A portion of the following essay was originally posted to this site, in modified form, as part of its Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable, on April 15, 2010. Particular thanks go to Robert Stanley Martin for his valuable comments on that prior incarnation.
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“If I have any real talent at all in comic writing, that talent is probably the talent for collaboration.”
– Alan Moore to George Khoury, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore
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I blame this post on Jesus.
The Swamp Thing roundtable has shambled along a bit longer than I expected, and we’re still not necessarily done. But while we’re waiting for a last post I thought I’d pull some passing thought-bubbles from the muck:
if issue 20 is damage control, it’s excellent damage control, taking a narrative that had rolled up around itself and tripped on its own loose ends many times, and resolving it elegantly within one issue. Furthermore, the art (especially the use of extradiegetic elements in the frames) does things that may be at least as, if not more, interesting as anywhere else in the run. Overall, though, I think it’s more interesting to think of it–and of the entire series too–as Moore working, in a nearly Oulipian style, with a complex set of constraints: what can I do with this ridiculous, gothic backstory I’ve inherited? What can I do with the purple prose that Pasko has used to set the tone of the series? What can I do with the complex panel arrangements that by now were already a trademark of the run? This actually challenges Moore (almost never again will he work with such complex panel shapes, as it is much easier for him, as writer, to control the art if he works with a set grid), and I do think he creates the most successful work of his career. Left by himself, in total control of the stories he can tell, he ends up falling in the same rut (and that is true of “From Hell” much more than of SOST). Yes, the American Gothic stories are the weakest of the run, but I disagree about the earlier stories. And if you simply use to judge them a measuring stick of taking individual stories and setting them up against comparable sci fi or horror pieces, you are really missing the forest for the trees. Again, reading the entire run as, first of all, a conscious taking on of constraints, looking at the specific troping that Moore engages in (it’s always amazing to me, for example, that nobody ever mentions the totally obvious “Master and Margarita” reference, which is not only cute in a limited way, but connects the larger themes of the two works), and looking simultaneously at the wider ark and at individual details, pages where Moore really shows his artistry, seems to me the much more appropriate way to go.
I like your S&M analysis, Noah. I think that’s why Swamp Thing doesn’t much work as a horror comic. I’m thinking of Silence of the Lambs versus Hannibal. The latter is actually something of a superhero tale, because the audience identifies with the superpowered Lecter.
If there’s any place where the art really contributes something extra to Moore’s story, it’s in creating whatever sense of horror the book possesses. But I’m one of those horror fans who believes movies do it best. Language, particularly the purple colored, is always too abstract for the genre, and ultimately a distraction from the emotive core. Horror is perceptual, the less said, the better. We can be morally outraged by reading a description of a rape, of course, but seeing it (say, in Irreversible) is on a whole other level, regardless of how well-written the description might be. Language alone allows for more of a sense of control than being submerged in sound and vision. Does that mean language is sadistic and perception is masochistic?
And EricB:
I would say that feminism is usually part of his project–but that there are different kinds of feminism and they don’t always get along. His “second wave” feminism–appreciation of, and celebration of, stereotypically feminine “values,” may lead to a lot of stereotyping (as you note here). He’s a self-conscious valuer of “feminine” principles—but this means defining some kind of “essential” version of gender, which is less comfortable for both first wave and third wave feminist thinkers. It can also come across as somewhat condescending coming from a man. Balloon-breasted castrating hawk ladies are not the high point of the series in terms of its representation of gender. I’m not sure it means Moore isn’t being “thoughtful” necessarily though– Strange’s idiotic blasting away at Swampy is clearly a critique of “typically masculine” behavior–The problem here is often in how the “typically” bleeds a bit too much into the “stereotypically.”
The immensely overwritten, but still kind of fascinating, “loving the alien” issue is more self-conscious in its manipulation of overly familiar tropes. There, the “mother” is machine, not Earth, is rapist, not potential victim–and Swampy (the man) has to take the stereotypically feminine position as rape victim–as “nature” being tilled by industry. It’s all a bit on the obvious side, I guess–except for its reversal of genders–”she” becomes the machine-like industrial rapist, and “he” becomes the “earthy” mother figure–even though neither of them, strictly speaking, is gendered at all (at least not in any traditional human way)–since one is a swamp monster, without functioning reproductive parts–and the other is a planet/machine.
Swampy himself vacillates between being a “feminine” “mother earth” figure–and a masculine foil to Abby.
So though we’re not quite gone, I’ll take this opportunity to thank all who read, participated and commented, and especially to our guest posters Jog and EricB (also known as my brother.) It’s been great fun — and not quite done yet!
In his post, Eric argued that Moore’s Swamp Thing is feminist, both because it presents Abby as a strong, heroic figure and because it critiques Swamp Thing’s own abusive use of patriarchal power.
I agree with Eric that power and gender are both important themes in the Swamp Thing series. I’m less certain that Moore always manages to be especially thoughtful about them, though. It seems to me, on the contrary, that in the marriage between Moore and his tropes, it’s as often the green, lumpy pulp that wears the jeans in the relationship as it is the feminism.
Having brutally murdered that innocent metaphor…I thought I’d look back at the same issues I discussed in my first post — the two-part story in which Swamp Thing goes to Rann.
This story is built around doubled couples: Swamp Thing, in exile from earth and Abby, is mirrored by Adam Strange, who is in a constant vacillating exile from Rann and his wife, Alanna. In both of these pairings, the male/female roles are apportioned in familiar manner. Swamp Thing and Adam are the seekers, questing across space, engaging in feats of daring-do, in order to return to hearth and home embodied by Abby/Alanna. Female means stability and civilization; male means adventure and rough virility. Moore is careful to tell us that the people of Rann are hairless, and that they see Adam as a kind of atavistic hairy monster. Alanna, then, is a (literally) smooth, perfect, (literal) princess in a tower; a fairy tale dream — just as Abby is referred to as a “Hans Anderson princess” at the very end of Moore’s run on the series.
Moore, moreover, links his males questing nobly for the womb explicitly to phalluses and sperm. There’s one sequence where Swamp Thing gets transformed into a bulbous member spouting suggestive liquid…and look at that caption.
“Her cries like a panther’s” indeed.
Of course, that same page we’ve got Adam with that ridiculous headgear holding his smoking gun at crotch level. After that, it’s almost (ahem) anti-climactic when Swampy uses his powers to refertilize Rann…or when we learn that Adam has been brought to Rann because the “fierce vitality” of his sperm is needed to impregnate Alanna on a world where all the men are apparently sterile.
The person talking all up in Adam’s fierce virility is not his wife, but rather Keela Roo, a Thanagarian hawk warrior. Keela Roo is a very different kind of feminine. Instead of waiting at home in a castle, she sallies forth in spikes and skin and fetish boots. She wears a big flamboyant headress that stands in stark contrast to her male-subordinates unadorned helmet. She is, in short, a dominatrix and a castrating bitch; vital, animal, sexy, and unhealthily virile. Here, for example, she goes after Swampy by inserting her big phallic weapon into his split and oozing orifice.
As is generally the case in these pulp narratives, the dark queen is scary, but she’s also attractive — not least because she actually has a personality. Abby doesn’t exist (in these issues) except as a name and a desire. Alanna never speaks in English, and though her Rannian dialect isn’t entirely opaque,and though we do get to see her desire for Adam, keeping her voice from the reader effectively makes her seem distant, exotic, mysterious, soft-spoken, and unattainable. The princess in the tower again.
Keela Roo, on the other hand, has a universal translator thingee — she wants you to know what she thinks. Language is something she has mastered, and she uses it seductively. Several scenes between her and Adam have a not-very-subliminal sexual subtext. Here she is wearing that preposterous outfit while Adam talks to her in his bathrobe:
And this next sequence is a brazen come on (with Adam in a bathrobe again. Doesn’t he ever get dressed?)
That “aid proposal” seems very like a euphemism for another kind of proposal, especially as we’re getting a shot down her cleavage.
Keela Roo tells Adam, “We are both fighters,” and she’s right of course. The problem is that she’s the wrong kind of fighter. She’s a twisted fighter, a perverted fighter — in short, a cross-dressing, feminine kind of fighter, when the right kind of fighter is a male fighter.
Thus, poetic justice demands that Keela Roo be killed, not in equal combat, but by domesticity itself. In battle, she manages to kick Adam Strange’s ass, but he fools her by leading her to his home, where his household guardian water creatures disposes of her. She is, then, not merely defeated, but humiliated — her fetish mask is torn from her, stripping her faux masculinity and leaving her as just a woman after all.
In the final twist of the knife, the creature who disposes of her is itself feminine (taking the form of a cat); a liquid female personification of hearth and home, which makes short work of that other woman Adam has been dallying with so that he and Alanna can be reunited again.
The point here isn’t that Moore is an irredeemable sexist, or even that this story’s handling of gender is particularly offensive. Rather, the point is that Moore, here and elsewhere, is using tried and true genre ideas (male quests; adventure vs. home.) And his main means for dealing with those concerns are received pulp tropes or DC comics ideas. Alanna is a princess not because Alan Moore made her one, but because some old DC writer steeped in Edgar Rice Burroughs and Flash Gordon made her one; the hawk woman is dressed like that because some pulp dc writer steeped in pulp cheesecake figured why the hell not.
Moore takes these ideas and runs with them…but though he runs pretty far, he doesn’t necessarily run to a different planet. In space opera, good women are beautiful paragons who sit at home being good and nurturing; bad women are aggressive and dominant and get killed off despite (or because of) their appeal. And that’s the way it is in Moore’s space opera as well.
Eric argues that at the end of the series, Moore undermines standard pulp narratives about revenge, domestic bliss and male power. But to me at least, reading back through some of these stories, Moore’s use of pulp in Swamp Thing seems less like undermining and more like assiduously and inventively cultivating.
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You can read the whole Swamp Thing roundtable here.
Jog’s massive concluding Swamp Thing blowout post will be up tomorrow.
My friend Chris loaned me his beloved, carefully encased in plastic, original issues of the full Alan Moore run of The Saga of the Swamp Thing for this roundtable. We’ve been talking about it off and on for the last couple weeks. This post is compiled from the highlights of our conversations.
Chris: Well, they weren’t carefully encased in plastic.
Caroline: No? You couldn’t prove it from how hard they were to get out.
Chris: I really do hate plastic bags. I typed a mini-rant that was totally off-topic, but you know, I’m not that much of a geek.
Caroline: You couldn’t prove it from this blog post.
Chris: Ha ha ha. Very funny.
Caroline: Well, I haven’t gotten them back in the plastic yet, but thanks for loaning me your Swamp Things.
Chris: You’re welcome. Did you like them?
Caroline: I did!
Chris: Really? I didn’t expect that. I never once thought about trying to hand you any Alan Moore other than From Hell.
Caroline: How come?
Chris: Well, they’re just pretty much straight-up genre work for the most part, albeit a kind of elevated version of it.
Caroline: Hey, I like genre!
Chris: You like SF.
Caroline: And romance!
Chris: OK, yeah, but you hate fantasy, and I’ve never heard you say anything about horror.
Caroline: Well, ok. That’s true. Sort of. I don’t absolutely hate fantasy and horror; it’s just that I don’t much like their post 19th-century incarnations, except when they’re really intended for kids. I like them fine in mythology or actual Arthurian legend, or Mary Shelley.
Chris: When I’ve steered you toward stuff, I’ve gravitated more toward the art than the genre side. Genre comics are books where the whole point is “this book exists to be liked,” and you tend to want more than that.
Caroline: Well it’s no secret how much I love art fiction. But I just read genre fiction differently from how I read art fiction. I’m less intellectually interested in it but it’s still pleasurable.
Chris: I guess I’m surprised you liked Swamp Thing because a) I didn’t think you were interested in genre fiction more than historically, and b) I think the problematic thing about SotST is that it kind of smacks of trying to redeem genre. You know: “World’s Best Swamp Creature Comic.” Everybody seems to struggle with “b”, and I didn’t think you would be any exception. But I didn’t think you’d get past “a.”
Caroline: Well, here’s the thing. I’m sure one of the reasons I was able to like this one is that the activation energy was very low, largely due to the prose doing the heavy lifting on the story. I could skim it. I can’t skim an art comic. I’m not sure anybody can really skim an art comic, at least not while actually “reading” it.
When I read genre, it’s for relaxation and the point is just to get swept along and enjoy it, not to really wallow in the details. I guess I read it like most people watch tv. Remember that reading for details is my job. So when I read for entertainment the whole point is not to worry as much about details, except the ones that I need to understand what’s going on.
So I especially like genre fiction that really wallows in familiar tropes. If it gets experimental or tricky, I want it to be something with a lot of metaphorical sophistication, really more art fiction that’s playing with genre tropes than “well-done genre.” I don’t have the energy for some really thick plot-heavy worldbuilding thing, because then I have to pay a lot of attention for a payoff that essentially is only a decent story. And mostly I’m not interested in thinking very hard about stories. I kind of expect a story to resonate enough that I don’t have to.
Chris: Hm. I can see that.
Caroline: And hell, this Swamp Thing is the uber-incarnation of “wallowing in familiar tropes.”
Chris: I was just going to say…
Caroline: I could read through it pretty quickly, enjoy the atmosphere and feel grounded enough to know what the story was, but not really be obligated to dig into the details.
Chris: Although, “wallowing in tropes” applies mostly toward American Gothic, which has this artificial structure imposed on it…
Caroline: I don’t know about that. I think Moore takes tropes from different genres throughout. The romantic triangle with the jerky husband is very much a trope, then Abby falling in love with her best friend. There are science fiction tropes throughout, and some elements from noir interspersed, especially in Constantine. Everything was quickly recognizable. I didn’t feel like anything was particularly new.
Chris: Let me talk to your prose observation…You like it because it’s prose for all intents and purposes, but you said you did like the art, yes?
Caroline: Absolutely. It’s very lush and atmospheric. I love the colors.
Chris: Does the art just provide atmosphere? Does it contribute in any meaningful way, or is it just a substrate for Moore’s prose?
Caroline: Well, atmosphere is a big part of genre isn’t it?
Chris: Yeah.
Caroline: I think it mostly provides atmosphere and texture, but I think that’s essential to good genre. It happens to be the part that’s often not very effectively conveyed in prose, and art gets at it very efficiently. I thought this art was smart and mostly very consistent at a high-level with Moore’s aggregation of tropes. I’d probably even say the art overall was better quality than the writing; it was a huge part of the impact of the book.
Chris: I think one of the interesting things about Swamp Thing in this respect is that it is a collaboration. Bissette-Veitch-Totleben were pals and studiomates, so there was a more seamless union than you usually get. Generally penciller/ inker breakdown is just assembly line to grind out more product faster. This team, all of them were pretty simpatico.
Caroline: That makes sense. There was a tremendous difference in the issues that had a different art team: they weren’t nearly as alive. They really didn’t have anything like the same emotional texture. But I guess what I’m saying is that I wasn’t really relying on the art at all to make sense of the book.
From my perspective, as a very skilled fiction reader almost entirely unfamiliar with mainstream comics, the division of labor here – meaning the narrative labor, not the collaborative work of creating the book – is very sensible and practical: the words did the narration and dialogue, the stuff words are really good at, and the pictures set the atmosphere and the tone and the mood, created the emotional texture. And the prose is just really competent: the prose techniques and tropes were very recognizable, and that was a really easy way into the story.
And an easy way in was really essential for me as a first-time reader. The few times I’ve picked up mainstream comics before, I’ve immediately had a very strong sense of “this was not written for me.” There’s a hint of “go read these other things and get a grounding in this tradition, then come back and read this,” which requires a commitment to genre comics that I don’t have. That wasn’t here at all in this book, despite the strong genre tropes, because they were so immediately and totally recognizable from their fiction counterparts.
Chris: I think the art really does contribute maybe more than you’re implying, because the team was so sympathetic, both to what Moore was doing, and to the genre in general. I think Bissette was overjoyed to be associated with “Best Swamp Creature Comic Ever,” without irony or embarassment.
So if SotST had been drawn by whomever was just hanging around the DC offices looking for work, I don’t think it would have been the same, no matter what the caliber of writing. Steve Bissette in particular is BIG into horror, and I think his enthusiasm was kind of a driving force in a lot of ways.
Caroline: I don’t disagree with that. I’m not so much trying to downplay the art as explain how the prose worked for me. My point is just that I didn’t really find myself reading the art much. And really, my overall response to the comic wasn’t that the horror genre was so dominant.
Chris: Even in the art?
Caroline: I saw a lot of visual tropes from horror in the art, but there were so many other genres mixed in there that no single one ever rose to the surface. Constantine’s clothes: so noir. I recognize that the horror genre was the one they riffed on most explicitly in the American Gothic section, but the atmosphere, almost entirely coming from the art, really didn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie or even horror from the 50s/60s like The Blob.
Chris: I think that effect – so much genre there’s a lack of genre – is Moore’s big contribution. American Gothic was probably a self-conscious attempt to “redeem” horror tropes, and I think it generally reads like a creative writing assignment (except for the zombie bits that I really love and we can talk about later…) Before that, I think the horror was more interesting, more organic, more free floating… it could seep into the story as needed.
Caroline: Exactly; it’s organic in form and content – which I really dug because it was so thematic.
Chris: Yeah, me too. I think that was on purpose: fecundity as motif…
Caroline: No doubt. I loved the way the idea of organicism was this overarching conceit for the first part, in the imagery, in the storyline, and then also in the way the different story elements were integrated together. In many ways it’s a very non-linear tale – at least, for mainstream genre.
Chris: Sure. And, you know, why shouldn’t a Swamp Creature comic demonstrate a high level of craft?
Caroline: This makes me think of Noah’s comment from early on, and I think Suat’s too, that they’re “massively massively overwritten.” That sort of implies a lack of craft, doesn’t it?
Chris: I suppose so…
Caroline: I guess, like I was saying at the beginning, I didn’t carefully read and commit to memory every textbox, so I’m sure there were particularly purple passages that I completely skimmed over. But I don’t think I’ve ever read a true work of genre fiction with that careful close reading. I’m not sure what the payoff of spending my time that way would be. I read Zizek that way, but not Heinlein.
Chris: There were passages and lines here and there that made me cringe… but overall, I thought he had a good batting average.
Caroline: Flipping back through it and looking at people’s examples, there are definitely purple passages, but they just didn’t bug me because I wasn’t reading at that grain. I was trying to hold on only as tightly as it took to stay on the ride.
Most just didn’t strike me as overwritten, although the example Noah comes up with really is pretty egregious:
“the interminable, tortuous extended metaphor comparing the emergency care ward of a hospital to a forest is probably the absolute low point of this volume— “in casualty reception, poppies grow upon gauze, first blooms of a catastrophic spring…a chloroform-scented breeze moves through the formaldehyde trees…”
What do you think, can we defend that on the “fecundity as motif” grounds?
Chris: I would say yes.
Caroline: OK. But it probably works because of the tightness of that fecundity/organicism metaphor. I’d say the whole thing may be a little overgrown, but that’s kind of the point…
Chris: I’ll offer an example of a kind of overwriting that I think would irritate you: Hellblazer, the John Constantine spin-off. I haven’t re-read it in a long time, but it also used a very florid prose style. But to me, it seemed more like a coat of paint slathered over the story.
Caroline: That’s a good way to describe what I felt about this one. There was definitely purple prose in places, but it was like a bad paint job, not a rotten board.
Chris: I don’t think that’s quite what I mean. With Jamie Delano, who wrote Hellblazer, the purple stuff is all on the surface, it really detracts from the overall effect. Even when Moore’s at his most purple, I don’t think you’re intended to take the overwriting seriously: it all just seems very playful. Delano was (in my hazy memory) utterly humorless, and that made his writing really insufferable to me.
Caroline: I see where you’re going – with Delano, there’s an earnestness to the purple prose that makes you sort of laugh at him. With Moore, it’s like a Magic Kingdom ride through genre fiction with a somewhat outlandish character on the loudspeaker. Set in a swamp.
Chris: Talk about purple prose.
Caroline: I try.
Chris: But yeah, Delano struck me as “earnest angry young man in coffeehouse.” (I don’t want to rag on him totally. Hellblazer did have some good long term character development in it, but man, was it a slog to get through…) But Moore is very freewheeling, libertine. A little like Sam Delany.
Caroline: I’ve been on this Delany kick lately.
Chris: Yes, I know.
Caroline: Pfft.
Chris: It reminds me of that sequence I keep pointing out in Motion of Light in Water. I should maybe pull the quote, but basically, Delany talks about the ‘60s, and how the era crystallized for him as he listened to a Motown song: The song – with all the typically slick Motown production – was just full of callouts and references to all kinds of other things in music and in culture; it was kind of a smorgasbord of stuff from the larger world just distilled into 3 minutes of pleasureable pop. And Delany noticed from there that that was happening all over the place at the time. “Nothing was forbidden,” so to speak. It informed his writing and his life.
Caroline: Right, Moore is working with what is really not a single genre, but ALL the major pop genres in aggregate. But do you think he’s imposing this ‘60s sensibility onto the book?
Chris: I don’t know if it’s specifically ‘60s; Delany perceived it as ‘60s. I don’t know that Moore necessarily did/does. But a similar sensibility, yes.
Caroline: The yams are pretty psychedelic – and the yam sex sequence is very psychedelic, visually and conceptually. But the book is, of course, from the 1980s. I guess I think that in some ways, there’s a “visual history as trope” in the book. The colors are very ‘70s; the horror images do have a little bit of a ‘50s feel to them, the teenagers in the car especially; the ‘60s psychedelia. The scene in #20 with the gunmen standing around the shot-up Swamp Thing looks a little like 1940s-era military images. There’s nothing I’d really identify as ‘80s but it was early in the decade…
Chris: Well, Constantine is Sting…
Caroline: There ya go.
Chris: There were punk vampires and some side characters, too. The spirit is hippie-era, but I guess it’s a bit punk-era too. That sort of “try anything” ethos…
Caroline: The hippie feel definitely dominates the punk feel to me. The art doesn’t feel punk.
Chris: You don’t think so? Well, I guess not like Gary Panter or anything like that.
Caroline: This is some seriously skilled art. Bissette is not the Sid Vicious of cartooning.
Chris: True.
Caroline: Constantine is really Sting?
Chris: Supposedly. Bissette was a fan and just liked drawing him. It fell by the wayside by the time he got his own book.
Caroline: So he wasn’t doing anything with the fact that it was Sting. Sting was just the model for the physical character.
Chris: Yeah. I’ve always loved the way Constantine sort of knows everybody, from bikers to nuns to boho NYC artists to geeks to friggin’ Mento from Teen Titans. The way he sort of flits from world to world is very much in that Moore-Delany cosmopolitan spirit.
Caroline: Right. “Libertine” applies to Constantine in a slightly more conventional sense. But it’s all held together by this notion of being unrestrained. I suppose that’s ironic, but it’s a very playful irony. Worlds in this comic are very permeable, boundaries are very fluid and overlapping. Nothing’s discrete.
Chris: Characters, history, geography, genre. I’m impressed by Moore’s willingness to play genre mash-up. The most significant example of this is horror + heroics. I confess I’m not a horror guy, so I’ll cheerfully be corrected by someone who knows better, but it strikes me that horror protagonists tend to be victims, passive characters. Moore’s reimagining of Swamp Thing, post-Anatomy Lesson, casts him as an active hero. While the JLA commiserate up in their satellite HQ on how useless they are against Woodrue, who is down on earth (get it?) plowing through the muck (get it?) getting things done? Moore’s Swamp Thing is active, but he’s not the bad guy. He’s defined as a hero and an individual: “This is what I can do. This is how I am unique and where I can make a difference.” Or to use a direct quote: “I am in my place of power… and you should not have come here.” I must confess, I hadn’t reread these for some time, and while I vaguely remembered that Swampy-Arcane battle that included that line, I’d forgotten just what a can of whup-ass Swamp Thing unloaded there. It was awesome, and I mean that seriously. It’s heroics and horror… shouldn’t awe be a basic ingredient? I think it should, but, say, in a typical Justice League comic – it’s just not there. Moore gets it. He remembers to put it in.
Caroline: So this sense that things are libertine and unrestrained works from the perspective of someone coming into the book from the comics tradition as well as for someone like me, coming in via more general genre fiction. The expectations of people familiar with comics are equally muddied up.
Chris: Absolutely. You know, I think the perfect illustration of Moore’s take on genre appears in the Voodoo/Zombie 2-parter. I think some of the most perfect moments in Moore’s run are in that episode. The zombie bits really sing (for me, at least), and I really love the little moments that play against genre expectation in touching and logical ways.
Caroline: I was particularly keen on the first page of that, where he’s detailing the claustrophobia and tedium of “life” in the grave.
Chris: Yeah, you can argue that it’s Moore showing off his prose for its own sake…
Caroline: Wait, you really think it’s particularly prosaic? I didn’t really get that.
Chris: Well, it’s mostly prose. The pictures are just there for the punch line, when he rolls over onto his side: “He couldn’t sleep.”
Caroline: True.
Chris: But I think this imagining of the zombie POV pays off nicely down the road. When the dead father appears before his (now) middle aged daughter, we don’t get the standard “I will eat your brain” sequence, just a father-daughter reunion that is genuinely touching.
Caroline: Yeah, “touching” usually isn’t an emotion that shows up in zombie stories.
Chris: And when the walking dead is still walking by the end of the book and has to get a job, our hero gravitates back toward enclosure, and takes tickets at the local movie house (where the horror movie posters all look absurd in comparison). Come on! That’s funny!
Caroline: It’s that unrestrained permeability again. The undead are usually pretty non-human, but he humanizes them to great comic and emotional effect.
Chris: That’s what works for me: Moore inhabits the horror. He imagines himself as the zombie. The pathos is earned, the emotion is real, the absurdity wittily acknowledged. It’s drama and humor both. Straight-up horror would have bored me. It kind of did, in much of the rest of Gothic. (And generally, only during Gothic, and its plastic conception; not so much pre-Gothic). But Moore’s zombie arc is a sort of mini-masterpiece of sympathetic writing and willingness to dance outside the grave. It’s very polymorphously perverse…
Caroline: That’s such a great phrase. The polymorphism is a huge theme in this book and it’s present at every single level. That’s extremely satisfying to me, even from the “art reading” perspective.
There’s a couple of ways to think about it, I guess: you can think of mainstream comics as their own subgenre of genre fiction, like science fiction or romance or horror, with their own tradition and their own tropes. Or you can think of them as expressions of the same genres that you have in fiction, so that science fiction comics and science fiction novels and science fiction short stories are all instances of science fiction. I think Moore definitely went for the latter approach in this book, although he apparently also paid attention to the comic book tradition and tropes.
So the book is polymorphic in relation to these two ways of situating itself – I gotta say that even though I don’t think Moore was really showing off his smarts here, it really is smart how even at that very topmost almost meta-writerly level, he’s still consistent with his surface-level content and themes.
Chris: Moore recognizes that it’s all story: horror into superheroes into romance into comedy into “mainstream fiction.” He respects them all and, at his best, promiscuously blends them into one another with a true libertine spirit. The Swamp Thing–Abby romance is appropriate: breaking taboos and cross-kingdom pollenization – because why not?
Unlike many readers here, I haven’t read much Moore. I started with Voodoo, which I hated utterly, tried something else, and never went back.
I was looking forward to Swamp Thing, because so many people recommended it and thought I would enjoy it. And I’m sorry to say that I think, well, I think I may not be the right reader for this series. I did my best. Honest. And I don’t dislike it. I just don’t have the right emotional responses. By which I mean the writer, artists, and colorists intended (I think) for me to have certain emotional reactions (like fear, or loathing, or being creeped out), and instead I felt differently (was cheered, rolled my eyes, or became confused).
Last week’s discussion about Ware’s work included some talk about the different levels of reading–close readings, shallow readings, and so on. Personally, I think they all have their place.
In this case, I’m making what I would consider a fairly shallow reading. These are my gut responses, my initial reactions, my petty self. I think that’s a perfectly valid critical reading of a genre work, especially pulpy genre work, which Swamp Thing so clearly is. Now, maybe the beauty of Swamp Thing was something that you had to get at the right time in your life. It’s not my intent to harsh anybody’s squee. But you know, this comic just plain didn’t do it for me. And before I can muster up the effort to minutely examine the intimate details of the words and the scenes and the art, I have to have a strong emotional reaction (good or bad).
This comic has, as its fundamental premise, the idea of a plant monster. As an avid gardener, maybe I just don’t find plants scary enough, because darned if I could work up any fear in the swamp bits. I saw the first page of Book 2 and thought, “Oooh, what cute little lizards!”
I just don’t think that’s what they were going for, somehow.
There’s that whole first chapter/book of Saga of the Swamp Thing that starts with Dr Woodrue’s little daydream scenario and I spent the entire time eagerly looking forward to finding out what actually happened, versus what he daydreamed would happen. Then we get to the cheerful lizards and it turns out that no, that whole sequence was what happened, and it was some kind of framing technique, yada yada.
And yet Dr Woodrue was so obviously mad as a hatter. What gives, I asked myself. Wouldn’t he be an unreliable narrator? Wasn’t that the point?
But no. So we move on. “Clouds like plugs of bloodied cotton wool dab ineffectually at the slashed wrists of the sky.” Plugs of bloodied cotton wool? Plugs of bloodied cotton wool? Fellas, the sky is neon orange and the clouds are pink. It looks like a clown threw up.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked parts of it. There was a lot of stunning art. The plants especially are wonderfully drawn and cleverly inked. I loved the raccoons and the frogs and the lizards and the bugs and the flowers. I even cooed “Raccoon!” out loud, causing my dog, who knows that word, to look around hopefully for a bandit faced critter. And of course, I liked Abby Cable a lot, and I thought she and Swamp Thing should hook up and live in the swamp among the happy bugs and orchids forevermore.
But I kept running into these problems. There’s a Very Serious Moment with the Justice League, who are informing us, as outside plot devices of authority are supposed to do, of the Dire Nature of the National Tragedy. Superman says, “Insane’s the word…He’s suffered a massive psychological breakdown since the last time we encountered him.” Italics not mine. The dialog is above a wanted poster for Jason Woodrue. And I’m thinking: The man is a plant monster and you only now realize he’s caaaaraaaaaaaaaazy?
I laughed myself silly. And then the Justice League basically say they’re going to lose. Against a man who thinks he’s a plant. I don’t even know. I just… I mean. I know people enjoy this comic, but–
The villain thinks he’s a plant! He’s wearing chia-pet underpants! A couple pages after Swamp Thing tells him the green doesn’t love him anymore he runs into a pink sunset so that he can squirt flesh-toned cheeze-whiz on himself.
I don’t know. I just don’t. I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do. I tried to keep going, but there was a soon to be death by swordfish (neat, I thought to myself) and then an autistic kid, and I just can’t face autistic kids or any child victims, actually, unless they’re done well. Which I could tell this wouldn’t be.
Kind of a pity, I guess, because I sort of wanted to know whether the yam-tubers he developed when he was dreaming of his dead wife were any kind of feminine symbolism or if I’m just being too much of a gardener again. Oh well. I suppose I can live just fine without knowing.
As any reader of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing can tell you, there’s little doubt that the emotional core of the series is Abigail Arcane Cable, initially Swampy’s friend, later his paramour, and still later, his common-law wife. Moore’s greatest coup in the series was in turning Abby into what is probably the greatest female character in the history of mainstream superhero comics. Admittedly, the competition isn’t much to write home about, but Abby (and Moore) clear the bar with room to spare. It’s easy to forget that Abby was initially the Bavarian niece of a mad scientist who wanted to steal Swampy’s body for the purposes of immortality (yes, that hoary old trope). For this reason, Abby could easily have been repurposed as “traumatized in youth,” as “stranger in a strange land,” or even as “exotic sexual object” without necessarily betraying her history. Moore does none of the above. Despite being faced with a variety of horrors (demons, monsters, monkey kings, werewolves, super-powered alcoholic husbands possessed by the spirit of her insane uncle), Abby is never reduced to a “damsel in distress” that the hero rescues in episode after episode, nor is she (like the typical female superhero) depicted as a balloon-breasted, spandex-clinging object for the male reader’s masturbatory viewing pleasure. Instead, Abby is a smart, brave, resourceful woman who is more interested in helping others than in “being saved,” and whose beauty and sexuality are only a part of her intellectual and emotional arsenal. She also usually wears jeans.
Abby does her share of screaming and running (more the latter) in the early episodes and is “rescued from hell” in Swamp Thing Annual #2 (the template for Sandman and a variety of other Vertigo series). However, from the very beginning it is clear that she is never present just to be rescued. In issue #26, Abby identifies a monstrous threat to Elysium Lawns, the home for autistic children at which she works, and heads off to help because “they need somebody tonight.” Her husband’s leering reply and her scorn for it, indicate early on that Abby is not to be seen as mere object for the male gaze.
Instead, this scene makes her the “hero” of the episode, even if she must finally bring Swampy, Etrigan the Demon, and Paul, the autistic child, into play in order to conquer the threat. The story itself is pretty stupid, bringing out the worst of horror clichés (“I will show you your deepest fears!”) and ends with a whimper, not a bang. Abby’s role, however, sets the stage for her importance to the rest of the series, and Moore’s commitment to woman characters who aren’t just window-dressing.
As previous posters have mentioned, not all of Moore’s attempts at feminism “work,” with the werewolf issue (#40) being a particularly egregious example of overwriting and overmoralizing. The depiction of a woman confined, domesticated, and objectified by male society (and who wreaks her revenge by transforming into a werewolf at “that time of month”) strains even the most good-hearted of liberal sympathies. The inevitable suicide by the werewolf doesn’t help either, following as it does, a string of literary/cultural representations that suggest that the best way “out” of a patriarchal society is not social change, or even a display of female strength, but a resignation in death. “The Curse” is definitively not as well written as novels like Virginia Woolf’s “The Voyage Out” (not quite a suicide, but close enough) or Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” and its conclusive “message,” coming from a bunch of men producing a superhero comic, is even more disheartening. As someone in the letters column noted, even the medium of self-inflicted death is irredeemably dumb, since no grocery store would be idiotic enough to display its sharp knives with the points facing out (would they).
Still, Moore is nothing if not willing to correct his mistakes (or to return to his favorite themes), and his return to explicitly feminist motifs in issue #54 is one of my favorites. In “The Flowers of Romance,” marginal characters Liz Tremayne and Dennis Barclay return after a three year absence in the issues following Swampy’s “death.” Liz and Dennis were friends of the Cables in the Marty Pasko run on the series, and in the time since readers last saw them, Dennis has used their supposed pursuit by the Sunderland Corporation to make Liz, a previously dynamic and professional woman, completely dependent upon him. If there’s any horror in this series, it’s in this story. With Swamp Thing dead and no monsters or demons in sight, the issue depicts Liz’s psychological rape. Dennis convinces Liz not to use electronic equipment for fear of electrocution, to wear towels as underwear, to stand up in the bathtub for fear of drowning, etc.
Fear is used as manipulation in the story as it is by Norsefire in V for Vendetta in order to establish the fascist state. Here, though, the fear is personal and the depiction of an abusive relationship is harrowing long before Dennis even makes his appearance in the story. In this case, the gendered political message arises out of a single relationship, affirming the feminist mantra that “the personal is political.” Like the men of “The Curse,” Dennis mentally cripples, domesticates, and imprisons a woman—but here the theme feels less like a hectoring prose-poem and more like an adventure story with cunning insight into personal psychology and social practice. Here also, the woman is saved not by resignation, but by individual agency (when she finds the courage to turn on the television and to leave Dennis to find Abby) and by another woman: Abby. Abby, herself traumatized by Swampy’s death (depicted beautifully in a pair of wordless pages) takes Liz in and protects her from Dennis, who follows her in an attempt to bring her back under his control, or wreak revenge. Dennis is armed and clearly insane, but Abby keeps her head and manages to lure him into the swamps, where he is ultimately consumed by alligators.
The result is, without a doubt, and with some degree of cliché, female “empowerment,” as Liz begins a slow ascent back to her previous self (mostly accomplished in Rick Veitch’s run on the series), and Abby begins to move on with her life.
Abby’s resiliency, combined with the focus on the strength of the female community in resisting masculine power, reminds the reader that Abby cannot merely be defined as “Swamp Thing’s girlfriend.” Rather, her identity exceeds that role and has the capacity to redefine itself. Since everyone involved (reader, writer, artist) knows very well that Swamp Thing will return, Moore certainly had the option of having Abby wallow in misery for the requisite number of issues until the hero’s return. The fact that she begins to “bounce back” only a month after Swampy’s death suggests that Abby may, in fact, be the hero of the book, the personality around whom Swampy revolves, rather than the reverse. Another high point is in the following month’s episode, devoted to Swampy’s funeral in Gotham. Batman invites Abby to make a public statement, perhaps even to “condemn us for our lack of understanding,” but Abby’s impulse is to keep her private love private, not to flex her muscles, or her “rights,” but to mourn in her own way.
After Swampy’s very public, and ultimately futile expression of his own feelings, Abby’s quiet moment of mourning presents a stark contrast, and a display of inner strength (if not of public power) that exceeds Swampy’s. In the first month of their separation, Swampy comes much closer to madness and “giving up” than Abby herself ever does, going so far as to create a “vegetable Abby” (and an entire hallucinatory supporting world) in order to cope with his loss (in issue #56).
Abby’s centrality and resiliency is never meant to minimize the intensity of the connection between the two characters. It does, however, begin to put Swampy’s own “heroic” status into question. The entire final year of the series gets its power, immediacy, and impact from the love between Abby and Swampy, but that very relationship begins to take on some troubling ambivalence. “Outed” in the tabloid press as being a vegetable-lover, Abby is arrested and brought to Gotham City, providing the set-piece for one of the coolest “battles,” and the finest art, in Moore’s run. John Totleben’s solo effort in the double-sized #53 is the piece de résistance of Swamp Thing illustration and of Moore’s overactive imagination. Popping out ideas for Swamp Thing’s vegetable powers faster and with more frequency than a nuclear-fueled pez dispenser, Moore reveals Swampy’s power to flood the air with aphrodisiacs and hallucinogens, to grow in the human intestinal tract, to occupy multiple bodies simultaneously (not safe for Batman), and to become a huge redwood Swamp Thing, thanks to the Gotham botanical garden.
All of these “tricks” are exercised in the pursuit of Abby’s peaceful return, linking the most “public” and superheroic of the series’ moments to its most personal. The series is at its worst when pitting cosmic evil vs. cosmic good (as in the similarly double-sized issue #50), but it is at its best when focusing on the most personal emotions. Swamp Thing #53 is about that most banal of story ideas, “the power of love,” but that idea is exhibited in startling (and troubling) new ways, when an entire city is transformed into a jungle and redwood-Swampy towers over it. Moore’s typical critique of and aversion to “power” is here put under pressure by the celebration of love (and particularly love and sex unconstrained by social norms). In the end, though, the critique of power stands, and Swampy’s increasing (near omnipotent) strength ultimately undermines his love more than his love justifies the exhibition of that power. As in Watchmen and Miracleman, the exercise of power is not here a “good thing.” Instead, Moore warns (as he often does) of the tendency to mistake power for morality, to assert one’s personal beliefs/ideals in order to “save” others and, in so doing, to deprive them of freedom and agency. It is true, that Swampy fights against an arbitrary and unfair institutional power, but his efforts to overcome it materialize as a carbon copy of its faults, not as an alternative ideology. Swampy flexes his muscles and tries to show who has the bigger (redwood) dick, rather than proposing a communal compromise, or a mutually acceptable solution.
Swampy’s reveling in his newfound strength is punished, almost immediately, by the D.D.I. (some sort of shadowy government agency with a connection to the remains of the Sunderland Corporation) and Lex Luthor, but it is initially difficult for the reader not to sympathize with him, since his display seems connected to the hippy values the series evinces elsewhere, even in the same issue. Even as Swampy asserts his own personal needs over and against the community of Gotham, that community seems to respond powerfully and positively, with Gotham’s dormant “flower-children” embracing Swampy and his values of “love,” “nature,” and “community.”
Since these values are also the series’ (and represented most iconically by the Abby/Alec connection), it’s a tough pill to swallow when Swampy is killed/banished at the moment of reunification.
It is equally troubling, if for opposite reasons, when the couple’s second reunion (Swampy’s return to Earth in #63) is delayed by a series of “revenge murders” of the DDI operatives on Swampy’s part. In “Loose Ends (Reprise),” even the title indicates that Swampy is repeating the atrocities committed by DDI/Sunderland, not escaping them. Back in Moore’s first issue, entitled “Loose Ends,” Sunderland cleaned up the titular hanging threads of Marty Pasko’s run on the series by pursuing and killing Swampy and his friends. Now, with power on his side, Swampy does the same to the DDI operatives. The series spends its final year exploring and emphasizing the importance of the (stereotypically feminine) values of love and community at the expense of the (stereotypically masculine) values of power and violence, but it is a lesson that Swampy himself doesn’t seem to learn. His first move on his return to Earth is another ostentatious display of power, similar to the one that got him “killed” in the first place. Mowing through the DDI/Sunderland killers before he even lets Abby know of his return, he places power/violence chronologically and ideologically before love, even as Abby is drawing strength from her newfound community of friends and associates (Liz Tremayne, Chester “tuber head” Williams, etc.)
Moore’s run on the series soon concludes with a “domestic paradise” with Swampy withdrawing from the world and constructing a “lime tree bower” for his lady love. Still, on re-browsing (and re-thinking) it is questionable whether or not his return is to her benefit. After all, Dennis Barclay constructed a “domestic paradise” for Liz, similarly enforced by his superior power and his professed love. Swampy’s heart seems to be in the right place in the final issue, but his means of getting there is on a pile of corpses. Given Moore’s critique of power elsewhere (even and especially supposedly benevolent power, like that displayed by Miracleman and Ozymandius), it seems unlikely that we are meant to view issue #64’s “domestic bliss” as a clear and pure “happy ending.” Swampy makes a vow to “withdraw” from human affairs, “to know and to never do”—for to assert his power, even for others’ benefit, would be to remove human agency and responsibility, as he finally acknowledges. Only one page after making this promise to himself, however, Swampy’s continuing hubris is evident. When Abby reminds Swampy that “they don’t build dream-homes” in the middle of the Swamp, Alec replies, “Perhaps they don’t…I did not intend to ask them,” constructing a “castle” for this muck-encrusted king and his consort. Swampy “does” without asking, without consulting anyone (including Abby herself). He continues to assert an almost incomprehensible power without considering the possible consequences. Swampy’s exercise of power hardly seems on the same level as the petty and repulsive brand applied by Dennis back in issue #54, but in the impulse to close Abby off from the broader world and to become her universe, he repeats Dennis’ basic ideology.
The happy ending is then plagued by the undercurrent of violence and power seen in the previous episode (and in the greening of Gotham). Thanks to the careful construction of Abby Cable over a period of almost four years, however, it is difficult to worry about her. She’ll take care of herself.
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Update by Noah: You can read the entire Swamp Thing roundtable here.
Once upon a time, there was a character called Swamp Thing. He was created by Len Wein and Berni[e] Wrightson in 1971, and then there were some other comics, and then The Anatomy Lesson happened and everyone started paying attention, or at least retroactively turned their attention to that point in time, since not a lot of people were reading it when that issue rolled out.
Eventually, that issue — The Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, and holy god what a beautifully portentous title, let’s not let the little things pass us by this week — proved to be such a landmark that it kicked off all of the softcover collected editions of the material I’d come across. For a long while, I didn’t even know that most of the core team had participated in at least one prior issue; artists Stephen R. Bissette & John Totleben started out on #16 (they succeeded Tom Yeates, a former classmate of theirs at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art), and writer Alan Moore picked up with issue #20 (following Bronze Age superhero veteran Martin Paskow). To the best of my knowledge, colorist Tatjana Wood and letterer John Costanza had been around since the beginning, and I’m not entirely sure when Rick Veitch showed up, since his initial supplementary pencil contributions went uncredited until I think the first softcover collections.
Of the post-Anatomy stuff, I mean; the rest of it’s still floating around in back issue bins, with its secrets.
I got rid of all but one of the old softcovers a while back, so I’ve been following the new hardcover editions Vertigo has been putting out. Vol. 1 comes with a special bonus: issue #20, the true first chapter of the Alan Moore, typically derided as a desk-clearing exercise. Bissette isn’t even in it; Totleben (who’s actually the one that had the strong notion of an extra-mossy redesign of the title character, and, in an alternate universe, became the series’ regular penciller) inks Dan Day, a fairly nondescript stylist compared to what would come later.
Nonetheless, reading that issue for the first time left me startled by its heavily visual storytelling, or rather, storytelling deepened by purely visual means. If nothing else, it’s very much a crucial piece of imperfect early Moore.
Eh, subtlety isn’t always necessary. This is the true first page of the bold new era, and while it might not involve plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalk with leopard spots, or Blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities, I will note that it does not have issue #21’s anatomically inclined title housed in the broken outline of a body. No, this one’s almost pure image, with ghostly swirling supporting cast members taunting Our Man as he freaks out in classic monster movie style while alluding to the biblical Samson, de-powered and enslaved, making a sudden comeback to destroy the Philistines along with himself.
The simplest metaphorical reading suggests that maybe someone wasn’t 100% delighted with the Martin Pasko tenure, but look closer – if the supporting cast are ghosts, then Swamp Thing isn’t going to crush anything but himself (presumably with the names of his original creators). Also, what does Loose Ends have to do with toppling a pair of pillars? Realize that Swamp Thing isn’t tying anything up; he’s knocking the ends of the page loose, upsetting the symmetry that cages him. He’ll die, but it’ll free him – this is not an idle joke or a petty irony, it’s a statement of purpose, and the start of a visual motif that will run throughout the issue, to varying effect.
This is what you see next. Excuse the crummy scan — there’s a lot of them, so you’ll want to get started early — but I think the idea comes across: it’s a symmetrical panel layout, variations of which will appear on all but the last three pages of the issue. Swamp Thing is pontificating at length on the apparent death of arch-fiend Anton Arcane, a bisected center bottom panel helpfully presenting his head on one side and the villain’s on the other. Given all this, I suspect the first thing that will come to mind is the symmetrical issue of Watchmen (#5), but remember that it was a whole unit, while this issue is a series of discreet, mirror-like modules. You can’t make it out above, so here’s the final two panels from the spread:
From this, we can anticipate another, in-continuity descendant.
The Killing Joke is not a symmetrical comic, no, but it begins with an extreme close-up of rain striking pavement, pulling back onto the top tier of a nine-panel grid as headlights cut across the splashing surface of the water. At the end of the comic, with Batman and the Joker merrily laughing at how insane they both are, the bottom tier of a final nine-panel grid zooms into splashing rain, headlights killed, then an identical extreme close-up on the last page. It captures the duo, silently assuring us that they can’t change, that these stories will probably continue forever.
Moore has often expressed dissatisfaction over the work, insisting that it’s ‘just’ a story about Batman and the Joker and unfortunately nothing deeper, but I wonder if he’s really upset that he repeated an earlier motif and couldn’t find anywhere to go with it – Arcane, after all, is (temporarily) dead, and the holding pattern Swampy & co. are stuck in won’t last, not while today’s hottest and hungriest comics talents are around, right?
They’re also young talents, though. Here we see villains discussing the imminent destruction of the beloved The Saga of the Swamp Thing cast; their decidedly non-mirrored conversation is merely dominated on both ends by its topic, which registers a little like an indelicate means of preserving the motif while allowing for an easier plot outlay (and this is the most plotting-heavy of the spreads). There is a rationale, however, in that a scene with no supporting cast good guys or sentient bog creatures needn’t convey a sense of entrapment, just preoccupation, and anyway the bit with the clicking balls — itself a representation of perfect action and reaction, upset at the end — will recur when the whole thing breaks down later.
Other spreads in this issue are less sure of themselves, imposing bald eagles on four corners of the spread to represent the arrival of abusive martial forces (one of the aforementioned villains is a wicked General), but then otherwise wrecking the symmetry by adding too many panels, maybe to ease the storytelling along; maybe not everyone on the creative team was on the same page. A sense of construction remains; the bald eagles actually relate to another spread, in which golden birds perch and stare downward at awaking lovers, only for deadly whirlybirds to give pursuit.
This one’s more purposeful, the arrival of violence fucking up the effect at the very end, blasting away the character’s place in prior issues’ plots. You can just barely make out an incorrect movie title in the top panel on the right-hand page – “Don’t Watch Now,” a reference to Don’t Look Now from director Nicholas Roeg, whose works would provide structural guidance and inspiration of issues to come. Another spread later on, where the top two tiers on one page are a different size from those on the facing page, leaves the effect merely sloppy.
But while it’s easy to blame Day for these troubles — the motif being so similar to those spotted in later Moore works — it’s crucial to acknowledge that, barring applicable statements on the record, we don’t really know who exactly does what on a collaborative comic, beyond the broadest attributions of the credits. It can at least be said that Day’s competent, stolid drawings provide an effective enough sense of the holding pattern world Swamp Thing and his cast are mired in, the layouts providing commentary on the panels’ reality from literally outside and in between, an omniscient voice altogether more pleasing than Swampy’s incessant narration.
Let’s be fair – this isn’t Alan Moore’s finest moment either. It’s the kind of script where a super-character attracts the attention of a guy with a flamethrower while stuffing the same panel with four thought balloons detailing a highly allegorical incident from that morning where he saw a strong beetle get overwhelmed by a horde of ants.
Then again, there’s some nice shading here, as the forces close in and the symmetry breaks down.
The layout simply repeats, crowded by more panels.
The visuals here seem especially heavy-handed in not just recalling the prior conversation between villains but pasting down hazy details from the spread itself, blurry in the manner of flashbacks, as if we readers can’t be trusted to bring it up on our own. If it’s possible to have too much ‘silent’ narration, this would be the case, although I like the climactic appearance of Swamp Thing’s shadow to append an exclamation point to his nearly issue-length monologue on such.
It does all form an interesting and subtle type of branding, however. Swamp Thing muses at length on how forms of light are driving away the shadows, the places to hide – he’s talking about modernity, casting back the weird mysteries and their small conflicts. “Aren’t they… going to leave any darkness… for us, Arcane?” From his surroundings, we can tell that Swamp Thing cannot escape this incursion. From the first page, we know that he will have to die to escape the confinement. This is a modern comic, says Moore, says Day & Totleben, this is the last stand of the old hero-villain dichotomies, which cannot stand up to the light of scrutiny. It’s 1983, and as the bullets that are blasting open the title character’s head point to, the shadows, the mysteries come from within, not outside.
Look at the thought balloons. This is the last you’ll see of them for a while; their proliferation is partially a flaunting of old-school comics techniques, which will be traded in for ‘sophisticated’ captions starting next issue. Not that Moore hates them or wants them to vanish forever – they’ll reappear in Annual #2, when Swamp Thing visits the land of the dead, and then in issue #33, when devoted love interest Abby Arcane witnesses the occurrence of the Swamp Thing character’s 1971 first appearance.
All part of the corpus, all fit for dissection. You don’t need me to tell you how The Anatomy Lesson acts as its own freestanding metaphor for revamping a comic book character, picking it apart and seeing how it stopped working, and how it might miraculously work again. That’s recorded, repeated history, and, interestingly, always ripe for revision. If you go back up to that opening bit of pillar-toppling, you’ll notice that Swamp Thing is also throwing aside the creative team; intended or not, it demonstrates the ephemeral nature of such concept revisions. It only takes one issue to shoot it all down and start over again.
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This has been part 4 of a roundtable discussion on [The Saga of the] Swamp Thing. The entire feature can be found here.