Tag Archives: Swamp Thing

Muck Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: False Starts

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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.

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: Clever Is As Clever Does

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Reading Richard’s last post I was reminded just how clever Moore was to put his vampires in the water. First of all, it allowed for some incredible visuals…and second it’s just a really smart idea. Vampires don’t need to breathe…so a pond would be a perfect place for them to form a community. Why didn’t somebody else think of that first? (Maybe they did…but even if that’s the case, Moore’s clever for lifting it. (Update: …and he lifted it from Marty Pasko’s earlier Swamp Thing story, according to Alex Buchet in comments — which makes it maybe a little more obvious a lift than I was thinking. Sort of invalidating the whole point of this post. But oh well…that’s blogging for you. Update to the update: no, apparently the idea of having vampires in the lake was Moore. Carry on then.))

One of the things about Moore that’s very unusual for horror writers and for certain kinds of pulp writers is how carefully he thinks things through. He’s got all these ideas about how stuff fits together — if you start here, then that means this, which means you get to that. Steven King, for example, doesn’t do that. His stories make no sense — or they sometimes make sense, but you definitely get the feeling that he’s making it up as he goes along (in Salem’s Lot, for instance, the vampires are sort of solid, sort of not — it just depends on what the story calls for.) Neither do Lovecraft’s, really — it’s all unnameable this and unmentionable that and you know he doesn’t care whether the Yog-shoggoth works or not so long as he can work in a Poe reference. Moore really does care about the mechanics, though — which can end up really badly when he tries to deal with gender anxiety (which Lovecraft, for example, manages to do a lot smarter by being a lot less aware/explicit about what he’s doing). But it can also give you a tour de force like the Anatomy lesson, where everything you think you know about the character gets turned inside out.

Basically, Moore seems like a very deductive writer — which seems like perhaps not the best fit for horror, which tends to work best when it deals with subconscious inklings and anxieties rather than with ratiocination. Moore really hit his stride when he moved towards works which had a greater focus on ideas rather than on the half-formed dream world of horror.

Though those vampire issues are still scary. And the monkey-king was pretty bad ass…. Moore could do horror if he put his mind to it, even if it did work against his strengths in some ways.

Update: The whole swamp thing roundtable is here.

Muck Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: Swamp Fear

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(Part 1 of the Swamp Thing roundtable can be found here and Part 2 can be found here).

In addition to being part 3 of the Swamp Thing roundtable, this post is also a follow-up to last week’s post where I questioned whether comics could ever be scary.

To recap, I asserted that horror comics could never incite the intense, visceral fear that horror movies so easily manage. Horror comics would be better off if they had more in common with horror novels, which generally have slow-burn stories that exploit common fears and social anxieties. There were a lot of great comments to the post, and I want to go through a couple of them before I get to Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

While I argued that the static nature of the comic page undermined any attempt at being scary, Michael DaForge offered a different take:

“Comics can use their “static-ness” to their advantage, I think.
I’m jumpy and easily manipulated by music or loud noises in
a movie. In Anti Christ, the genital mutilation startled me (or
grossed me out or whatever it was supposed to do?) But it didn’t
stay with me the way the scene with the stillborn fawn did from
earlier in the film. Or this sequence did from Uzumaki:

… [W]hen it’s 5 am and I’m having a hard time getting to sleep,
I’ll remember stuff like that.”

That’s a good counterpoint, and Uzumaki demonstrates why having the right kind of art is essential for a horror comic. Unfortunately, the art in most mainstream horror comics is simply too indifferent to tone and mood to instill any feelings of fear in the reader.

Aaron Ber commented later that there should be a distinction between “creepy” and “actual fear”. He went on to say:

“Not to keep making this a comics vs. film thing, but horror is one
of the most demonstrable ways I can think of to show how effecting
film can be. People experiencing fear in a film can have physical
reactions on an involuntary level, as if their safety is actually being
threatened. I just don’t think comics can work that directly – to the
point where on some level you are no longer conscious of the fact
that what you are experiencing isn’t actually happening to you.”

I think Aaron Ber is right to the extent we’re discussing heart-racing, hands-over-your-eyes scary. Comics will never be able to provoke that kind of reaction from the reader. However, I don’t think there’s an clear distinction between what people find creepy and what they “actually” fear. Fear encompasses a broad range of emotional responses: sometimes it’s an immediate physical reaction, as when something startles you, but other times it can be a lingering sense of unease or a recurrent anxiety. A comic with a creepy story and disturbing imagery can potentially stay with the reader longer than a movie about a chainsaw-wielding psycho. So perhaps comics can’t be “scary” as the term is commonly understood, but creepy is a good alternative.

And now I’ll finally start discussing the actual topic of this roundtable. Not every issue of Swamp Thing is a gem. Not every issue is creepy (nor were they all intended to be). But Alan Moore could write an unsettling story when he wanted to, and he collaborated with a team of fantastic artists, particularly Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. And one of the best stories during their run on Swamp Thing also happened to be one of the creepiest.

The vampire storyline in issues 38 and 39 was part of a larger arc where Swamp Thing had to run errands for John Constantine (of Hellblazer fame). One such errand took Swamp Thing to Rosewood, Illinois, an entire town submerged beneath a lake. And the only residents of this underwater hamlet were vampires. In Alan Moore lore, running water is lethal to vamps, but the stagnant water of the lake provided the perfect environment to avoid the sun while still hunting dumb teenagers who went for a swim.

It’s a simple, pulp monster story, but Moore was absolutely committed to making it as creepy as possible. He accomplished this partly through some plot details that were equal parts eerie and gross. The one that immediately springs to mind is the morbidly obese vampire bride.

There’s just something so repulsive about a fat monster that spends her day wallowing in the filth of an abandoned movie theater.

Another way to make a monster story creepy is to be as ruthless as possible. In other words, anyone can die in any number of awful ways. But in an ongoing series like Swamp Thing, it’s nearly impossible to convince readers that the titular character is in any real danger. Moore wisely evaded this problem by introducing lots of supporting characters that could be offed in short order. He had no reservations about killing a teenage boy at the beginning of the story. And it only got worse from there, especially when the undead boy was reunited with his mother.

While Moore may be a great pulp writer, in the hands of a different art team his script would have come across as a nothing more than cheesy monster plot with overripe narration. As the above panels make clear, the unsung heroes behind Swamp Thing‘s success are Bissette and Totleben. Along with Stan Woch in issue 38, they gave the comic a brooding tone with their heavy use of hatching and black space. And the colorist, Tatjana Wood, enhanced Bissette’s and Totleben’s work with murky greens and blues for the underwater scenes.

The above page is a great example of how their work set the mood of the comic. Plot-wise, this page is nothing more than the vampires descending into their hidden city, but the depiction of the city is terrific. Readers can recognize the details of any American street, but those details are only partially drawn or deliberately obscured by hatching as well as black and near-black colors. It’s an ugly, lurid mockery of a small town, where light from the surface can only barely penetrate the foul water. And the dead fish designs in the gutters add to the sense of muck and decay. It’s easy to see why young readers in the 80’s found Swamp Thing so affecting.

Even when Moore’s scripts aren’t very good, Bissette and Totleben are there to elevate the material. Suat and Noah beat me to the punch with their debate over issue 40, a.k.a. the PMSing-werewolf issue. It’s easily one of the silliest issues in Moore’s run, but it has one of the nastiest werewolf transformations that I’ve ever seen in any media.

To borrow a point from Michael DaForge, the static nature of comics, along with the ability of readers to linger on each panel, actually makes the scene much more effective than a similar transformation in a movie. The intensity and horror of the moment are emphasized by the stillness of each image. And I agree with Noah that Bissette and Totleben draw a great-looking werewolf.

Swamp Thing is never scary in the way a great horror movie is scary, but it doesn’t need to be. Instead, Moore, Bissette, and Totelben created a few short stories with creepy plots and nightmarish imagery. And those stories were, at least for me, far more memorable and affecting than the last few zombie/slasher/haunted house movies that I’ve seen.

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Update by Noah: The whole Swamp Thing roundtable is here.

Muck Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: I…Won’t…Stop…Talking

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Suat notes acidly that any discussion of Swamp Thing is likely to be mired in nostalgia. I think we’ve actually got a couple of folks on the roundtable reading them for the first time…but Suat’s certainly got me pegged. In high school, I read and reread and rereread all the issues of Alan Moore’s run on more times than I can probably count. However, when we went off to college, it was my brother who got most of the issues (I got Watchmen) and, since I knew them so well already, I never did get the trades. As a result, it’s probably been 15 years since I’ve read last part of Moore’s run; issues #57 to #64, from way back in 1987.

So…contra Suat, are they as good as I remember? Well…no and yes. It’s certainly true that, as Suat suggests, they’re, massively, massively overwritten. I think as a kid I just skipped over most of the giant glaring gobs of text boxes. As an adult I’m more conscientious, or stupid, or some combination of both, and I actually tried to read them all — and, yeah, that really doesn’t benefit anyone. I think 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…” yeah, yeah, we get it already, you’re a poet, now would you mind shutting the fuck up?

The painful thing is that one or two of the images might actually work — “his body’s the grave of his mind” is nice; the idea of the EEG screen as “steep green hills”. But Moore’s entranced with the fertility of his own pomp; why stop with one sharp image when you can carry the thing through from too much to toweringly tedious to self-parodic and beyond. Moore’s road to hell is paved, not with good intentions, but with loose-bowelled facility. Rereading this, it becomes clear that Promethea’s self-absorbed cleverness isn’t a decadent falling off, but an unfortunate potential that Moore indulged, to some extent, throughout his career.

Still…Moore’s language certainly has an upside as well. He lets his sentences take over and run amok because he loves them; his self-indulgence is really in a lot of ways an indulgence of words, which he likes to stroke, and cuddle and giggle with in the back of the car seat. The first (two-part) story in this volume, for example, opens with a pound and a half of completely gratuitous Aussie dialogue, tossed in, it feels like, just because Moore couldn’t resist once the idea had popped into his head.

“bleedin’ peroxie pooftah” “ponder on the porcelain” — that’s enough goofy alliteration to make Bob Haney blush.

Once he gets started, of course, Moore just can’t stop…which is why, a couple of pages later, he just goes ahead and literally invents his own language:

When you first look at this, it feels like a tour de force. Moore doesn’t just throw in a few words of dialogue; he keeps going for page after page in a consistent, invented language. You can understand just enough of it to tell that the language does work; Moore actually knows what these people are saying — and you could figure it out too, if you had just a little more information.

That’s Adam Strange talking to his wife Alanna. For those not in the know, these are both old, old dc space opera characters. Adam Strange is this random earth guy who gets hit by a “zeta beam” which transfers him across billions of light years to Rann, where he becomes a hero. But the beam wears off over time, so he’s always getting dumped back on earth, and having to run all over the planet to find the next zeta beam (they come with some frequency) to zap him off to the stars again.

Anyway, in Moore’s story Adam knocked up against swamp thing (whose consciousness has been forced off earth — long story) in the zeta beam and was injured, and has now recovered. That’s where we are with the panel above. And after a reread or two, you can translate that first sentence at least; Alanna is saying, “Adam, what happened?” And Adam I think answers, “Uh…I’m not sure exactly what happened,” or something like that. I especially like the “Uh…” there — I think Adam is pausing in order to shift into thinking in another language — these are the first words he’s spoken that aren’t in English (he says his wife’s name a couple panels up, but that doesn’t really count.)

So, again, the effect initially is dazzling. But…think about it a second, and the whole thing seems more than a little ridiculous. This isn’t Tolkein spending a lifetime or thereabouts creating another tongue. This is Alan Moore pulling a language out of his ass…and that’s exactly what it looks like. It’s not Japanese, !Kung speech, or even German. Really, it’s not another language at all; barely more alien than the Aussie dialect we started with. It’s really just a kind of code. Moore seems to have written out his text and then substituted made-up words on a more or less one to one basis. In some sense, even more embarrassing than just having all your spacepeople talk English. Why try at all if you’re going to do a half-assed job?

And the answer to that, as Moore shows, is that sometimes, if the job is big enough, or original enough, or cool enough, it is in fact worth doing a half-assed job just to see where you end up. The language is nonsense — but then, this is a pulp space story, which means the whole thing is nonesense. After all, we’re in the middle of trackless space; why on earth (as it were) does everybody look human?

Besides, and what is the main point, having these silly out-of-place humans speak in silly out-of-place code allows Moore to do some things that he couldn’t have gotten any other way.

I think this page just brilliantly evokes the strangeness…not of another world or planet, necessarily, but of being far away, in a different culture. The best touch is that, after a couple panels of alien speech, Moore has Adam speak in English. Because at first you’re trying to figure out the alien dialogue, the moment when Adam talks “normal” comes as a small shock. For a second you get to see him, oddly, as the alien, the one out of place. It reminds me of a scene in C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy where Ransome, after spending some months with aliens, sees a bizarre creature and then a second later realizes that it’s himself in a mirror — he’s had the “privilege” (I think he uses that word) of seeing himself as the Malacandrians see him.

The way Moore uses his “language” in the sequence below is great too:

Again, the juxtaposition of the Rannian and English is basically the whole point of the page. “You speak English!” “So..do…you.” It’s such a hyperbolic ex-pat moment…and again, there’s that weird disjunction as you go from trying to follow the Rannian dialogue to realizing that everybody is suddenly speaking English. And then Moore switches the character’s positions, as Adam and Swamp Thing talk to each other, and Alanna is the odd one out:

I find that whole bit really charming. In the first place, I like the ex-pat camaraderie; Adam Strange wouldn’t necessarily have palled around with Swamp Thing on earth, but here they are infinite miles away, and suddenly (once they’ve stopped killing each other) they’re friends.

The other thing that’s hard to resist about the use of the Rannian language here is how much faith Moore puts, not so much in his reader, as in himself and in the comics form. Moore isn’t a high modernist here; he’s not Joyce or even Joanna Russ — he’s telling a pulp adventure story and he wants his audience to follow a pulp adventure story. But he’s still willing to write large swathes of his narrative in untranslated code, because he just thinks he’s bad ass enough to do it. And…hey, presto, he can.

Again, one of the best parts is that you can almost parse what they’re saying, even though, thanks to the clarity of the drawing and the clarity of the pulp tropes, you don’t really need to. In fact, one of the things the comic allows you to do that you might not be able to do as easily in a movie is teach yourself the language. The ability to stop and go back and reread means that you can recapitulate Adam’s immersion in Rann, and learn the language just as he did. Cross-cultural understanding becomes a kind of puzzle (though certainly an artificially easy one.)

I go back and forth on how much I like Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala…they don’t tend to send me, but they are certainly professional, and fully up to conveying action and even nuances of emotion without the help of dialogue:

That may be my favorite panel in the comic; it’s total cheesecake for girls, and Alanna’s half-proud, half-I’m-going-to-get-that-shortly expression is just priceless. It’s a pretty great thing to have in a comic aimed primarily at guys; you get to look at the main character form the perspective of his wife. It’s analagous (and somewhat deliberately so, I think) to seeing yourself as the alien sees you — the distance Moore talks about in the story is not just of place, but of gender and love.

That’s Swamp Thing’s narrative too; his separation from earth, like Adam’s sporadic separation from Rann, is more about being removed from his wife than about being away from a particular place. Language is wrapped up in love and identity; when Swamp Thing finds Adam Strange’s bag on Rann and sees the word “Seattle,” we know that part of the impact is that the word to him reads “Abby.” Words are how we know each each other…and yet, at the same time, as Alanna’s expression above tells us, theyr’e kind of not, or at least not solely. That’s a very appropriate ambivalence for comics to have, it seems like — to see words as the metaphor for our lives and loves while simultaneously drawing a bubble around them.

In that vein, the last panel has some of Moore’s loveliest writing (as Adam contemplates his inevitably distant relationship with his newly conceived child) and its most doofy symbolism (as Alanna’s water pets form the shape of a heart.)

It’s certainly heavy-handed — but so is caring for your wife or for your kid, or, possibly, for your own chattering. Moore’s too in love with his own imagination to worry about looking dumb, which means that Swamp Thing is filled with dumbness, but also with love. It’s not a bad trade-off.

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You can read the entire roundtable thus far here.

For another take on the final volume in the Swamp Thing series, you can check out Robert Stanley Martin’s review.

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable Session 1: Preamble and Introduction

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(The Swamp Thing Roundtable Part 1)

Context. It’s 1983 and you’ve just picked up the latest issue of your favorite monster magazine. You feel pretty stupid since Swamp Thing has sort of sucked since Bernie Wrightson stopped drawing it. That’s a nice cover by Thomas Yeates though.

Wasn’t he the guy who drew the first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing a year back?

Remember. It is the age of innocence. The age of The Warlord and Arion. The age of stupidity. The age of bad taste.

Continue reading →

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable

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Just to give readers a heads up: we’re going to have a roundtable on Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run starting tomorrow. We’ll have guest posts by Joe McCulloch and comics scholar (and my brother) Eric Berlatsky, as well as contributions from the usual utilitarians. So check back in throughout the week.