10 Insane Alternate Versions Of The Thing You Won't Believe Exist

From off-the-wall crazy insane to slice-of-life calmly mundane: Harvey Pekar's depiction of the Thing couldn't be any further from the Wonderful One.

Harvey Pekar was a legend in the underground comic scene. Creator of American Splendor, he revolutionised the way graphic novels were perceived by both critics and the general public. Writing almost exclusively autobiographical memoirs, he was one of the last people you would have expected to pen a story starring the Thing.

That's the beauty of Harvey Pekar Meets The Thing, one of the last strips Pekar ever wrote. There are no fights, no intergalactic conquests, no threats of world domination: it's just an old friend stopping Harvey in the street to see if he can help him find a job. That old friend just happens to be a super-powered orange behemoth.

This posthumously-published strip actually turned out to be strangely prophetic. The Thing tells Harvey that, even though they're making a movie about his team, he's worried that Marvel are about to fire him. He's running low on cash and he heard that Harvey was retiring, so the Thing asks if he could take over Harvey's file clerk job.

Even though Pekar had no way of knowing when he wrote the story, the movie in question would turn out to be a massive flop and Marvel Comics would cancel the Fantastic Four series for a few years after this comic. Whether or not the Thing got the desk job, we'll never know.