One of the greatest foes ever faced by Green Lantern and the Justice Society of America was a brother to Man-Thing, Swamp Thing, and the Heap.
Solomon Grundy, like those other three examples of lurking vegetation, had been inspired by the brutal, shambling fiend in Theodore Sturgeon’s short story It!, published in the August 1940 issue of the pulp magazine Unknown. Grundy’s creator, the famed science fiction writer Alfred Bester, acknowledged that fact.
The short story’s protagonist, a plant monster that somehow formed around a human skeleton, was described by science fiction writer and critic P. Schuyler Miller as “…probably the most unforgettable story ever published in Unknown.”
Bester’s creation crawled out of Gotham City’s Slaughter Swamp four years later in the story Fighters Never Quit (All-American Comics 61, Oct. 1944, drawn by Paul Reinman).
“Grundy shambled like the monsters that came before and after, but his chalk-white flesh, tattered black clothing, and general lack of chlorophyll distinguished him from the herd,” wrote comics historian John Wells. “He could also speak and, in his inarticulate way, informed a group of thugs that he had no name but had been ‘born on Monday.’ Inspired, one of the crooks named him Solomon Grundy after the old nursery rhyme and the general framework of the story grew from there, spanning a week just as the short verse did.”
“Nothing stopped him; jails couldn’t hold him, nor could speeding trains or bullets deter him,” wrote comics historian Jeff Rovin. “Since he didn’t need to breathe, a body of water was no obstacle.”
“Adopted by those small-time hoods as their frontman, the superhumanly strong Grundy was an almost-unstoppable force to the Golden Age Green Lantern,” Wells wrote. “Hobbled by severe head injuries, GL kept fighting even without his magical power ring and, encouraged by his friend Doiby Dickles, ultimately threw the creature directly into the path of an oncoming train.”
Being flattened by a freight train, however, barely slowed down the perdurable revenant. Nor did being frozen among the Triassic fossils in the Petrified Forest in Arizona, exiled to the Moon, or imprisoned at the center of the Earth, fates he suffered when he returned in 1945’s Comic Cavalcade 13, 1947’s All-Star Comics 33, and 1947’s Comic Cavalcade 24.
Green Lantern’s omnipotent power ring wasn’t so irresistible where Grundy was concerned. “That’s why he was immune to the power ring! Immune to everything!” the Emerald Gladiator discovered at the end of their first encounter. “He was not real life! He was a distortion of nature!”
Grundy was the half-century-dead skeleton of the wealthy Cyrus Gold, granted a pseudo-life by the bits of rotting wood and leaves that clung to it.
The similarity to Sturgeon’s story was the result of the fact that the story was a rush job that Bester had been given only a day to complete, the author told Lou Mougin.
“I told Ted about it,” Bester recalled. “I said, ‘Ted, I’m very grateful to you, and if you want a piece of my check’—it was, like, a hundred and nineteen dollars— I said, ‘You’re welcome to it. But I want you to know that I did extrapolate what you had done with It — I think that you should have developed It further.”
Bester was adept at reworking good material. He refashioned another Green Lantern villain he’d created in 1943, the immortal Vandal Savage, into Adam Cain, a menace who fought Lamont Cranston in a 1944 radio script for The Shadow.
Dormant during the superhero eclipse of the 1950s, Grundy returned to battle both the Justice Society and the Justice League in the 1960s. Alongside the Batman villain Blockbuster, Grundy would effectively serve as DC’s stand-in for Marvel’s Hulk.
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