Swamp Thing #4

"Desert Five O' Clock"
written by Scott Snyder
pencils by Marco Rudy
inks by Marco Rudy, Michel Lacombe and Sean Parsons

William Arcane, murderous child of the Rot newly escaped from a children's hospital, is making his way across Western Texas in SCUBA gear to keep his chlorophyll allergy from killing him before he reaches the desert.  If any sympathy still remained for William's history being cruelly bullied by his peers at the hospital, his needless slaughter of the occupants of a Texas diner for the pleasure of watching them die and a vanilla milkshake shatters it.  And, more importantly, he now seems strong enough to go without his oxygen tank and gas mask to breathe.

Alec Holland continues to resist the Green, though he must endure the never-ending chatter of the plant world during his waking hours and the pompous, patronizing and self-righteous lecturing of the Parliament in his dreams.  They may pretend to be moderate and reasonable, and no doubt they think themselves such, but they are fanatics.  They know history, but they do not understand it.  They refer to eras of struggle against the Rot, cooperation with the Red, but they do not recognize the damage they themselves inflict—like the arthritis of the short-order cook—and they imagine that the Green, by right and inclination, should possess the Earth over the other two.  They speak of sacrifices and warriors, of proud lineages and enemies, and though the threat is near and imminent, they too are warmongers.  And they see Abby as a threat.

Abby, it seems, like Alec is feeling the call herself.  The Rot gathers around her, in her sleep for example, like the flowers around Alec.  The Parliament fear her, predict Alec's downfall at her hands, and push him to preemptively kill her.  But, as written by Alan Moore and followed up by his successors, Abigail Cable (or Arcane, here) and Swamp Thing are one of comics' greatest love stories, and Snyder honors that.  Alec is full of memories that aren't his own, but are nevertheless close to him.  They may not be "his" exactly, but they aren't untrue, and he's willing enough to trust them.

Swamp Thing #4 suffers for being the first in which Yanick Paquette doesn't contribute significantly to the interior artwork.  Marco Rudy does his best to maintain the style of the book, and though they lack the polish of Paquette, most of his organically shaped pages deliver well enough, but his characterizations of Abby and Alec are occasionally woeful, and their conversation on the lawn behind the diner, otherwise a highlight of the issue, languishes proportionately.

[February 2012]