Stephen R. Bissette

What elevates this volume for me is its elegant reshaping of the Persephone myth within the Swamp Thing arc. Abby’s descent to Hell during Arcane’s supernatural winter, and her ascension to Earth during natural spring, are clear parallels. Moore folds the ancient myth into a modern mythology in which Earth itself, through its elemental agent, wards off death, retrieves life from Hades, and renews itself in the consummation of spring. At its heart, this volume is a parable of panentheism, show more in which the new Eve eats of the new Adam’s fruit in a final rite that unveils Moore’s knowledge of good and evil: that the cosmos is all divine and all one. Life and death, love and hatred, God herself/himself, all are reversible patterns of the single deified reality that renews itself in an eternal cycle of horror and grace. Sure, we slogged through some purple prose and grotesque imagery to get here, but I can appreciate the artistry of cramming all this into a DC comic premised on a man turning into a plant. show less

Maybe I've read too much Moore lately. Maybe it was a mistake to read this right after his run on Miracleman. Maybe I'm just discovering that I'm not as much a Moore fan as I thought I should be.

This wasn't terrible. Not at all. But I didn't find it as earthshakingly good as everyone (including Len Wein, the guy that created the Swamp Thing in the first place) says.

Let me explain...

Way way back in the late 70s, somewhere around late 77 or early 78, we'd just moved to a very small town in the show more middle of nowhere. I knew no one, and I was bored. I had to wait for my mother who was doing...something...so I walked down to the local variety store, looking for something to grab my attention. I tried the paperback selection on the spinner rack, but there was nothing there that I wanted. I moved to the comic book spinner rack and again, it was slim pickings. However, there was this thicker comic..."The Original Swamp Thing Saga" that caught my eye (mostly due to the gorgeous Bernie Wrightson art). I paid the ungodly amount of fifty cents and went back to where I was waiting for my mother, and I started reading this collection.

...and it blew my fifteen year old mind.

The art. The story. The actual writing. The art!

I couldn't tell you how long the wait was for my mother, but I can tell you I probably read that book cover to cover at least three times, and enjoyed it more every time. I continued to collect those reprints, that eventually covered the first ten issues and I loved them all.

So, yeah, Moore? He had big shoes to fill. And so did any artist who was brave (or foolish) enough to follow Wrightson.

Moore's big claim to fame was the separation of Alec from the Swamp Thing. Okay. Fine. I can take that, but it felt like it also drained much of the pathos from the story as well. Instead of this tortured man in monstrous form, now we get...a monster who sleeps in a swamp and lets the rain fill in his eye sockets? We get a very confident monster who calmly reattaches his arm and punches someone with it? We get...a basic hero?

Sorry. Yawn.

I will say that I did enjoy Moore's take on at least one of the predictably silly villains DC is famous for. The Floronic Man was slightly less silly. But when Moore took on Jack Kirby's The Demon—that I can see Moore totally loving because he gets to write his dialogue in rhyme—it just felt...chaotic. It didn't do much for me. Add to that a kid who's constantly spelling things out, and I just kept thinking...yep, here goes Moore, becoming all Moorey as usual.

And, side note: did the original Wein/Wrightson series not have its share of silly villains? Sure it did. But somehow, Len and Bernie made it work. It was entertaining, instead of being dark for dark's sake.

Like I said, it's probably me burning out on the curmudgeon that everyone seems to adore, but overall, I found his incarnation of the Swamp Thing to be far less relevatory than the original Wein/Wrightson version.

And it didn't help that I really disliked the Bissette/Totleben artwork, with the preponderance of heavy parallel line shading that seemed to obscure more than delineate, and characters' faces that seemed to change from panel to panel with no consistency. As well, the colouring—which should have helped clairify the muddy artwork—seemed to muddy it up even more.

Overall, I can see how, in the mid-80s this might have felt groundbreaking, but to me, it just changed the entire shape of Swamp Thing, and ruined it for me. show less

Alan Moore is good, isn't he? He brings the weary, philosophical fatalism to the Swamp Thing that defined this character (for me, at least). I thought the Swamp Thing's identity-crisis would play out at greater length, however. After a convenient vegetable threat Swampy seems to have accepted his fate and identity without too much in the way of Shakespearean introspection and soliloquy. Well, I suppose he did almost disarrange himself which could be the vegetable equivalent of MacBeth-like show more soul-searching.

Honestly, I fully suspect that Swampy's identity-crisis will underpin the rest of the series, and in typical Alan Moore fashion, will prod at the soggy, pulsating whorls of what it means to be human, with a rusty scalpel. Can't wait. show less

This is less of a stand-alone thing and more of a continuation of what the previous volume started doing: blowing up the previous Swamp Thing continuity, and trying out different combinations of action, fantasy, and horror while waiting to see what the series will really be about. The horror story we get here is really pretty simple, and it's based around two characters (Anton Arcane and Matt Cable) that we never had much reason to care about, but it's very effective at evoking dread and show more disgust, and the Bissette/Totleben art continues to be a great fit for this material. Despite all the great monsters they like to draw, and all the well-chosen words Moore uses to tell us what a bad time Abby is having, I think the most effective scene in this involves just a guy sitting in a car talking to a fly. show less