Dan Day (1)

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

I definitely enjoyed this one, and it was Alan Moore in good shape (certainly better shape than that mass of who knows what known as From Hell, which I tried to read and dropped). Anyhow, I was familiar with the character of Swamp Thing, but I had never really read it. So, this makes a pretty good entry point as Moore reimagines and gives us a new story. The gothic element is strong in this series, and it is one I enjoyed. It is something I don't see in many comics any more. Though this show more series came out in the 1980s, it still holds up pretty well now. And the art is actually pretty good. Worth a read. show less

I've heard so much over the years about [a: Alan Moore|3961|Alan Moore|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1304944713p2/3961.jpg]'s legendary run of the Swamp Thing. The character itself intrigued me, if only due to knowing of its horror reputation as something often praised. Like Frankenstein's Monster, however, I never quite expected it to be so beautiful. Alan Moore breathed life into a creation more beautiful than it's creator, and weaved together plotlines surprisingly relevant to our show more world today. There's a timelessness to this story that often doesn't exist in the post-comic censorship years of comics; too many people went too grim-dark with the power they were given - Moore's restraint is beautiful.

Alan Moore quite literally deconstructed the Swamp Thing. He resurrected him as something wholly different to Alec Holland, and infused him with a consciousness more than human only after he decided to give voice to the green. Holland turned from a mere horrific monster bent upon revenge, and then trying to reclaim humanity, to a creature at ease with his new identity. He became certain of himself and in the voice of the earth - a Green Man archetype without the trickster notion thus far.

I eagerly look forward to continuing to read this run. Somehow, it's even better than I expected it would be. [a: Alan Moore|3961|Alan Moore|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1304944713p2/3961.jpg] truly is one of the great masters, and man does the artwork do his prose justice. show less