John Totleben

Ah, The Original Writer...I mean...Alan Moore. I think he's trying to be as spiteful and tempermental as Harlan Ellison, but no one can out-Harlan Harlan.

I have to admit, I have a love/hate relationship with Moore, and it typically rears both heads within the same series.

- Watchmen? Loved most of it, hated the ending.
- From Hell? Well researched, not bad, but Moore truly defecates on the mattress at the end. Completely ruined it.
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Absolutely loved show more this...until Moore decided to test the patience of his readers by getting more and more ridiculous.

I could go on, but you get the drift. It feels like Moore starts out with a great idea, and is gung-ho, pedal to the medal with writing like we've never seen before, being taken places we've never been before...

...and then...

...and then it feels like Moore either thinks, something along the lines of, "well, I got away with all of that, let's see exactly how much they'll take before the project falls apart" or else it's simply the case of, "no idea how to end this, so let's just through in some unexplained/really bizarre/left field stuff and walk away from the smoking ruins."

This starts out very well. It doesn't bring comics into a more dark, adult sphere of storytelling, it takes the entire genre and pretty much upends it. Which is good. And then Moore unleashes the darkest, unholiest hell imaginable with a truly unrepentant villain. Also good, though it's something can only be done occasionally.

And then, Moore gets weird. The Warpsmiths. The weird talking aliens. The long long long long long long long screeds of quasi-poetic word jumbles that really add nothing to the plot, but they fill pages.

And then Moore decides to paint in his new world as gods would remake it, which goes really hard with the heavy-handedness.

I guess what I'm saying is, in the beginning, Moore is there to show you his chops, and to entertain the heck out of you. But then he turns into that homeowner who's held a party but now decides he wants everyone out so he starts acting obnoxious and petty and loses all interest in entertaining you. Instead, he'll just annoy you until you leave.

So, yes, this was absolutely the game-changer everyone says it was, but then Moore...well, I guess the best way to say it is, he got Moored to the idea that he could do anything he wanted and we'd love it.

Some probably even do, but not this kid.

Four stars for the game-changing bits. And one star off for all the bits I had to basically skip over because they were dumb. show less

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