated 143.
I imagine the comic book interest in the Yeti was fanned in part by the critically praised 1957 Hammer film The Abominable Snowman starring the redoubtable Peter Cushing. The movie was based on the BBC TV play The Creature by Nigel Kneale, creator of the even-more-redoubtable Prof. Bernard Quatermass.
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