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

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One

written by Alan Moore
art by Stephen Bissette and John Totleben
(additional art and inks by Dan Day and Rick Veitch)

Alan Moore picks up his legendary run on Swamp Thing with his titular hero in the middle of an existential crisis and propels him straight into an identity crisis.  "Loose Ends," collected for the first time in trade format, is—as its title suggests—Moore's chance to wrap up the plot threads and secondary characters started by preceding writer Martin Pasko.  It confirms the death of Arcane immediately before it kills off its title character in a barrage of bullets fired by Sunderland's mercenary army.  But it's Moore's next move that entirely changes the game for Swamp Thing with the legendary issue "The Anatomy Lesson."

It's not often one gets an autopsy of a central character, but that's exactly what "The Anatomy Lesson" is.  Shady tycoon Sunderland brings in one of DC's lesser known characters Dr. Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, to perform the autopsy on the former Alec Holland.  In the course of his research Woodrue discovers that Swamp Thing isn't Alec Holland.  In fact, he never was.  Instead, he's plant life stimulated by Holland's bio-restorative formula to absorb the memories of the former scientist.  Remembering his human body and thinking itself Holland, this plant life approximates a familiar human anatomy out of plant stuff and thereby creates Swamp Thing.  In his sinister revenge on the bullying businessman, Woodrue allows Swamp Thing to thaw, discover the truth about himself, and get his own vengeance against Sunderland.

Woodrue, in turn, becomes Moore's first real threat for the Swamp Thing, who, after learning he was never human, retreats to the swamp and falls into a more vegetative state, abandoning the red world for a green one.  Woodrue fancies himself an avenger for Earth's plant life, a self-righteous and super-powered eco-terrorist with a flair for torture.  But Woodrue's assault on humankind (and, more specifically, Abigail) awakens Swamp Thing, draws him out and shows him just what kind of hero he can be.  As Green Arrow wisely remarks, "We were watching out for New York, for Metropolis, for Atlantis...but who was watching out for Lacroix, Louisiana?" (Saga of the Swamp Thing, Book One: 113 [24: 3]).  It is, and really has always been, a gap in superhero comics, the small town.  They may come from rural towns or be raised on farms, but superheroes have a tendency to gravitate to the cities.  All crises happen in the world's (or worlds') metropolises, but Moore has given us a hero for everyone else.  As Superman acknowledges when he and Green Lantern collect a disgraced and abandoned Woodrue for Arkham, "Let's just be grateful that there's something watching out...for the places no one watches out for" (132 [24: 22]).

Woodrue, however important in igniting Swamp Thing's superhero career and bringing him back out of his plant-like forgetfulness, and the Justice League, however famous (and, here, a little clueless), fall short of this first collection's finest guest appearance:  Jason Blood.  And Moore certainly knows how to write his entrance:  "The hotel was not the best, but it was the most atmospheric.  The devil checked in at noon" (136 [25: 2]).

The three-issue arc beginning with "The Sleep of Reason..."—one whose titles allude to Goya's etching "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos," Agee's screenplay for Night of the Hunter, and one of Etrigan's finest (and most ominous) rhymes respectively—also settles Swamp Thing into the tone that it would maintain throughout most of Alan Moore's run.  It's a Southern gothic horror that capitalizes on the unique flavor of the Louisiana bayou and its French Caribbean associations with magic and voodoo.  As Abigail begins her new job at a home for autistic children, she discovers that its being preyed upon by a homicidal monkey demon that feeds on fear and was summoned out of a Ouija board.  And it takes a combination of she, Swamp Thing, Blood's alter-ego demon Etrigan, and Paul, the young boy whose parents summoned and were killed by the fear monkey, to take it down.

It also begins in earnest the romance between Swamp Thing and Abby Cable, perhaps the finest love story the medium has yet to deliver.  Though still married to Matt Cable, often drunk and increasingly misogynistic, Abigail and Swamp Thing show growing fascination with one another, and though their care for one another was evident earlier in her persistence in finding him in the swamp and in his return to consciousness to save her from danger, they touch flirtatiously, he pulling her under the water—"playing Creature of the Black Lagoon" as she puts it—and she noticing the seasonal changes in his "skin" tone.

Collects Saga of the Swamp Thing #20-27:  "Loose Ends," "The Anatomy Lesson," "Swamped," "Another Green World," "Roots," "The Sleep of Reason...," "...A Time of Running...," and "...By Demons Driven!"

ISBN:  978-1401220822