Ted Sallis and his team working in the Everglades were trying to duplicate the Super-soldier serum when Sallis' lover Ellen Brandt decides to sell him out. He destroys his notes having memorized them and flees, injecting himself with the last sample. But his car crashes into the Everglades and a chemical mutation occurs that turned Ted into an organic plant being with solid red eyes. His internal organs are re-arranged or missing and his senses heightened. He has telepathy amd empathy which he uses to determine if the humans he meets are good or evil; if the latter he can sense their fear and produces an acidic corrosive that burns his enemies to death or scars them for life. Yet Man-Thing is sentient and memories of his human existance come back now and then to plague him. But he generally defends the weak and rescues those lost in the Everglades or who are suffering. And he can never be fully destroyed because of constant regeneration in the swamp...

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