Swamp Thing by Mike Allred

Art by Mike Allred

Above, a stunning Swamp Thing by the legendary Mike Allred! 

Caparezza's Orbit Orbit

On the 31th of October acclaimed Italian rapper Caparezza released his latest work, Orbit Orbit, which is both an album for BMG and a graphic novel published by Bonelli.

The graphic novel, available as both hardcover and softcover, written by Caparezza (his debut as comic writer), is drawn by an incredible ensemble of well-known artists: Sergio Gerasi, Riccardo Torti, Nicola Mari, Marco Nizzoli, Renato Riccio, Stefano Tamiazzo, La Came, Yi Yang and Matteo De Longis (cover).

The story features Caparezza as a cosmonaut who embarks on an interstellar journey in search of creative inspiration after a period of isolation. The antagonist is a character named Darktar, clearly inspired by DC Comics' Darkseid.

Caparezza has always been a comic book fan and the album, Orbit Orbit, is crammed with comic book references, including Swamp Thing and Watchmen.

 

Track 4: Darktar

«Nella palude come Swamp Thing»

Track 12 – Pathosfera
«Sono quello freddo della ganga, Dottor Manhattan» 

You can find out all the references on Fumettologica, HERE (in Italian).

The key track of the album is titled A Comic Book Saved My Life. 'Nuff said!

Swamp Thing by Jesse Lonergan

Art by Jesse Lonergan

Swamp Thing confirms to be a really popular character!

Above, a spectacular portrait of our beloved God of The Green by the fantastic Jesse Lonergan (it's a pre-show commission from the last NYCC).

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Website or Instagram page. 

Swamp Thing by Marco Santucci

Art by Marco Santucci

Above, a bulky Swamp Thing by Italian comic book artist Marco Santucci, a recent Lucca Comics pre-show commission.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram page HERE.

Swamp Things by Andi Watson

Art by Andi Watson

Above and below, gorgeous Swamp Things by the amazing Andi Watson.

You can get one at a bargain price! Check it HERE!

 

For more info about the artist, visit his site, here.

Art by Andi Watson

Moore, Swamp Thing and Abby by Raulo Caceres

Sketch art by Raulo Caceres

Above, a great portrait sketch of The Man fused with Swamp Thing and Abby by Spanish artist Raulo Caceres (from Mario B.'s amazing CAF Gallery).

 

Caceres illustrated some special, limited covers for Providence (check it here).

For more about the artist, visit his web site, here.

Swamp Thing by Marco Fontanili

Art by Marco Fontanili

Above, a great Swamp Thing commission by Italian artist Marco Fontanili. 

Below some preliminary art.

 

In recent times Fontanili published a fantastic Nosferatu book. He is currently promoting Steamboat Evil, his dark version of the classic Mickey Mouse's movie. 

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram. 

Art by Marco Fontanili

Un-used Swamp Thing 21 cover

Art by Thomas Yeates

Few days ago, collector Richard Donnelly posted the above image on his CAF gallery. 

It's an un-used cover art by Tom Yeates for the seminal Swamp Thing The Anatomy Lesson issue, cover date February 1984. 

Donnelly writes: "This un-inked pencil cover with two surgeons and a nurse about to vivisect Swamp Thing was likely rejected by Comic-Code or DC editorial. Signed with note and sketch by Thomas Yeates."

 

The official cover - now a classic! - was actually less direct and explicit.

Swamp Thing by Andrew MacLean

Art by Andrew MacLean

Above, a great portrait of the loveable Green Monster by comic book artist Andrew MacLean.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram HERE.

Swamp Thing by Russ Braun

Art by Russ Braun

Above, a great black and white Swamp Thing portrait by American comic book artist and illustrator Russ Braun.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his official site, here. 

Swamp Thing by Mike McKone

Art by Mike McKone

Above, a great Swampy portrayed by British comic book artist Mike McKone. 

 

You can see more HERE.

Swampy by Greg Smallwood

Art by Greg Smallwood

Above, a stunning Swamp Thing commission art by the amazing Greg Smallwood. 

For more info about the artist, visit his Official site: HERE!

Swampy by Aaron Campbell

Art by Aaron Campbell

Above, a gorgeous Swamp Thing commission by the amazing Aaron Campbell.

 

For more info about the artist, visit his Instagram page HERE. 

Swamp Thing by Tony Moore

Art by Tony Moore

Above, a great Swampy by acclaimed American comic book artist Tony Moore. The pic was posted few days ago on the artist's Facebook account.

Possibly the best SWAMP THING I have drawn to date. Pretty recent, inked with calligraphy nib Microns. - Tony Moore

Swamp Thing by Maël Lohbrunner

Art by Maël Lohbrunner

Above, a groovy Swamp Thing portrait by Bordeaux-based artist Maël Lohbrunner.

 

For more info, visit the artist's Instagram and ArtStation page.

Swamp Thing by Officina Infernale

Art by Officina Infernale

Above, a great Swamp Thing illustration, combining monstrosity and tenderness, by Italian über-artist Officina Infernale.

It seems that the illo would be included in an upcoming Moore-related book.

Preliminary art by Officina Infernale

Charms and absurdities

From the introduction to Saga Of The Swamp Thing trade paperback, 1987, collecting issues #21-27.

Alan Moore: [...] The very first thing that anyone reading a modern horror comic should understand is that there are great economic advantages in being able to prop up an ailing, poor-selling comic book with an appearance by a successful guest star. Consequently, all the comic book stories produced by any given publisher are likely to take place in the same imaginary universe. This includes the brightly colored costumed adventurers populating their superhero titles, the shambling monstrosities that dominate their horror titles, and the odd grizzled cowpoke who's wandered in from a western title through a convenient time warp. For those more familiar with conventional literature, try to imagine Dr. Frankenstein kidnapping one of the protagonists of Little Women for his medical experiments, only to find himself subject to the scrutiny of a team-up between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. I'm sure that both the charms and the overwhelming absurdities of this approach will become immediately apparent, and so it is in comic books: Swamp Thing exists in the same universe as Superman, the same world as Batman and Wonder Woman and all the other denizens of the cosmos delineated within the pages of DC Comics' various publications.
 

As I said above, this approach has both its charms and absurdities. The absurdities are obvious: to work properly, horror needs a delicate and carefully sustained atmosphere- one capable of being utterly ruined by the sudden entrance of a man in green tights and an orange cloak, especially if as a character, he's fond of puns. The charms are much harder to find, but once revealed, can actually be rewarding. The continuity-expert's nightmare of a thousand different super-powered characters co-existing in the same continuum can, with the application of a sensitive and sympathetic eye, become a rich and fertile mythic background with fascinating archetypal characters hanging around, waiting to be picked like grapes on the vine. Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice.
 

Imagine for a moment a universe jewelled with alien races ranging from the transcendentally divine to the loathsomely Lovecraftian. Imagine a cosmos where the ancient gods still exist somewhere and where whole dimensions are populated by anthropomorphic funny animals. Where Heaven and Hell are demonstrably real and even accessible, and where angels and demons alike seem to walk the earth with impunity. Imagine a planet where exposure to dangerous radiation granted the gift of super-speed rather than bone cancer, and where the skies were thus filled by flying men and women threatening to blot out the sun. Imagine a place where people were terribly good or terribly bad, with little room for the mediocre in between. No, it certainly wouldn't look very much like the world we live in, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be every bit as glorious, touching, sad, or scary. With this kind of perspective, the appearance in these pages of the Justice League of America or vintage DC super-villain Jason Woodrue should be less unnerving than it might otherwise have been to the uninitiated. [...]

Swampy by Dan McDaid

Art by Dan McDaid

Above, a great sketch of our beloved swamp monster by British comic book writer and artist Dan McDaid. It's a sort of companion piece to the Moore portrait he did (check HERE).

 
For more info about the artist: Wikipedia - Instagram - Twitter - BigCartel

I strongly recommend McDaid's sci-fi epic Dega: check here and here!

 

Grazie mille, Dan!

Bissette: Swamp Thing, Roeg and... a perfect synthesis

Excerpts from a long, interesting interview with Stephen R. Bissette conducted by Jason Bergman for The Comics Journal.  You can read the complete piece HERE.

Stephen R. Bissette:[...] I alone couldn't have done what we did on Swamp Thing. None of us who were part of that unique team could have done it alone (although Rick Veitch came damned close to doing so, didn’t he, when he was writing and penciling his run on the title?). We, meaning Alan Moore, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, and everybody else that was part of that - Len Wein our first editor, Karen Berger our second editor; John Costanza lettered the book, Tatjana Wood was our colorist. That kind of chemistry yields work that, when it's really humming, is better than the work any of us could do individually. Having experienced that myself, I really believe that.

I went into Swamp Thing having experienced that kind of synergy with one of my oldest friends in the comic book field, Rick Veitch. Rick and I really did some work together that we're both still proud of.

[...]

Len Wein called us and said, "You're going to be working with a new writer and it's somebody you've never heard of." And I said, "Who is it?" He said, "Alan Moore." I said, "Alan Moore! We love his work." Len thought I was bullshiting him. I said, "No, no, no. We've been reading Warrior since the first issue." We had been buying the UK black & white comic magazine Warrior from Heroes World, ironically enough - Ivan Snyder’s Heroes World New Jersey comic shop, the same mini-distributor Marvel later went exclusive with. The Heroes World comic shop in New Jersey carried Warrior, and we'd been reading "V for Vendetta" and "Marvelman" right from the first issue. We knew what Alan had been doing and we were psyched.

And this is what you can't explain, Jason. This is pre-internet. This is before we could have afforded a phone call to each other. We all wrote letters to each other, John Totleben, me, Alan Moore. All three of us. Our letters crossed in the mail. Alan wanted to do with the character exactly what John and I wanted to do with the character. What we wanted to do with the character, John had been pitching to Len via Tom Yeates, and Len had said, "No, no, no, no. Too radical." The whole idea of Swamp Thing not being a man inside, that he was this plant. That's what John said that the character should be, should run with.

Len had turned it down as an idea. For some reason, now that Alan was onboard, Len was open to it. Does that mean Len had let go of the character he had co-created to the point where he could do that, or because Alan so excited him as a writer that Len would trust him? I don't know, but we all wanted to do the same thing.

Furthermore-- Rick Veitch could talk to you about this. From the time Rick and I met, one of the things Rick said always captivated him is, I remember every movie I've seen. And this is pre-video era, so you would see a movie once or twice and you would try to remember it frame-by-frame, if you were crazy like me, because you might never see that film again in your life. And I was trying to make that kind of kinetic imagery and storytelling happen in my comics work, the aspects of cinema that I knew would and could work in comics, but I didn't have the writing skill to do it.

The filmmaker by name, and I've named him before in interviews, was Nicolas Roeg, co-director of Performance, director of Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth. It turned out that Alan Moore loved Nicolas Roeg's work. In our first couple of letters, we found we were on the same page, that Roeg was a common reference point: something we could work from to forge a different way of doing comics.

If you go back and read "The Anatomy Lesson"—that first story that the team of us worked on together (all of us, because as I’ve repeatedly stated, Rick helped me on the pencils), so it was the four of us—it's structured like a Nicolas Roeg film, right? Nicolas Roeg approached storytelling like a mosaic, and you can move the tiles around. I always like to describe it as when Roeg’s approach to cinema is really working, you can tell the story from both ends to the middle—to the heart of the story—and you make the fireworks detonate in the reader's head. That's what Alan could do. He could already do it. Alan was scripting everything Rick Veitch and I had been talking about doing for years. We wish we could do this. Here's this script from this guy in England none of us have met, “The Anatomy Lesson”, and he aced it. And he fucking did it in what, 22 pages.

So right from that point, we all knew we're onto something, like, this is working. Alan would get fired up seeing my pencils. And what was happening, Jason, because there was no internet, is, we were moving all this stuff through the mail. I would photocopy in triplicate every pencil page I sent out to DC, and I would send a package to John Totleben and a package to Alan Moore and keep a set for myself. And Alan was seeing the pencils within a week to 10 days of when Len Wein and then Karen Berger had them. That was back when the US-to-UK/UK-to-US mail was functional and dependable.

Alan would get excited by what I was doing with the pencils, and then we would all see what John had done with the inks, and it would set fireworks off, and we were all pushing each other to go further. For a time, it was just a perfect synthesis.

You can read the complete piece HERE.

Swampy by Rick Veitch

 

Art by Rick Veitch

Above, a fantastic Swampy by Master Rick Veitch! Great thing!