Swamp Thing #7

"Swamp Thing"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette

Good lord, this book is beautiful!  Paquette's contributions to Swamp Thing have been exceptional from the beginning—incorporating organic green filigree between panels, inspired both by cellular structures of plants and art nouveau design, and elegant human figures—but in Alec Holland's transformation into the Swamp Thing, his work is invaluable.  As the Green shoots its roots into his body, invading his heart, lungs, brain and blood stream, the juxtaposition between the aggressive green fibers and the pink fleshy matter overlaid on a leaf pattern is both gorgeous and unsettling in its anatomical realism.  The following full-page close-up of the new Swamp Thing's face and eye is brimming with awakening power.  Nathan Fairbairn's colors, while always solid, are rarely as notable as they are here, with the orange fire started by the Rot in the Parliament competing with the newborn Swamp Thing's spreading green, casting shadows and warm, menacing light on the birth.

Snyder's also in prime form in this issue.  It doesn't progress the main plot anymore than can be easily surmised by its cover:  Alec Holland finally becomes the Swamp Thing.  However, it articulates some of Snyder's finest ideas for the relaunched series.  The Parliament, in particular, while it was always a strange and foreign mind, shows itself here to be cold, vindictive, and profoundly inhuman.  Frustrated with Holland for not eagerly assuming the mantle they assigned to him and angry at being infiltrated by the Rot, they use their last remaining power to save Holland long enough to watch them die before dying himself.  But Holland, even as he asks them to transform him, calls them out on their heartlessness and selfishness:

"Though maybe, it's for the very reasons you think us humans so scared and so weak—   —that we were chosen to be your conduits.  Because, as your brethren told me when he visited me in the swamp—   —what we offer you isn't power or strength.  It's restraint.  For a long time, I made the mistake of thinking of the plant world as a peaceful place...   ...a place of beauty and balance and wonder.  But the truth is, it's no different than the Red or the Rot.  It's a force of nature, volatile and wild and conscienceless."  (Swamp Thing #7: 9)

And when Holland is finally turned, he turns not to save the Green, whose own cruelty and vengefulness and inconsiderate persistence he's experienced so much of his life, and not even really to stop the Rot, though he has no love for it; it's for Abby, his lover equally coerced into playing a part she wants nothing to do with.

[May 2012]