Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book Two

written by Alan Moore
art by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben
(additional art and inks by Shawn McManus, Rick Veitch, Alfredo Alcala, Ron Randall, and Berni Wrightson)

Though Swamp Thing has now more or less settled into thinking about as an altogether different creature than Alec Holland, whose memories and consciousness he continues to wrestle with, he is still haunted by the man.  Holland is the gaunt, white ghost Swamp Thing occasionally sees in the swamp, staring at him from a distance.  He is also the invisible dead man standing between him and Abigail Cable, the man whose name she continues to call him.  "The Burial" is his chance to set his memory and his bones to rest.  Swamp Thing revisits the fire at the barn, the explosion that claimed the life of Alec Holland and his wife Linda, a love whose memory still lingers in Swamp Thing's mind.  And so he watches his own birth from Alec's grave.  But it is the memorial, his burial of Holland in a grave dug by his own hands and marked with a root from his own arm, the knowledge that this is where Alec Holland lies, that allows them both to leave the other behind.

Moore can be quite brutal to his heroines, and Abby Cable does not escape him.  Following the quietly elegiac "The Burial," Saga of the Swamp Thing begins its Anton Arcane trilogy—"Love and Death," "A Halo of Flies," and "The Brimstone Ballet"—a psychological and physical onslaught targeted, perhaps, at Swamp Thing, but Abby is the carnage.  Her naked bloody body, wrapped on itself and prostrate in a foetal position, and her empty horrified eyes betray her trauma, though we do not yet understand why.  Her uncle Anton, thought dead, possesses the body of her husband Matthew Cable, seduces her into a world she wanted for them—a new house, a job for Matt, a renewed romance—but it is a front for ushering horrors back across the Styx, Blackriver Recorporations.  And it starts a ripple of evil across the country.  With sadistic glee and egomaniacal certainty of his victory, Arcane kills Abby.  Though Swamp Thing, with a growing sense in his identity and abilities, is able to defeat Arcane and a newly (though temporarily) reincorporated Matthew is able to revive her body, her soul remains lost in Hell, unjustly discarded by Arcane.

"Down Amongst the Dead Men"—Swamp Thing Annual #2—is Swamp Thing's κατάβασις, his mythic descent into the underworld.  Like Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante before him, all willing and living visitors to the lands of the dead, his journey is a series of meetings, encounters with those recently and long since dead, and a series of guides:  a newly deceased mother and her son; Alec Holland, finally at rest after his burial; his wife Linda, whom he cannot bring himself to meet, only glance at from afar; Deadman; the Phantom Stranger; the Spectre; the demon Etrigan, who aided him in the capture of the Monkey King; Sunderland; and ultimately Arcane.  His quest, though, is not for conversation—as Odysseus with Tiresias, or Aeneas with his father Anchises—but to rescue Abby, the Eurydice to his Orpheus.

Swamp Thing has his epic descent; Abigail Cable has her dream vision, her own metaphysical visit to the "abandoned houses" of Mystery and Secrets.   In a move that would presage Neil Gaiman's Sandman Dreaming, Moore re-imagines the earlier DC horror titles and their hosts—brothers Cain and Abel, of the first story, caught in an endless cycle of murder and resurrection—in their lonely houses on either ends of a Kentucky graveyard, the keepers of story.  It is here, from the mouth of bumbling Abel, that she hears the story of another Swamp Thing, Alex Olsen.  It is, in fact, Len Wein and Berni [sic] Wrightson's original stand-alone Swamp Thing story, published in The House of Secrets #92.  Moore transforms a continuity inconsistency into a rich and suggestive mythology, a series of Swamp Things created as guardians in times of need, "sour times" as Abel puts it, each reliving a cycle of love, betrayal and death.  But, like most dreams, Abby wakes and soon forgets, her forfeit for choosing a secret instead of a mystery.

If his horror is gruesome and depraved, the very worst mankind can inflict upon itself, his love story soars.  "Rite of Spring" stands out not only in the collection or the series but also in the medium as an erotic triumph.  The obstacles to their romance, especially after depriving Swamp Thing of his human soul and any chance of a human body, are conspicuous, particularly to Swamp Thing himself.  Despite her gesturing overtures and her often expressed admiration for his seasonal beauty, he cannot imagine she would desire him, finding their physiological differences inevitably "unpleasant" for her and any notion of conventional sex anatomically impossible.  He is wrong about the first and improvisational in light of the second.  He literally grows a piece of himself for her to consume, a tuber that gives her a vision of world as he sees it, a vision in which she can see herself as he sees her.  It gives substance to the bumbling attempts at erotic unity the rest of us humans strive fruitlessly to attain with our sexual pleasure.  Also, apparently, he tastes like soft lime and cardamom.

The outlier of Book Two is "Pog," a strange and strangely melancholy ditty, a gorgeous and loving pastiche of Walt Kelly's classic comic strip Pogo, in which the cartoonish residents of the Okefenokee Swamp are transformed into space travelers in search of a new home after their "lady" was destroyed.  They are not naïve, but their vision of the world as it could be, as they long for it, is distressing in its impossibility.   "Shipboss" Pog is not burdened by cynicism, but he is hounded by dwindling hope in ever finding a home.  It makes their thwarted optimism about this new swamp all the more devastating.  When Bartle—counterpart of Albert Alligator, once advised by Porky Pine, "Don't take life so serious, son...it ain't nohow permanent"—is killed by a congregation of alligators and his lifeless body so grievously mourned by the Hystricide—space-traveler Porky Pine—it is achingly evident that there is no home for creatures like this.

Collects Saga of the Swamp Thing #28-34 and Swamp Thing Annual #2:  "The Burial," "Love and Death," "A Halo of Flies," "The Brimstone Ballet," "Down Amongst the Dead Men," "Pog," "Abandoned Houses," and "Rite of Spring"

ISBN:  978-1401225322

Dial H #7

"Strategies of Multitude"
written by China Miéville
art by David Lapham

And thus enter the Dial cults.  There are rumors of a new relic, something Dial-related that has its worshipers piqued.  But, despite traveling around the world—Prague, Nairobi, Tokyo, and Perkingham(?)—and posing as acolytes in various costumes worthy of an Abbott and Costello movie, Nelson quickly discovers that "secret cults are boring" (Dial H #7: 4) and perhaps unsurprisingly unforthcoming about their mysteries.  Not to be stonewalled by clandestine mysticism, Roxie formulates her own plan to impose an epiphany on Paris's spiritual leader of Dial religion.  And, with Nelson off-stage prompting her missed lines of their scripted and rehearsed gospel (in French, no less), Roxie transforms before him into an over-sized, half-mechanized super-woodlouse.  No doubt, it would have been disappointing if it weren't also a miracle.

Meanwhile, a new likely villain arrives in Littleville hunting down information about the event that wrecked Ex Nihilo's warehouse.  He may perhaps have been mistaken for an art photographer by his cabbie, but he's there for more pointed and lethal exploitation.  He wants the Dial...and information on Manteau.

Armed with their own intelligence—gathered with less intimidation though more dishonesty—Roxie and Nelson track the Dial relic to an outpost of Atlantis, a lost temple to the Dials, deep below the ocean surface.  Though I personally would have been more than happy to be entranced by his "poetic reverie" (11), Nelson's Daffodil Host gives way—via "reverse dial" (6-7-3-4), i.e., H-E-R-O backwards—to Roxie's Planktonian, a throng of microscopic, single-minded sea creatures.  The Dial is already gone, and after a fantastically skirmish with a humpback whale, Roxie returns to the boat with nothing but a tattered special forces patch in French and English.  But coupled with the new "meta" in Paris's superhero tabloid, they now know.  The Canadians have a Dial.

Superheroes:  Tree Knight, Asphaltman, Cuttlefist, Cardamom, Shark Mage, [unnamed woodlouse hero], Daffodil Host, The Planktonian, The Centipede

[February 2013]

Starman #8

"A (K)night at the Circus II"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

With the clarity that comes as anger abates, Jack Knight gets a sudden jolt of perspective.

"For a moment there, I thought like a hero.  A big, tough, two-fisted, brightly-costumed hero.  And then I glanced at myself in the mirror."  (Starman #8: 1)

After losing a fight quite fantastically to a circus goon, Knight spoke heroic words, full of bravado and defiance, with little consideration for sense or moderation, words spoken in fiery indignation.  Now he must return for the strange, plaintive blue man with some plan to rescue him...or no plan, mostly none.  But he goes in anyway, partly perhaps out of some sense of obligation to his father, but mostly because someone must.

Jack Knight walks in mostly blind, and he finds his adversary far more powerful than anticipated—an incubus, ironically named Bliss, feeding off of the uniquely savory pain and humiliation of his "freak show"—but Knight finds far more allies than he imagined, weak and sometimes in Bliss's thrall, but eager for freedom and generous with information.  When his victory does eventually, and inevitably, come, it is at the side of Mikaal Tomas, the very man—a brief and very different former Starman—whom he came back to emancipate.  It's fitting enough, but hardly as meaningful or as soulful as Robinson seems to want it.  Instead, the issue's most powerful moment is easily its final splash.  At first glance, its a celebration with Knight's own self-instructions to make sure he receives payment—in the form of posters and props—for his service.  But it's Mikaal's longing and tearful and startlingly unengaged stare at the sky that steals the issue.

"A (K)night at the Circus II" tenses under some of its own anxieties.  There's a kind of uncanny beauty in physical peculiarities, in strangeness itself.  The line between looking and gawking is always a movable one, especially for the person on the other end.  But Starman is also a series that has shown great interest in cultural relics:  previously vaudeville, here the Dust Bowl freak show.  Why a "special person" would be more delectable for Bliss is otherwise unexplained, since other than Mikaal the freaks all seem human.  Starman and Robinson walk a strange line:  these are whole and complete characters with painful insecurities and strong wills, but the comic—like Bliss—insists that they are different, and though Knight may berate himself softly for imagining Tod Browning as an acceptable model for viewing these "freaks," we too are asked to marvel at their (admittedly fictional) oddities in Harris's fine artwork.

[June 1995]

Swamp Thing #9

"Broken Bones"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette (pp. 1-8) and Marco Rudy (pp. 9-20)

Boasting.  The unrelenting habit of villains and heroes alike to brag about their power, their superiority, and their plans.  "Broken Bones" has a lot of fight-talking.

Seethe, ruler of the Rot, is arrogant and cocksure, entirely convinced of the inevitability of his victory.  No doubt, his pride is elemental to his characterization.  There's very little sly about the Rot.  Beyond a few early ploys to cripple its enemies—the assault on the Parliament of Trees by an infected Amazon explorer and the infection accelerated by Maxine's interference in Animal Man—Seethe's strategy has been unflaggingly straightforward.  Using brute strength to construct a stronghold in the desert and amass an army of corpses, the Rot will simply suffocate all life.

Seethe also enjoys gloating.  It is not enough to metamorphose Abby into a skeletal insect queen for the Rot, and it is not enough to dispatch the Swamp Thing, champion of the Green, with little mess or delay.  Seethe enjoys the irony of inviting a newly transformed Abby to kill her former lover as he tries to save her.  Because he is so convinced of his victory, Seethe can imagine no alternative outcome.  This is his mistake.  He underestimates their affection for each other and their defiance of those—himself and the Parliament—who would force them into anything else.

Alec's solution is elegantly simple:  he sweetened her canned peaches with orchid seeds.  When needed, he grew them out of her, breaking the Rot's control over her.  But as always, Paquette and Rudy deliver an alternately beautiful and bleak vision of a mediocre script with a strong story. 

[July 2012]

Dial H #6

"Offensive Content"
written by China Miéville
art by David Lapham

"Offensive Content" is Dial H's rainy-day story, a brief respite from the main action as Nelson and Roxie are trapped inside for the day.  Inevitably, some heroes are more useful than others, but sometimes a "hero" is a danger or a catastrophic embarrassment.  Nelson dials up Chief Mighty Arrow, an obstinate flat caricature of an American Indian chief armed with magic arrows and powered by a magic feathered headdress.  He's a confection of pop culture racist fantasy and ethnic reductivism.  In artist David Lapham's fine imagination, Chief Mighty Arrow cuts a handsome figure with elegant lines and strong features, but his ruddy complexion and parodically mangled English make him little more than a crude stereotype.  And so, he doesn't get to leave the house.

Roxie has accumulated a photo-album of such heroes:  her Refusenik Dossier, a catalog of heroes she refuses to employ even under the guise of Manteau.  Some are racially insensitive—Golliwog—some sexually obscene—Captain Priapus, who probably wouldn't fit under Manteau's cloak anyway—and some historically crude—SS Ilsa.  Miéville's vision for Dial H has always been socially interested, and "Offensive Content" is an opportunity to ruminate on the medium's sometimes unsavory history and blunt, unthinking insensitivity.

But as thoughtful and provocative as his perspective might be, it's also a somewhat unsettling portrait of the psychological risks of dialing.  Nelson incrementally and unwillingly starts becoming someone else.  His irritable impatience might be his own, but his sexism in demanding food from Roxie while he watches TV and his racially callous use of phrases like "heap big" surprise even himself.  He is retrospectively ashamed, but even in the short dialing period, Nelson has some minor difficulty keeping himself himself.  It's a danger he's far too quick to dismiss despite Roxie's sager warnings.

Superheroes:  Chief Mighty Arrow (and his winged horse "Wingy"), Doctor Cloaca, SS Ilsa, Captain Priapus, Kid Torture, Golliwog, ElectroCutie, The Prime Mover, Cock-a-Hoop, Tugboat, [unnamed robot superhero]

[January 2013]

Starman #7

"A (K)night at the Circus"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

I suppose it could be called urban prejudice, Jack Knight's uncanny foreboding in the dramatically rural farmland surrounding Opal City's abrupt city boundary, but in Robinson's sometimes purple but always gripping prose it becomes something almost magical.  His choice of pop culture reference is "American Gothic" by Grant Wood, erroneously interpreted as a husband and wife (rather than father and spinster daughter) keeping their dark midwestern secrets.  A more suitable painting might have been "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth, desolate and grey and seemingly malevolent.  There's a wildness and unpredictability to the landscape, as full of treasures and oddities as it is rife with uncertainty and danger.

It's in this strange, otherworldly territory that Jack Knight stumbles on a traveling circus, a somewhat anachronistic curiosity, a relic from the early century.  But it's the Freak Show that draws his attention, invited to marvel at its peculiar collection of physical aberrations like a warped echo of his own world of superheroes and villains.  Here he meets another Starman, Mikaal Tomas the "cosmic geek", enslaved by a devious carnival operator, who suggestively hints that all his freaks are real.  Deceived by the circus master and attacked by his legion of oddities, Jack Knight is left for dead in the grassy field outside the circus tents.  It is possible that only a few weeks ago, prior to his brother's death and the return of the Mist, Jack would have gone home wondering at the weirdness of his day, licked his wounds, and never returned.  But it is not likely.  It is precisely Jack's sense of justice, offended by the blue alien's enthrallment, that makes him the hero he is.  The staff and the superhero trappings are just decoration.

By integrating Mikaal Tomas, Robinson begins to make good on his tease from Starman #3, his predecessors and fellows scattered around the universe.  It's a promise that lends depth to Robinson's universe, one that reaches into Starman's past for continuity.  Jack Knight would approve.

[May 1995]

Starman #6

"1882 Back Stage, Back Then (A Tale of Times Past)"
written by James Robinson
art by Teddy H. Kristiansen
additional pencils by Christian Højgaard, Bjarne Hansen, and Kim Hagen

The Shade is something of a literary curiosity, a traveler from the milieu of Dickens and Wilde to Robinson's history-saturated Starman series.  He is, in Jack Knight's world, a man out of time, still donning his top hat and stylishly brandishing his eagle-headed cane.  He speaks with a thick poetry and writes with flourish, an aesthete with a particular fondness for the past.  It is perhaps for this very reason that Jack Knight—against his sometimes better judgment—finds him so compelling.  They are, in some strange, anachronistic way, of similar temperament.

But if Jack's defiance is motivated more by a sometimes misguided sense of independence, the Shade is morally slippery to be blunt, as comfortable slaughtering an entire theatre troop as defending a young woman from their predation.  He is a mercenary, if one doggedly faithful to his promises and sincerely invested in the future of Opal City.

"So am I, my boy.  Perhaps little if nothing more...  ...but I am a man of my word." (Starman #6: 6-7)

"1882 Back Stage, Back Then" is a dark little tale, a vaudevillian horror fable of deceit and retribution, of a gentleman who moves through the shadows.  Like Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, alluded to frequently and without much subtlety in the episode, it is a gothic fiction, a Faustian tale culminating in the greedy and lecherous Lune's dramatic death among the carnage of his conspirators strewn across the stage with the devil leering on.  Again, like Wilde, the details are suggestive but opaque:  the waifish, flaxen-haired boy; the lavish, French-styled theatre; the menagerie of carnival performers; and, most of all, the rose he demands as payment from young Wayville and, of course, the missing page in his journal.  Jack Knight is perhaps right in thinking he might not want to know, but the mystery is so tantalizing, we just can't help ourselves.

[April 1995]

Animal Man #6

"Tights"
written by Jeff Lemire
art by John Paul Leon (pp. 1-17), Travel Foreman (pencils pp. 18-20) and Jeff Huet (inks pp. 18-20)

As an interlude in the larger Rot story, "Tights" is only moderately integrated, but as a satire on superhero angst, it's a gem.  Buddy Baker's acting turn in the critically acclaimed indie superhero drama Tights directed by Ryan Daranovsky and released by Liiramax—thinly veiled allusions to Darren Aronofsky and Miramax, respectively—has been a topic of conversation and a source of mild spousal discord from the opening of Lemire's run on the series.  It is just as you might expect:  Batman by way of The Wrestler.  Chas Grant is an aging semi-obscure costumed hero, no longer able to be the hero he once was but unsuitable for anything else, clinging to the last vestiges of his former life.  He's unemployed, teetering on the brink of alcoholism, and desperate for the continued approval of his son, though he does little to support or parent him.

In fact, Tights is notable only in that it employs every cliché.  It is entirely familiar.  The brilliance of Lemire's deconstruction of the deconstruction is the frame device, detectable only in the final few pages.  Baker's son Cliff uses the remaining battery on his smartphone to watch his father's movie.  Unlike the agonized superhero character Red Thunder, Buddy Baker is relentlessly devoted to his family.  For much of Animal Man's early arc, Ellen, Cliff and especially Maxine are as central to the story as Buddy.  The juxtaposition between the two re-frames the idea of family for superheroes.  By the time Cliff so realistically quips back—"I was just watching some movie.  And please never say 'porn' again, Dad (Animal Man #6: 18)—we can fully appreciate the shift.  Lemire is, quite simply, re-writing the rules.

[April 2012]

Swamp Thing #8

"Eye of the Storm"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Marco Rudy (pp. 1-9) and Yanick Paquette (pp. 10-20)

Paquette's Swamp Thing design wins the episode.  Alec Holland emerges not as the sometimes soft (if powerful), mossy swamp foliage of most earlier incarnations, but a rough warrior armor-plated with thick, gnarly bark, masked with horned branches, and sprouting dense, leafy wings.  His rage is palpable, which is good, since most of the issue is dedicated entirely to his first real battle with the Rot.

Seethe has built a dead kingdom, erected out of bones and carcasses, festering flesh made animate by his will.  And he speaks from the rigid mouths of his dead hordes.  It is certainly a grotesque sight, and Rudy's architecture is suitably bleak, if not particularly surprising.  The layouts, often echoes of flies, a fractured vision of decay that takes a kind of insect anatomy, are intriguing and fine complements to Paquette's earlier cellular and floral patterns for the Swamp Thing's green world.

Alec's instant affection for Abby, an emotional echo of a life that wasn't his, continues to be the series' best element.  When she emerges transformed, Seethe's queen with a hardened black exoskeleton and sharp, piercing teeth, it is a blow for Alec, seemingly overmatched by his would-have-been lover, but the ultimate fate of Abby never really feels threatened here, though the mechanism for her salvation is more difficult to discern.

[June 2012]

Dial H #5

"Disconnected"
written by China Miéville
art by Mateus Santolouco

"A few days ago I was just some guy.  I'm still just some guy.  Some guy working with his best friend's murderer to rescue an old lady superhero.  To fight a supervillain and an angry void."  (Dial H #5: 1)

"Disconnected" resumes the hunt for Abyss, a ravenous nothingness consuming all light, threatening to turn the world into a cold, dark, lifeless rock or perhaps to eat it into nothing.  Dr. Wald, a.k.a. Ex Nihilo and now superhero Hairbringer, was so hubristic that the assumed the creature would show some allegiance to her for bringing it back into the world, but the nullomancer soon discovers otherwise.  Forced into strangely amicable cooperation with Darren's murderer the Squid and now finding himself in equally strange collusion with a villainous mastermind, Nelson and Wald collaborate to turn the Abyss's small offspring voids against their parent/maker.

It is, perhaps, a convenient solution, but one with wonderfully unexpected execution and consequences.  Santolouco's Abyss has always been a gorgeously massive and star-filled monster, who glitters with the light it's already devoured.  In magic-logic and poetically symmetrical physics, nothing eating something begets nothing, but nothing eating nothing begets something.  As the befuddled little voidlets eat away at their progenitor, he turns into an awesome and grotesquely crumbling stone statue in the middle of Littleville.  In the words of the Squid, "They'll chew it into dense dead presence" (14).  The Squid, ironically in context, is also gives voice to Miéville's eloquent, beautiful, and a little painful tribute to human language and expression:

"Some people on my world...  ...think the whole of our universe is just the effluent of nihils' predation on each other...   ...that we live in the crumbling corpolite of nul-eat-nul.  That matter is the leftover of void rapacity, like that ugly statue, that abyssal aftermath.  It sounds better in your languages.  I learned 17 when I came.  I could never decide which was my favorite.  Or which voice to use."  (18)

While it grants a greater depth to the Squid, turns a character introduced as little more than a mindless goon in X.N.'s employ into a quietly philosophical and aesthetically minded solon, it's largely ancillary to the main story.  Instead, it's an example of precisely the deep appreciation of human creativity and experience that makes Miéville's thoughtful world so elegant and poignant.

Even as the Abyss and Wald are defeated, another shadowy figure with full command of its Dial emerges out of the Abyss in search of H-Dials, disarming and killing Wald in the process.  Nelson's still-glitchy Dial, which switched off just before the creature emerged onto scene may have saved him and Roxie (Manteau, now unmasked) from a similar fate for the moment, but it already poses a significant threat to any Dial user and stands poised as the next arc's likely antagonist.

Superheroes:  Rescue Jack (un-dialed), [unnamed Swiss Army knife hero], Hairbringer, Atavist, Timekiller, Girl Eclipse, Cock-a-Hoop

[December 2012]

Starman #5

"Talking with David, '95"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

David's a difficult Starman to like.  No doubt, it's partly because most of what we've seen of David is through the eyes of his younger brother, but even when it's not, he's proven to be petty, hostile, and belligerent with Jack.  Robinson doesn't yet illuminate the circumstances of Jacks' graveyard visit with his dead brother, but he takes the opportunity to humanize the elder brother.  David is insecure, unsure of who he actually is, and envious of Jack because he knows, and probably because he's still alive.  But that doesn't keep him from still being an ass.

David taunts and antagonizes Jack from the beginning, steadfastly refusing to tell him exactly where they are—dream and afterlife excluded—just "'cause," though he subsequently tells Jack that it's not his secret to tell, and jumping Jack because he's now Starman, despite Jack being reluctant to assume the role.  Between the two of them, they wreak some havoc on the graveyard, upturning graves and breaking headstones, and they spend most the night trying to repair some of the damage they cause, which unlike destruction, as most superheroes find out, is usually unable to be accomplished with superpowers or extra-special superhero gadgets.  Eventually, the two make enough peace to last a year.  David makes some minor amends, but more importantly he clears the air for Jack to more openly and confidently embrace the hero that he wants to be without the oppressive expectations of what his father and his father's tradition demand him to be. 

The decision to make this a black-and-white issue, aside from David's gaudy Starman costume, is a bold one that pays off in both the general unearthly mood it strikes and the impact that the first full-page, full-color panel of David flying away with the rising sun provides.  Whether or not this coloring choice is indicative of just where they are is provocative but ultimately irrelevant.

[March 1995]

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]

Justice League #23.3: Dial E

"Dial Q for Qued"
written by China Miéville
art by Mateus Santolouco, Carla Berrocal, Riccardo Burchielli, Liam Sharp, Jock, Tula Lotay, Marley Zarcone, Brendan McCarthy, Emma Rios, Emi Lenox, Jeff Lemire, Frazier Irving, David Lapham, Carmen Carnero, Sloane Leong, Kelsey Wroten, Michelle Farran, Annie Wu, Zak Smith, and Alberto Ponticelli with Dan Green

It's got all the quirky erudition and creative whimsy of Dial H with none of the narrative sophistication.  Four young teens, who work as couriers for a local crime boss, steal a Dial.  Add the Q-Dial—which dials up supervillains—to the arsenal of others in the Dial-verse:  H-Dial, S-Dial, G-Dial, J-Dial, and D-Dial.  The teens—Gwen, Al, Ben, and Case—take turns dialing as they flee from boss Tibb and his henchman Nick, trying to reclaim their property.

Ultimately, "Dial Q for Qued" is more a menagerie of dial-able supervillains than a cohesive story.  A new artist is responsible for each page, which is about how long each of the villains hangs around.  For those unfamiliar with Dial H, the effect is likely erratic, with little visual or narrative continuity.  For those already enamored of Miéville's world, it's a delightful presentation of possibilities that weren't.  You're invited to imagine this series as it could have been realized by any or all of these artists.  That it begins with the series' first Mateus Santolouco and concludes with the series' final team of penciller Alberto Ponticelli and inker Dan Green reinforces the idea that "Dial Q for Qued" is a kind of history or possible history.  In this case, the variability—in both supervillains and illustration style—is part of the fun.

KUDOS:  Baba Iago, Miéville's mash-up of Baba Yaga, the creature out of Slavic folklore who rides in a forest hut on giant chicken legs, and Shakespeare's somewhat diabolical villain Iago from Othello.  Ayenbite, a villain of regret, named after an obscure 14th-century Kentish poem.  Jock's unique style, while probably not the most promising in long-form Dial H, brings his moody near-disembodiment to life.  Decalcomaniac, brought to technicolor life by Brendan McCarthy, who draws the substance out of people and onto paper like transfer technique of his namesake.  David Lapham, whose exceptional rendition of the Centipede makes you wish he'd had a short run as artist on Dial H.  Mise-en-Abyme, because there's nothing like a recursive visual effect to wield superpowers.  Kelsey Wroten, whose monstrous Bad Dressage is genuinely creepy, with its skull bridle and over-sized hooves.

"Dial Q for Qued"'s interest in old school telephone—and the memory that old rotary phones don't have a numerical equivalent to "Q"—is matched only by its linguistic archaeology.  Miéville baited his readers into the entirely plausible assumption that to "Dial E" would mean dialing "E," no doubt for "Evil" and probably 3-8-4-5.  Instead, he mines the English language for "qued," which as a noun has been obsolete since at least the sixteenth century and uncommon since the thirteenth.  It's a detail, unlike most of his bizarre supervillains and the superheroes before them, that Miéville is compelled to elaborate, but in general he doesn't spell much out for his readers.  In Dial H, and to a lesser degree in the allusively dense but narratively simple Dial E, you get what you work for.

As a conclusion to Miéville's recently finished Dial H run, this issue is somewhat disappointing, nor is it likely to draw in new readers out of the reeling, whirlwind storytelling.  As a exercise in imagining the possibilities of the idea, it's a intellectually teasing and visually delightful treat.  And it's just like Miéville to end with a tantalizing mystery:  what does the last-minute appearance of Rescue Jill say about Nelson Jent's non-dialed hero persona Rescue Jack from Dial H #4?

Supervillains:  Suffer Kate, Baba Iago, Shell Shock, Electroplax, Ayenbite, Goad, Rent, Decalcomaniac, Ruination, Slub, The Bends, Gloaming, Wet Blanket, Byssus, Mise-en-Abyme, Bad Dressage, Captain Quag, Frontal, Gallowman, Topiary Rex, Recluse, The Stink, Mechasumo, Huldra, Snail Devil, Piñata

Superheroes:  Rescue Jill

[November 2013]

Animal Man #5

"Food Chain"
The Hunt, Conclusion
written by Jeff Lemire
art by Travel Foreman and Steve Pugh
inks by Jeff Huet

"Food Chain" certainly raises the stakes for Animal Man's gruesome horror.  So far, this series has demonstrated a gift for slight suggestions to make your skin crawl.  The third Hunter's tongue-tentacle creeping up Ellen Baker's nose, for instance, is unnervingly gross.  However, the vision the emissary of the Rot gives to Buddy Baker is genuinely horrific.  If his bloated and puss-filled face weren't horrible enough, the vision of his Rot-corrupted daughter literally eating his still-living face off his skull is monstrous.  Since no superhero comic in history has ever allowed its villain to triumph so completely, the veracity of this vision is undoubtedly to be questioned, but it nevertheless presents Animal Man with a dangerous conundrum, one that potentially pits the survival of the world and his young daughter against the lives of the rest of his family, including his own.

Maxine, stronger than even she yet knows, feels her father is losing his fight and summons the animals in the woods around her grandmother's farm to his defense.  Unfortunately, this proves to be a trick of the Rot, which nests itself in those same living creatures, essentially hijacking them, infecting them like a plague.  And, also like a plague, this threat spreads.  Once it has been introduced into the animal kingdom, it will spread like wildfire until all the Red is infected by the perversion.  The Rot, as the Hunter so proudly proclaims as it is being devoured by the wildlife, has already won.

However harsh Mary Frazier is to Buddy in his absence, in the crisis itself the woman comes through, even showing a little of her humor.

Cliff notices former avatar of the Red, Socks, talking:  "The cat talks!"
Mary, clutching the cross around her neck:  "That you're surprised by?"
(Animal Man #5: 13)

She's a difficult woman to like, an easy one to understand, but when she cries after having to leave her dog behind in their sudden escape from her home, she's incredibly sympathetic.  After all, no one likes to see a dog die.

[May 2012]

Dial H #0

"Sundial H for Hero"
written by China Miéville
art by Riccardo Burchielli

DC's "Zero Month" couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time for Dial H, since it interrupts the series just before its last issue in its first story-arc.  That said, "Sundial H for Hero" capitalizes on the mythology-building potential of, if not an "origin" story, an early chapter in its history to introduce some very compelling and substantial twists.

Laodice is a particularly fine protagonist, one that could easily carry her own mini-series.  Under attack by what at first seems to be an invading army but turns out to be a giant Middle Eastern dragon Mušhuššu made famous by the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, she uses the mysterious sundial to call up a hero to battle the beast.  Dialing one of the ten symbols each of four days at noon, despite being derided as crazy by her fellow citizens, she becomes Bumper Carla, a fierce, brassy heroine in jeans, polka dots, and an electrified bumper car, who defeats the devastating dragon.

And that's only half the story.  Years later Stratonice, a girl during the dragon attacks, returns from her travels seeking additional knowledge about the mysterious dial that saved their home.  She returns without success, but she attracted attention with her questions and arrives back home to find a strange prisoner asking about the Dialer.  Unfortunately, in the melee with the dragon, the Dial was inadvertently destroyed.  Thinking the stranger an assassin or a wizard who would be enraged with this knowledge, Laodice keeps her secret and refuses to speak to the prisoner.

The real surprise, however, is the arrival of Bumper Carla herself.  Before this, the Dials presumably had manifested superpowers for their users out of nothing.  Confronted with the very hero she dialed hurling accusations of theft and murder, Laodice—and, by extension, we readers—realizes that dialed powers are borrowed, or perhaps stolen, powers.  The consequences of Laodice saving her own people from the dragon is that many in Carla's world were killed.  To avenge them, Bumper Carla kills Laodice and willingly faces banishment to the "still zone" by Slim, unconvinced that her accusations of spirit theft could possibly be true.  In one deft swoop, Miéville has exponentially enhanced the stakes of his series.

Superheroes:  Bumper Carla, Dead Hood, Arrowmaid, The Needler, Power Squirrel, Nuclear Punch, Slim

[November 2012]

Swamp Thing #6

"The Black Queen"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Marco Rudy

"The Black Queen" is about Marco Rudy's dark deathscapes.  The Parliament of Trees is burning, William is absolutely convinced of the Rot's victory, and Abby is being absorbed and cocooned by the Rot's dead emissaries, but it's the visions of destruction—the victory of the Rot—that propels this issue.  Cities of bones and rotting flesh, chess queens built of corpses, and swarms of undead birds attacking Holland provide the tone for the issue, since little happens in the plot.

Emotionally, Swamp Thing hits the right notes, even if they're not particularly deep.  They try to be, don't get me wrong, and I like the burgeoning romance between Alec and Abby, the echoes of simultaneously familiar and distant feelings.  However, Swamp Thing has had neither the time nor the story to earn the kind of dramatic turn it attempts here.  However, Alec's change of mind, his regret at failing to assume the mantle of Swamp Thing earlier, seems genuine less because the Parliament is falling than because he doesn't have the strength yet to defend Abby.  His pleading to make him the Swamp Thing is for her, to mount a rescue of her from the Bone Kingdom and to keep her from the horrible transformation that apparently awaits her.  Abby's plea for death is perhaps more difficult to accept just yet, but her defense of Alec as he makes his escape is not.

[April 2012]

Starman #4

"A Day in the Opal"
written by James Robinson
pencils by Tony Harris
inks by Wade Von Grawbadger

Jack continues to bring his off-beat pop culture perspective to bear on his fledgling superhero career.  He may have grown up in a superhero family, but he never understood their world the way they saw it.  Instead, he makes sense of his own life through the things he loves:  pop artifacts from bygone eras, art house film, urban myth, and his city's art and architecture.

"What?  No.  Look, I hate to sound rude, but this is all a bit too...   ...Bergmanesque for me.  Weird, half-finished bits of sentences.  Strange stares.  Pregnant pauses.  That might work in a Calvin Klein commercial, but not with me.  Actually, I'm thinking of Felliniesque, aren't I?  Man, how embarrassing... getting my "esques" mixed up."  (Starman #4: 14)

And he's talking to just the right man:  the Shade, who also sees his own life in its relation to the art of his age, loves Opal City and its textured past, and suspects Jack might be something special that he doesn't even yet realize.

Robinson's prose can get a little purple; his description of the music of Opal City—admittedly in the florid imagination of Jack Knight himself—is humorously absurd.  But his ability to quietly give a fairytale tone to his superhero series is welcome.  This is nowhere more apparent than in his description of the mystical Hawaiian shirt, designed by mysterious artist Harry Ajax and supposedly showing the way to heaven.  Likewise, the shirt—never shown in the issue, but sold by Knight out of his new stock to a representative of Swiss businessman Albert Bekker, who disappeared (like Ajax himself) immediately after procuring it—is joined by another supernatural pop-art artifact, an animated street poster that sucks in a melancholy passerby.  Neither attracts much attention from Starman, yet, who's more preoccupied with re-establishing his shop.

[February 1995]

Animal Man #4

"The Rot"
The Hunt, Part Four
written by Jeff Lemire
art by Travel Foreman
inks by Jeff Huet and Travel Foreman

Like Swamp Thing's Alec Holland, Buddy Baker finds his family, his personal life, caught in the crossfire of competing life (and un-life) forces, and unfortunately for him, his only teachers in the Red are the Parliament of Limbs, a collection of fused-flesh former avatars.  In the words of Ignatius, a.k.a. Socks, the avatar who chooses to leave the Red to help Baker and Maxine, "No price is too steep to protect the child.  You know that.  Your years here have made you complacent" (Animal Man #4: 14).  Though most may once have been human, they are no longer.  They see only the epic potential of young Maxine and cannot sympathize with Buddy's paternal love, though they have no trouble exploiting it.

She's extremely difficult to like, but the inclusion of Ellen's mother in the Baker family dynamic adds to the credibility of Lemire's Animal Man.  Baker's too damn lovable to warrant his in-law's unfettered criticism, but it can't be easy watching your grandchildren live so close to a world so dangerous.  The irony, of course, is that it's not at all Buddy Baker who's brought the danger into their family, but Maxine herself, for whose protection Buddy was granted the special powers he uses as a superhero.  It certainly undermines the possible validity of Mary Frazier's shrewishness.

Foreman has delivered excellent and creepy artwork for Lemire's unusual anatomical story demands, but here he really gets to shine.  The conclusion to Animal Man's fight with the two Hunters is all flesh and muscly sinews, but it's Maxine's full-page explosion of the Hunters over her father's bloated, misshapen body (4) is beautifully grotesque.  Likewise, the two-page spread illustrating the perversion of the Hunters Three, former avatars of the Red seduced by the promise of power beyond life, is a fine use of negative space and organic, fluid lines (11-12).

[February 2012]

Swamp Thing #5

"Dead Meat"
written by Scott Snyder
art by Yanick Paquette

If William Arcane's slaughterhouse beasts, the assembled parts of dead cattle and pigs, weren't disgusting enough, their evisceration by Holland's roots and trees is downright stomach-churning.  In lesser hands, Snyder's relatively sparse action sequence would have floundered as boring, but Paquette brings his lush illustration style to the grotesque party.  Details—including, for example, the boa and monkey in the opening illustration and the faces in the trees of the Parliament in the last—more than compensate for the sparse dialogue in the issue.

As before, scenes shared by Alec and Abby are periodically stellar.  The two, even when providing little more than exposition, show significant sparks, and for the most part, neither knows what to think or do about it.  Are their feelings any less real because they're somehow reliant on the memories of a dead former Swamp Thing?  Does he know her less because he knows her through another's experiences?  How much of her lover was always Holland, the consciousness Swamp Thing absorbed?  How much was not?  As Alec says, "This is a place between" (Swamp Thing #5: 6).  Either way, she remains the thing he's most willing to fight for.  Each of them, recalling memories of each other from their childhoods, before the other Swamp Thing ever was, feel certain they are warned to stay away from one another.  Perhaps their attraction is a result of each one's perverse stubbornness to resist the call of their respective dominions:  Green and Rot.  Perhaps, though, their perverse stubbornness is the result of their attraction.  Even as the Rot has invaded the Parliament of Trees and William is maniacally and gleefully certain of the Rot's victory, Alec and Abby share their first kiss, something their own and surely we are meant to see a victory, probably much greater, there as well.

[March 2012]

Supernatural: The Dogs of Edinburgh

The Dogs of Edinburgh and Emma of the Isles
written by Brian Wood
art by Grant Bond

It's one of those strange facts of Supernatural that few of its monsters could be considered "local."  Some are universal, more or less—angels, demons and the like—which may be derived from a late-European branch of mythologized Christianity, but which presumably don't geographically discriminate in their interactions with humans.  In other words, they don't belong to any place...on Earth, at least.  The remaining monster-foes are international transplants, mostly though not exclusively European.  It's also one of the show's greatest charms that, wherever it may be filmed (*cough* Vancouver), its mood is very Americana:  classic rock, Detroit muscle cars, and two leads with Texas accents, a predilection for denim and Carhartt, and an appetite for cheeseburgers and beer.  Wood entirely transplants this setting, sending Sam, and eventually Dean, to the Old World to face monsters on their own ancient turf.

In some ways The Dogs of Edinburgh segment of Wood's mini-series, in particular, doesn't entirely fit with the show's account of Sam's college career prior to his father's disappearance in the first episode of Season 1.  The show would have us believe Sam's interest in the "family business," so to speak, was minimal at best, and that, instead, his time spent at Stanford was dedicated mostly to not chasing monsters.  Sam's academic life is re-imagined here with a keener interest in history and mythology than law, and his love life, presumably before beginning to date his would-be fiancée Jessica, more pressing than his school work.  It's not exactly the Sam we know.

The Sam we do know shows up for Emma of the Isles.  Sam—Dean too, actually—is exactly the kind of guy to hop a plane on a moment's notice to come to the aid of a beautiful woman from his past, especially one with Emma's mystery.  Part one:  ancient, undying god (perhaps?) with a pack of obedient killer dogs squatting in a dilapidated 60s-era tenement on sacred pagan soil.  Part two:  selkies, or seal maidens.  Once Dean arrives in Scotland, Wood's series starts to feel a little more like Supernatural, despite the foreign setting.  His Winchester brothers don't strike precisely the same notes as the show, but he's got a quiet, interior appreciation for them that shows itself often.  And sometimes, sometimes, the chords ring true.  Best line:  as Sam waits for Dean's arrival on the red-eye, "Twelve hours to Dean" (Supernatural: The Dogs of Edinburgh: 84).  Second best line:  "So American, your names.  I swear, you two are pulp novel characters" (104).

However differentiable in tone and detail from the CW show, Wood brings a welcome perspective to the life the Winchesters lead.  Emma of the Isles, however improbably romantic her name, offers a refreshingly poetic attitude toward supernatural activity.  Sam and Dean do not appreciate their world, and generally for good reason, since the constant threat that being a Winchester brings prohibits them from seeing the less dangerous parts of that world.  On their first "date," Emma takes Sam to an old quarter of the city where they watch a ghostly funeral procession for a young boy killed by a passing cart.  Emma:  "I think they're so beautiful.  Such profound grief, shared by the entire community..." (20).

Grant Bond's artwork is sufficient but unimpressive and occasionally awkward.  Most of the series seems flat.  His versions of Sam and Dean are almost unrecognizable, and their physicality stiff and ill-proportioned.  Bond is also entirely incapable of capturing the antiquity of the geography that Wood's script depends on heavily.  Dustin Nguyen's watercolor covers, on the other hand, are beautiful and atmospheric.

Collects Supernatural: Caledonia #1-6

ISBN:  978-1401235062