Swamp Thing (comic book)
The character of Swamp Thing has appeared in seven American comic book series to date, including several specials, and has crossed over into other DC Comics titles. The series found immense popularity upon its 1970s debut and during the mid-late 1980s under Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, and John Totleben. These eras were met with high critical praise and numerous awards. However, over the years, the Swamp Thing comics have suffered from low sales, which have resulted in numerous series cancellations and revivals.
First series
Len Wein
The first Swamp Thing series ran for 24 issues, from 1972 to 1976. Len Wein was the writer for the first 13 issues before David Michelinie and Gerry Conway finished up the series. Horror artist Berni Wrightson drew the first 10 issues of the series, while Nestor Redondo drew a further 13 issues, the last issue being drawn by Fred Carrillo. The Swamp Thing fought against evil as he sought the men who murdered his wife and caused his monstrous transformation, as well as searching for a means to transform himself back to his human form.The Swamp Thing has since fought many villains, most notably the mad scientist Anton Arcane and his army of Un-Men. Also involved in the conflict was Matthew Cable, a federal agent who originally mistakenly believed Swamp Thing to be responsible for the deaths of Alec and Linda Holland.
Despite Wein's writing the first 13 issues, only the first 10 issues of the original Swamp Thing series had been collected in trade paperbacks or reprint comics, primarily due to the popularity of Wrightson's artwork, stopping rather than concluding the story arc. Wein ended his run as writer by having the Swamp Thing reveal his identity to Matt Cable and ultimately avenging the death of his wife by killing Nathan Ellery. The full Wein 13-issue run was released in hardcover by DC in June 2009 as Roots of the Swamp Thing, volume 4 of the 9-volume book series the DC Comics Classics Library.
David Michelinie/Gerry Conway/David Anthony Kraft
As sales figures plummeted towards the end of the series, the writers attempted to revive interest by introducing fantasy creatures, sci-fi aliens, and even Alec Holland's brother, Edward, into the picture.The appearance of Holland's brother toward the end of the series marked a series of plot developments, designed to provide the series with a happy ending, which generated much controversy. In Swamp Thing #23, Alec finally regains his humanity and while the creature was on the cover of the 24th and final issue of the series, Holland appeared as human throughout the interior story. The cover illustration showed a yellow muscular creature, Thrudvang, beating up the Swamp Thing; the interior showed Holland imagining the Swamp Thing beating up Thrudvang, in similar positions but with roles reversed—the issue itself depicting Holland and his new love interest running away from Thrudvang. A battle between the Swamp Thing and Hawkman was promised for the next issue, but no such battle occurred until Swamp Thing #58.
During the short-lived revival of Challengers of the Unknown in issues #81-87, also by Gerry Conway, the Swamp Thing returned as Alec Holland who, without continually producing and self-medicating with the bio-restorative formula, reverted into the form of the Swamp Thing. Holland, along with the Challengers of the Unknown, encountered the supernatural being known as Deadman, a fact that would confirm the post-Wein Swamp Thing stories existence in DC Universe continuity years later when Deadman and the Swamp Thing met again during Alan Moore's run as writer. The Swamp Thing also appeared with the Batman twice in The Brave and the Bold #122 and 176 and with Superman in DC Comics Presents #8. In the latter, by Steve Englehart, he tried in vain to stop Superman from committing what he perceived as genocide on 60 Solomon Grundys living in the sewers of Metropolis.
Second series
Martin Pasko/Dan Mishkin
In an issue dated May 1982, DC Comics revived the Swamp Thing series to try to capitalize on the summer 1982 release of the Wes Craven film of the same name. The title, called The Saga of the Swamp Thing, featured in its first Annual the comic book adaptation of the Craven movie. Now written by Martin Pasko, the book loosely picked up after the Swamp Thing's appearances in Challengers of the Unknown #81-87, DC Comics Presents #8, and The Brave and the Bold #176, with the character wandering around the swamps of Louisiana as something of an urban legend that was feared by locals.Martin Pasko's main arc depicted the Swamp Thing roaming the globe, trying to stop a young girl named Karen Clancy from destroying the world. The series also featured back-up stories involving the Phantom Stranger by Mike W. Barr, which led to a collaboration between the Swamp Thing and the Stranger in a guest run by Dan Mishkin that featured a scientist who transformed himself into a silicon creature. The primary artist for the bulk of Pasko's run was Tom Yeates; towards the end of the run he was replaced with Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben. Bissette and Totleben, who had known Yeates at The Kubert School, had been ghosting various pages for Yeates, and were given the assignment on Pasko's recommendation.
In issue #6, editor Len Wein declared, in response to a published letter, that Alec never had a brother and that every Swamp Thing series story after issue #21 of the original series never happened. The letter, however, questioned why the Swamp Thing had reverted, which had already been explained in the Challengers of the Unknown run. A later column pointed this out, so they said they would not deliberately contradict it, even though they would still go from the assumption that it never happened.
The arrival of Bissette and Totleben came as Pasko, who wrote the second Brave and the Bold team-up shortly before he began the series, resurrected plotlines from the original series. Abigail Arcane and Matt Cable were brought back and shown to be married, though this development had a darker side: Cable had been tortured via repeated electroshock treatments by his black-ops superiors over his decision to stop working for the government in order to marry Abigail. The electroshock treatments caused permanent brain damage for Matt, resulting in him being unable to work and, ironically, granting him psychic ability in the form of being able to create lifelike mental illusions. Pasko also resurrected Anton Arcane, now a grotesque half-human/half-insect cyborg with an army of insectoid Un-Men who ultimately cannibalized their creator after the Swamp Thing was forced to kill Arcane.
Pasko left the book with issue #19, which featured the death of Arcane, the second of which, from Swamp Thing #10, was reprinted in The Saga of the Swamp Thing #18. He would be replaced by British writer Alan Moore.
Alan Moore
As Swamp Thing was heading for cancellation due to low sales, DC editorial agreed to give Alan Moore free rein to revamp the title and the character as he saw fit. Moore reconfigured the Swamp Thing's origin to make him a true monster as opposed to a human transformed into a monster. In his first issue, he swept aside the supporting cast Pasko had introduced in his year-and-a-half run as writer, and brought the Sunderland Corporation to the forefront, as they hunted down the Swamp Thing and "killed" him in a hail of bullets.The Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, "The Anatomy Lesson", signaled a change in the character's mythos by having an obscure supervillain, the Floronic Man, perform an autopsy on the Swamp Thing's body and discover it was only superficially human, its organs little more than crude, nonfunctional, vegetable-based imitations of their human counterparts, indicating that the Swamp Thing could never have been human. The Swamp Thing was not Alec Holland, but only believed it to be so: Holland had indeed died in the fire, and the swamp vegetation had absorbed his consciousness and memories and created a new sentient being that believed itself to be Alec Holland. The Swamp Thing would never be human again because he never was human to start with. Woodrue also concluded that, despite the autopsy, the Swamp Thing was still alive and in a deep coma due to the bullet wounds and imprisonment in cold-storage.
Moore would later reveal, in an attempt to connect the original one-off Swamp Thing story from House of Secrets to the main Swamp Thing canon, that there had been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Swamp Things since the dawn of humanity, and that all versions of the creature were designated defenders of the Parliament of Trees, an elemental community also known as "the Green" that connects all plant life on Earth.
The Swamp Thing went catatonic due to the shock of discovering what he really was, after having killed Sunderland in a fit of rage and escaped deep into the Green. Woodrue went insane after attempting to connect to the Green through the Swamp Thing, and Abby had to revive the Swamp Thing in order to stop Woodrue after Woodrue killed an entire Louisiana town. Swamp Thing returned to the swamps of Louisiana, and encountered Etrigan the Demon, then gave a final burial for Holland's bones.
Matthew Cable, gravely hurt in the previous storyline, was revealed to have been possessed by Anton Arcane, and Abby unwittingly had an incestuous relationship with him. After a fight, Cable was thrown into a coma, and Abby's soul was sent to Hell. In Swamp Thing Annual #2, modeled on Dante's Inferno, the Swamp Thing followed Abigail, encountering classic DC characters such as Deadman, the Phantom Stranger, the Spectre, and Etrigan en route, and eventually rescued her.
The relationship between the Swamp Thing and Abby deepened, and in Swamp Thing #34 the two confessed that they loved each other since they met, and "made love" through a hallucinogenic experience brought on when Abby ate a tuber produced by the Swamp Thing's body. The controversial relationship between a plant and a human would culminate in Abby being arrested later for breaking the laws of nature and conducting a sexual relationship with a nonhuman. Abby ultimately fled to Gotham City, leading to a story arc featuring the fourth encounter between the Swamp Thing and Batman. Before that, the "American Gothic" storyline introduced the character John Constantine in issues #37–50, where the Swamp Thing had to travel to several parts of America, encountering several archetypal horror monsters, including vampires, a werewolf, and zombies, but modernized with relevance to current issues. Around this time, Moore had the Swamp Thing encounter Superman a second time, in DC Comics Presents #85. The storyline began with the Swamp Thing's old body being completely destroyed, and growing a new one. Constantine encourages the Swamp Thing to use the power for transportation, and the Swamp Thing learns to do so with increasing speed. The "American Gothic" storyline ended with a crossover with Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the Swamp Thing had to solve the battle between Good and Evil. He also met the Parliament of Trees in issue #47, which was where Earth elementals like him lay to rest after they have walked the Earth, and it was here Moore solved the continuity problem of the first and second Swamp Thing: the first Swamp Thing, Alex Olsen, was now a part of the Parliament.
Although Abby was eventually released, Swamp Thing was ambushed by soldiers using a weapon designed by Lex Luthor. Luthor's weapon destroyed the Swamp Thing's connection with the Earth, whilst the Swamp Thing's body was destroyed by napalm. Unable to regrow a new Earthly body, the Swamp Thing was presumed dead. However, the Swamp Thing's consciousness had instead fled to outer space, in search of a planet that was amenable to his new psychic wavelength. In the first tale of the Swamp Thing's extraterrestrial activities, the Swamp Thing came upon a planet colored entirely in shades of blue, and on which there was no intelligent life. In this particularly popular issue, the Swamp Thing populated this lonely blue planet with mindless plant replicas of Abby and other reminders of his lost Earth.
In issue #60, entitled "Loving the Alien", the Swamp Thing actually becomes the father of the numerous offspring of an alien cosmic entity after she "mates" with him against his will.
Moore's run included several references to obscure or forgotten comic characters, but none so prominent as in issue #32, when he broke with the serious and moody storyline for a single issue. In the story "Pog", Walt Kelly's funny animal comic character Pogo and all of his woodland friends show up as costumed visitors from another planet, looking for an unspoiled world after their own utopia was overrun and destroyed by brutal monkeys.
Moore began a trend of mining the DC Universe's vast collection of minor supernatural characters to create a mythic atmosphere. Characters spun off from Moore's series gave rise to DC's Vertigo comic book line, notably The Sandman, John Constantine, Hellblazer, and The Books of Magic; Vertigo titles were written with adults in mind and often contained material unsuitable for children. The Saga of the Swamp Thing was the first mainstream comic book series to completely abandon the Comics Code Authority ; after the CCA denied issue #29 the seal of approval, DC created an imprint to publish the series under and no longer submitted issues of The Saga of the Swamp Thing to the CCA for approval.