Swamp Thing Day!

Len Wein was born on this date in 1948. Wein was among the wave of fanboy talents who helped to shape the Bronze Age of Comics. He is most famous as the co-creator of Swamp Thing along with artist Berni Wrightson. Wein's brief but potent run on Justice League of America is perhaps my favorite in that series long history. 

Swamp Thing has become a favorite, at least the original Swamp Thing as envisioned by scribe Len Wein and artist Berni Wrightson. I have never to my memory read any of the later renovations of the character by Alan Moore, and know precious little about them really, save that lots of folks love them. For me though it will always be the rockem' sockem' first run which captured and still holds my imagination.

While I only bought and read one or two original issues of the comic during its run, I've since bought the saga in reprint several times. Roots of the Swamp Thing not only collects the vintage Wein and Wrightson stories, which I own a few times, but includes for the first time the last several stories Wein wrote for new Swamp Thing artist Nestor Redondo.

Redondo was an ideal choice to replace the very atmospheric Wrightson, and while his Swamp Thing lacks the sense of awfulness that Berni infused him with, nonetheless Redondo is able to create a creature who is well served by the stories he finds himself in. I wish DC had included all of the first run so that more of Nestor's great art could be savored.

Of course, most folks know that the story began as a one-off in House of Secrets, a classic story of love and revenge. It was not supposed to lead to larger things. 

But in the first issue of Swamp Thing the setting is modernized, and we meet the tragic Alec Holland, a scientist who is transformed into a shambling creature of vegetation. 

The story swings wildly, introducing all sorts of classic horror tropes. Swamp Thing's arch enemy Arcane transports the creature to Europe. 

In one of my favorite stories Swamp Thing does battle with a fantastically rendered Werewolf. 

The madness of the mob is all too present in a tale about witchcraft. 

The saga lets our hero confront a weird world of automation run amok. 

Back in America, the Swamp Thing is confronted by the DC stalwart Batman. 

Then our "hero" must contend with a bizarre creature in the depths of a mine, a creature who controls a small town. 

Berni Wrightson left the series which made him a comic book star after ten issues. The Swamp Thing has another deadly confrontation with the now changed and powerful Arcane. Nestor Redondo teams with Wein to continue the series. Redondo does a great job following after Wrightson, but for many the series stopped when Berni left. 

Luis Dominguez

Nestor Redondo

Nestor Redondo

The second volume of Swamp Thing - The Bronze Age offers up the remaining issues of the original run of the 70's series and in addition treats the reader to some of the Swamp Thing's guest-starring roles in the years between this cancelation of the first series and the beginning of Saga of the Swamp Thing. The first volume neatly showcased the astounding first ten issues of the run by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson. Then also goes onto to showcase the three additional issues written by Wein but drawn with good effect by Nestor Redondo. 

The main problem with the Swamp Thing as a continuing series was constant change of scene in the book which saw the Swamp Thing in Europe and all across the United States. With Wein's departure, Redondo is joined by writer David Michelinie. Redondo's rendition of the Swamp Thing is quite good and in some ways more effective than Wrightson's at communicating the plant nature of the creature. But Wrightson was virtually incapable of drawing anything that didn't feel gothic, and Redondo's work does not have that immediate horror feel to it. In their first story together the team has Swamp Thing run across some mutant kids who are persecuted by the local town folk. He intervenes but it is the extreme bravery of one of the kids which marks this issue. There are also giant ants, so that's another boost. 

In the next installment Swampy runs up against a strangely intense preacher and discovers that demons can hide where you least expect them. Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane are joined by Bolt and another man in their pursuit of Swamp Thing. It's a dangerous thing to join up with Cable though and many a minor character has paid that price. 

In the third installment Swamp Thing finds himself on an island and discovers a strange woman who is the last of her tribe and her companion, a Vietnam vet who has become a mercenary because he has found living in peace in the United States a supreme challenge. These two are waging a war of liberty for natives of the island and oddly Swamp Thing ends up not being very helpful at all. 

Cable, Arcane and Bolt are back along with an old foe who seeks revenge on Swamp Thing and uses his vast array of robots to try and get that revenge. The gang escape by helicopter but wreck it yet again. 

The gang stumble across a bizarre village in the swamps filled with old folks who seem to behave more like children than anything else. Turns out there's an occult scheme afoot to steal the lifeforce of unwary folks and give longer life to some of those inside the village. 

Bob Haney and Jim Aparo step in to give Swampy a The Brave and the Bold adventure alongside Batman. Bats knows Swampy from the latter's own series when Batman was the first mainstream DC hero to guest-star in the comic. This time it's Swamp Thing's turn when he's captured by a big game hunter and put on display in Gotham . He's just in time to help Batman battle a monstrous plant outbreak in the streets of the big city. 

We get the first true two-part tale in the run when Swamp Thing must battle a version of himself. One of his weird properties is that he can regrow any body part which might be cut off. Once he lost an arm and while he regrew it the original arm also continued to grow and eventually became another Swamp Thing, albeit minus Alec Holland's intellect. In a story dealing with the ecology and Native American myth the two Swamp Thing battle it out. As usual Cable, Arcane and Bolt are along for the ride. 

In one of the most bizarre Swamp Thing tales, he is whisked away to a to a distant outer space habitat which is at once the domain and prison of Solus, a criminal put way for his planet's safety. But he passes his time by kidnapping folks from various worlds and using them for sport. Swamp Thing arrives just in time to assist with an uprising among the assembled aliens. 

Back on Earth Swamp Thing is still in deep trouble when he's captured and taken into an underworld community which is populated by mutated humans and the soldiers who guard them. The mutation was the result of a botched scheme to test yet another weapon underground in the deserts of the Western United States. Swamy is lucky to escape and he ends up in Oregon where he'd grown up. There he seeks his brother. This is Michelilnie's last issue as scripter. 

 

The pentultimate issue marks the debut of Gerry Conway for one issue as there is a seeming attempt to redirect the Swamp Thing comic and move it away from its mystery and science fiction roots and more into a superhero mode. To that end Swampy is given a villain dubbed "Sabre" in a full-blown super-villain outfit and the Swamp Thing himself finds he's been transformed back into Alec Holland. The new logo highlights an attempt to give Swamp Thing a new image and move the character away somewhat from its classic horror roots. 

More superhero action in the final issue as Swamp Thing is really only seen either as a statue or a memory. Alec Holland a new love interest are up against Thrudvang, a new baddie and it takes some old fashioned ingenuity to survive. The next issue is scheduled to guest-star Hawkman, but it never came out. This final issue was written by David Anthony Kraft from a Conway plot and the art was supplied by Ernie Chan and Fred Carrillo. 

But if you get this volume you get what's left of the next issue. It was not completed because of the abrupt axe dropping on the series, but it was scripted by Kraft and fully penciled Chan and partially inked by Carrillo. All of that is included and it's possible see what was on tap for Swamp Thing. For one thing, Swampy was now able to transition between his Swamp Thing and Alec Holland forms, making more akin to the Hulk. Hawkman is tricked into fighting the Swamp Thing and actually loses. Sabre is back but we'll never see what happens. 

We are treated now to four issues of Challengers of the Unknown in which the Challs cross into Swamp Thing territory, specifically the Pennsylvania town in which the alien threat of M'Nagala is alive and threatening the whole world. M'Nagala had first shown up in Swamp Thing #8 and while the threat was stalled it was clear that it was not stopped. Now we see the results of that when Prof is infected by the alien fungus. Weirdly both Swamp Thing and Deadman are drawn into the adventure which eventually finds an ending if not a particularly happy one. The end result is that Swamp Thing is invited to hang with the Challengers and Deadman chooses to do so even though they are not aware of his existence. 

Next is a Challengers trilogy that sees the death-defying team trek to the far future when ferocious monsters start to pop up all over the world, sent from the future for a reason no one knows. Swamp Thing goes with the team along with Deadman to find and rescue Rip Hunter the Time Master who himself has fallen under the sway of the cruel leaders of the future Earth. There is an uprising and the Challs along with Swampy do their best to help it out before returning to the present day and unfortunately cancellation. Swamp Thing is again homeless. These Challenger stories were written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Michael Nasser and later by an up and coming Keith Giffen. 

Old pro Murphy Anderson is on hand to do the art chores on DC Presents #8 which has Superman confront the menace of Solomon Grundy who appears to have come up with a way to make endless duplicates of himself. Swamp Thing runs afoul of the Man of Steel when he seeks Grundy out for his own purposes given that they both are products of the swamp. This story was written by Steve Englehart. 

Marty Pasko is the scribe for the final entry in this collection, a The Brave and the Bold tale drawn by Jim Aparo. Batman chases down a woman who has escaped from prison before she can be killed by her old mates who pulled off a robbery with her. Swamp Thing gets involved, but it's a close thing and tragedy is spread all around. And tragedy will be the order of the day when Pasko joins artist Tom Yeates on a revival of the Swamp Thing's own comic, but that's for another day. 

The character created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson has proven sturdy and has become a star in the DCU. 

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A Look Back!

As we prepare to say farewell to 2022 it's a propitious time to look back and see how the last annum actually performed. Compared to the previous two years overwhelmed with anxiety and dread, I have to give it high marks. The Covid pandemic has been beaten back to some degree thanks to vaccines and while still a worry it's not causing the kind of disruption that it did for quite a while. 

On the political front the dullard who once occupied the highest seat in my land has dwindled and I hope is about to go into the West. November's elections showed that his ability to pull forward his acolytes is minimal at best and the party which sold its soul to him is now at long last prepared to move on. They are far worse for the experience, having for the most part continuing to offer support to the lout even when he sought to overthrow the very government he pretended to lead. Hopefully he can go back to bilking his willing slaves and let the public business get on with itself. And it has been doing decently under our current leader, a quiet but effective president who actually does things instead of only ever just braying on about them. 

Women are the worse for this year though thanks to a Supreme Court that now seeks to make them second class citizens without full command over their own bodies. The constant irony of halfwits clucking about being "forced" to wear a mask while simultaneously applauding a decision which forces women to carry a pregnancy to term despite their own choice is grating to say the least. But the upside is that such decisions create opportunities for long-lasting change in laws across the land which will be immune to interference from church-going judges. It is in the hands of the people to rescue themselves from this assault. 

Here at the blog, I've been pretty happy with the results this last year. I wrapped a number of projects which I'd been meaning to get to for some years such as the Tarzan comic strips and movies last summer, and I was happy to at long last get a chance to read the DC Shazam series and report on it. I'm proud of the posts which related to the Holocaust and the book We Spoke Out. With Nazis putting themselves unashamedly forward in the public debate it's wise to keep such vigils. Last February's look at "Blaxploitation" was fun and informative. And the recent foray into martial arts masters such as Thunderbolt, Iron Fist, and Judomaster was a lot of fun indeed.  I've really enjoyed catching up on my Alan Moore readings and there is more (pun intended) of that come in the new year. 

I'm a retired bloke now with lots of time on my hands which makes me happy that I've held onto so much of the reading and viewing I've enjoyed over the decades. Now I have time to enjoy it all again at my leisure and with greater insight and even sometimes greater wisdom. That said, I continue to buy arguably too much new material. I need to explore the existing stacks and I make a vow to do just that. 

So, let's press ahead into the new year (as if we had a choice) and hope that things will get even better. It's not the things which creep behind us that will get us, it's what lies ahead.

Happy New Year by the way! Be safe out there. 

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Saga Of The Swamp Thing - Book Six!

In the sixth and final volume of Saga of the Swamp Thing as written by Alan Moore things really get wild. As the saga begins Abigail has been rescued from her legal problems and allowed to go home, but it's a home without Swamp Thing who was seemingly killed in the war with Gotham City. Actually he'd been disconnected from Earth but found a somewhat safe haven in the depths of space on a blue world, a world of isolation which proved eventually not to sufficiently satisfactory and so he took a gamble and sent his essence off into space once again. 

Where he landed was Rann, the very same Rann so often visited by Adam Strange by means of the Zeta Beam during the Silver Age of comics in the pages of Mysteries in Space. In this two-part tale by the team of Moore and new regular art duo Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala we meet Adam Strange once again as he gets to Rann only to find a "monster" to fight as he so often did in the form of Swamp Thing (now red as per the sparse vegetation of Rann). Also on hand are two Hawk soldiers from Thanagar who are negotiating with Rann for technology to help with their scarcity issues in exhanged for Zeta Beam tech. Turns out not everyone has pure motives and before long Swampy and Strange are battling the Hawks for their very survival. Moore plays around with language in these issues also giving the reader the language of Rann untranslated which seemed somewhat daft to me. 

The next issue is a real change of pace with Stephen Bissette returning to write the story which reintroduces the Patchwork Man from the original Wein and Wrightson run on the series so long before. He's Abigail's father as we learned in that story and now his memories of her have resurfaced to some degree. His body is deteriorating but his reunion with his daughter is touching for them and for the reader as well. 

I'm going to say up front that I did not much like Swamp Thing #60 but I did appreciate the experimentation. I just don't think it worked very well. The art on this one was done by John Totleben and he used collage and other such techniques to try to illustrate an alien technological world and being, one which the Swamp Thing comes into contact with on his peripatetic journey across deep space. I frankly read this one twice and I just couldn't make it out. Not helpful was Moore's text which was over wrought and seemed written more for sound than sense, very poetical but to my eyes at least rather obscure. 

Much more to my liking was the next issue which had the Swamp Thing land on a world of sentient vegetation, so that when he tried to infuse his intellect into it he was in fact displacing and abusing the people of the world referred to only as "J586". I assume that's the designation for the Green Lanterns as this world is lucky enough to have one who helps eventually to separate Swamp Thing from the sundry folks he has possessed. That possession is not without consequence to some of the inhabitants as for a short time they shared a consciousness and that sharing resulted in too much information for some. 

Rick Veitch takes a stab at writing as he and his inker Alfredo Alcala work to present Swamp Thing's encounter with the New Gods, in particular Metron. It's a very trippy issue as most of them have been as the series recently. Swamp Thing works in tandem with Metron to attempt to penetrate the Source and for a time they think they have done. They are disabused of this notion by Darkseid who is interested in what motivates the Swamp Thing on this odyssey across the stars. He does learn and as usual uses that information to help his strategies for the future. Swamp Thing is allowed to continue his journey. 

In the penultimate Alan Moore issue Swamp Thing at last comes to Earth. Chester Williams, the hippie who had turned on a few folks to the magic of the weird yams that sometimes tumbled to the ground from Swamp Thing is a mainstay in the strip now, helping Abigail get her focus back with some environmental work and in this issue meeting Liz Tremayne, still recovering from her captivity with Barclay for the first time. As we encounter old cast members, some of the men responsible for planning and attempting to execute Swamp Thing end up dead in a number of strange ways, all having to do with plants. We sense that Swampy is back even before we see him. 

The last Moore issue is illustrated by three artists -- Tom Yeates, Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette. Alredo Alcala binds the styles together with his lush pen. The story deals with the reunion of Abigail and Swamp Thing as they bond together in a number of ways and share what they've learned in their forced separation. Swamp Thing is debating whether to use the enormous powers he has to help stop hunger in the world at large. His answer to this dilemma is drawn from his time with Parliament of Trees and he understands that his role in the world is not to save it from itself really. All the time this is unfolding we meet a strangely familiar fellow named "La Bostrie" who is poling a canoe into the story yet takes no part in it. Moore writes himself out of Swamp Thing almost literally as Swamp Thing and Abigail are shown at peace at last. The cover by John Totleben sums up the mood of the story quite well. 

Overall these are very very weird stories and to my mind Moore and at times the artist indulge themselves at the detriment of the clarity of the storytelling. Moore's writing throughout this volume is loquacious to a fault and at times I frankly can't make out what he means. It's intended to be poetic, but it sadly becomes pedantic. More Moore is not better than less Moore when it comes to to Swamp Thing at the very least. That wraps up my look at Swamp Thing. I've read nearly a hundred Swamp Thing stories by a range of very talented folks and it's a saga I'm glad I finally undertook, if it was perhaps several decades late. It's back to Berni Wrightson and Frankenstein this week as Halloween approaches and other things that go bump in the night as well. 

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