Swamp Thing Annual #2

[arbre_rieur]

In which the creative team introduce something new to the Parliament of Trees: Politics...















So he gives it a shot. He tries to create a duplicate of himself.













He meets Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, the plant that thought it was Holland but then learned the truth.







(12 and 2/3 pages from a 38-page issue)

Comments

[arilou_skiff]

Didn't marine animals predate land plants?

[cainofdreaming]

Yes, life first formed around the hydrothermal vents, 'black smokers', and it wasn't reliant on photosynthesis down there since light doesn't reach there. Algae probably came before what we usually consider as the regular marine stuff, though.

[zapbiffpow]

I liked this story, and the fact that the "original" Swamp Thing is living some semblance of a peaceful retirement at his Blue Heaven there. Worried about the politics, though: this ain't gonna turn into no Guardians of Oa deal, will it?

This series and Animal Man are living in some sort of underrated zone right now.

[md84]

I liked the way Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is considered the paragon.

[arbre_rieur]

And the idea that, even though it's the paragon, one shouldn't just emulate it. That the real lesson to take from it, to actual path to success, is to chart one's own course.

[leoboiko]

Kind of disappointed at how… human all these greens still are, down to the leafy furniture and clothes and tools and even an animal epithet. It feels like the human world with a reskin. I've been spoiled by the real alieness of Brandon Grahan's Prophet, I guess.

[porcupine_advocate]

They're about as human as Gaiman's Endless, I'm guessing.

[md84]

Not all that surprising, since they all used to be human. Except for the Alan Moore Swamp Thing who only thought it used to be human.

[cainofdreaming]

Not all of them. Humans are really Johnny come latelies when it comes to the Erl Kings, there's been Swamp Things long before humans came to be. From plants to trilobites to dinosaurs, all have been chosen. At least that's how it used to be. Dunno about Nu52.

[draganoche]

it's the same in some other pages we get to see dino and trilo swamp things, my personal favorite was a samurai avatar

[misanthr0pe]

Maybe the inclusion of human avatars is what brought politics to the green and that's something I think we would dominate at.

[cainofdreaming]

Have you tried to lobby a T-Rex to support your political agenda? And, heck, they've got the freaking Tree of Knowledge in their membership so I doubt that humans have that big an advantage anyway.

[thezmage]

I thought Swamp Thing had wings now?

[zapbiffpow]

I think that was some kind of ultimate power-up, like Dragonball's Super Saiyans . Haven't really followed the series until recently, but I think it's a temporary form.

[zabilac]

I can't help but that Holland!Swamp Thing looks a little plain compared to some of the other other Avatars.

[md84]

Maybe it's a sign that he's clinging to his humanity.

[mrosa]

This new take on the Parliament is so petty... I applaud Moore for having created beings with a distinctively non-human outlook and worldview; here, though, it's just human cabinet politics, down to a plant creature aping what I presume to be some 18th century wig-wearing, fat-bellied, port wine-drinking English MP. Just, why?

[arbre_rieur]

Well, the whole point of the denouement is that while Moore's run is the gold standard, one shouldn't emulate it. That instead one should follow the true spirit of Moore's run, which is to follow their own muse. "You know his stories. Do what he would have done. You want to win? Just do it his way." "No."

Not like there's anything intrinsically flawed about human-like characters. The vast majority of fiction's been doing just fine writing about humans, eh? If there's room for both Adam West and the Dark Knight, there's room for more than one interpretation of the Green.

[mrosa]

I don't have anything against human-like characters, I loved Moore's Swamp Thing with his great humanity. What I don't understand is, why the Parliament has to be human-centric took. Why not a bunch of characters who have a different worldview, a different form of writing? You talk about not emulating Moore, but I see things from a different prism, and wonder why a writer would want to balk at the challenge of writing characters from a truly non-human perspective. Honestly, behind the guise of 'not being derivative of Moore' I just see a writer who isn't confident in his skills to write non-human characters, one who just falls back into his comfort zone and gives us the same old same old.

[arbre_rieur]

Why did Moore "balk at the challenge" of writing a monster desperately trying to reclaim his humanity, in the form of the original Swamp Thing who actually was Alec Holland?

Questions like this are built on false assumption. Going in a different direction isn't balking at a challenge, it's going in a different direction.

Are the people who write a campy, pow-biff Batman balking at the challenge of writing the grim 'n' gritty dark detective who shares the same name? That's the beauty of fiction -- It allows for more than one interpretation.

[mrosa]

A monster struggling to retain his humanity is a staple of genre fiction and certainly more commonplace than creating a consciousness that eschews human mentality, a great challenge for any human being, who only has his humanness as a reference. So Moore wasn't balking at any challenge, he was rushing headlong into one.

[arbre_rieur]

Ah, but you could say that trying to do something fresh and new with a commonplace genre staple, where it's much harder to find untrodden ground, is more of challenge than scrapping that to go for something where you have much fewer other antecedent stories as competition.

Anyway, you don't need to defend Moore to me because my whole point is that going in a different direction *isn't* balking at a challenge. Which is why I think this new direction we're seeing now has potential too.

[funbox]

I almost want a gif of those last two panels I love them so much. It's just the simplest, happiest "F*** off" I've seen in a while

[md84]

Normally I don't like stories with the "Be Yourself" aesop since they are usually so ham-fisted about it. But here...it works.

[wizardru]

On the one hand, I don't like seeing the Parliment redefined in this way...on the other hand, the redefinition opens up some great story possibilities and the parlimentarians show here are pretty interesting.

And that ending is really quite good.

[superfangirl1]

I really love the ending.