The Heap debuted in the aviation feature "SkyWolf" in Air Fighters Comics #3 (cover-dated Dec. 1942), in the story "Wanted By the Nazis" by writer Harry Stein and artist Mort Leav, and continued as a sporadic guest character.

Another similar character debuted in Image Comics' Spawn #73 (June 1998), reimagined by writers Todd McFarlane and Brian Holguin and penciler Greg Capullo.

The original Heap was formerly Baron Eric von Emmelman (his last name also sometimes spelled Emmelmann), a World War I German flying ace who was shot down in 1918 over a Polish swamp.

[13] Clinging to the smallest shred of life through sheer force of will (and, as it was later revealed, with the mystic help of the goddess Ceres, later to be referred to more generically in the series as Mother Nature), through the decades his body decayed and intermingled with the vegetation around him, becoming one with the marshland itself until at last a shaggy, shambling half-world creature neither animal nor man[14] arose from the muck during the early years of World War II, a creature which would become known far and wide as The Heap.

[6] Resembling a huge humanoid haystack whose most visible facial feature was a dangling root-like snout, the mute monstrosity first battled the lupine-cowled Blackhawk-style Allied ace SkyWolf before turning against its fellow Germans who were now fanatical followers of the evil Nazi cause.

[6] According to Jess Nevins' Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes, the Heap's opponents "range from Axis agents to ordinary criminals to werewolves, disembodied murderous hands, giant lizards, voodoo houngans, sea serpents, and the Black Boar of Mongolia".

[15] Capable of both savage violence and a surprising gentleness, for a time the Heap even had an unwilling "kid sidekick" of sorts in the form of Rickie Wood, a young boy whose remote control model biplane stirred murky memories of the hulking plant-thing's former life.

[16] The Skywald version was pilot Jim Roberts, who accidentally crashed his cropduster plane into a tank of liquid nerve gas at an Army toxic waste dump and was horribly mutated into a jagged-fanged, long-tongued and glaring-eyed brute whose hideous blob-like body was virtually indestructible, bullets passing with a minimum of damage through the slimy gelatinous green "earth matter" which had replaced his fleshly form and which could regenerate against any injury up to and including near total incineration by a bolt of lightning.

[17] Unlike the previous incarnation, this Heap while mute was no mindless monstrosity and retained his human intelligence, allowing readers to share his every anguished thought as he wandered the world in a desperate attempt to find some method to either cure or kill himself.