Alan Moore's Swamp Thing: Loose Ends

[alicemacher]

"The whole thing that the [Swamp Thing] book hinged upon was that there was this tragic individual who is basically like Hamlet covered in snot. He just walks around feeling sorry for himself. That's understandable, I mean I would too, but everybody knows that his quest to regain his lost humanity, that's never going to happen. Because as soon as he does that, the book finishes."
--Alan Moore, quoted in Lance Parkin, Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore (Aurum, 2013)


Moore's 44-issue run on Swamp Thing (2nd series) was a turning point not only for the title (which under writer Marty Pasko was facing cancellation), but for mainstream American comics as a whole. Building on his already groundbreaking body of work for 2000 A.D., Marvel UK and Warrior, he not only more than salvaged that horror title but introduced new levels of formal experimentation, literary sensibility and sophisticated content to the monthly 24-page medium. Without Moore's Swamp Thing, there would've been no Hellblazer, no Sandman, no DC Vertigo, no Marvel MAX. So let's jump right in with his first issue: Swamp Thing vol. 2 #20, aptly titled "Loose Ends" as it clears the board for Moore's new direction. Art by Dan Day and John Totleben.


In Pasko's final issue (#19), Anton Arcane had apparently died in a Virginia airship crash. As "Loose Ends" opens, the genre-savvy Swamp Thing returns to the crash site to find his arch-enemy's body.





Meanwhile, Alec's friends, journalist Liz Tremayne and former Sunderland employee Dennis Barclay (who quit when he discovered the company's evil plans) wake up in a car after spontaneously sleeping together. Walking back to their hotel, Dennis excitedly chats with Liz as though they're already a couple, but she has other ideas.






Abby Cable (née Arcane) confronts her husband Matt about the horrifying monsters following them around lately. She says Alec suspects Matt had generated them somehow, and Matt owns up to it.




With that confession, Matt tries to rekindle their love life, but Abby says she's not ready.




Liz drops into the hotel in order to retrieve Dennis's medical bag and be quit of him. Delayed by an overly chatty clerk going on about the dwarf in Don't Look Now, and by a cowboy-type who offers to get the bag for her, she thus narrowly escapes death from a bomb Sunderland's men had planted in their room.




"...and Dennis Barclay smiles."

That's the last we'll see or hear of Liz and Dennis until Issue 54. They will be very different people then.

Sunderland's men, having (they think) disposed of them, and firebombed the Cables' home (not realizing they were a safe distance away), move on to their final target.




The swamp creature decides to make a run for it, reasoning his near-invulnerability will protect him.

Comments

[laughing_tree]

Len Wein offered Moore the choice between two of the books he was editing at the time: Swamp Thing and JLA. I wonder how the industry would be different today if he'd gone with the latter?

[thanekos]

Either way, we'd have the imagery of " There is a house above the world, where the over-people gather. "

[tcampbell1000]

One strange thing about comic books is that success rarely follows success. When a book is doing badly, a writer has a much freer hand to work with it, whereas if you're taking over for someone who's been tearing up the charts, you're under a lot of pressure to try to keep a good thing going. JLA was starting to sputter at this point but was still considered a "flagship" title, while Swamp Thing was on the edge of cancellation. Alan may have recognized this and decided accordingly. He valued his freedom even then.

Still, it is fun to think about. There are two major possibilities:

1) It wouldn't work, or it wouldn't work that well. There was an established DC fandom for the Justice League, after all, and their reaction to the "Detroit League" era shows that the kind of sweeping change Alan was known for could easily backfire. Connoisseurs would probably still love his brief run on the title, but art don't always mean sales.

2) It would work extremely well, and DC's self-reinvention would end up being even more aggressive than it was, because Alan would be right at the center of it instead of peripheral to it, influencing it, and doing the occasional Superman guest shot.

[alicemacher]

"because Alan would be right at the center of it instead of peripheral to it, influencing it, and doing the occasional Superman guest shot."

In which case, his break with DC may well have come much sooner. As you say, Moore values creative freedom. He also cherishes the right to own his work. If his JLA run were so successful as to bring about an equally profitable, company-wide change of approach to the writing of superheroes... well, it's not hard to imagine Moore testing content limits more and more, while pushing for fuller ownership of his work.

Now editorial may have been willing to bend on the content limits. (In fact, they did so considerably for the Swamp Thing issue "Love and Death" and thereafter.) However, it's doubtful they would've been willing, back in the mid-eighties when the "creators' rights" concept was in its infancy, to meet Moore even halfway on the intellectual property matter (e.g. granting him even the rights to recurring characters he himself created, while DC retained the rights to the stories in which they appeared). So Moore would've left DC, possibly after much less time than in actuality he stayed on Swamp Thing.

There's also the question of whether, even while he was still with the publisher, Watchmen would've happened, or whether Moore simply would've applied some of its elements to JLA. On the other hand, we might have gotten Twilight of the Superheroes after all. The possibilities are mind-reeling.

[tcampbell1000]

It's hard to say! I could see a scenario where taking on JLA would mean Alan staying with the company longer and parting on friendlier terms.

Despite his image as comics' "Mad Monk" and the difficulties of communicating across the Atlantic in the 1980s, Alan formed close relations with his collaborators, closer than were encouraged at the time. He also came to the company with a tremendous love for it. It stands to reason that if he were doing DC's flagship book, he would also be interested in reaching out to the creators working on Superman, Wonder Woman, et al.

Maybe that'd be a decision he regretted, as the creators in those little fiefdoms would resent the intrusion of this faddish Brit-hippie and his rambly, apologetic scripts. But let's say it worked out. If he was that successful, DC editorial might want to make it work out.

At this point in DC's history, Crisis on Infinite Earths would be in the early stages of development and Teen Titans was becoming its biggest hit. Alan's JLA would certainly end up playing a much bigger role in that series and he'd probably end up co-writing it with Marv and George (who would likely welcome the help, TBH, as the difficulties they had juggling all DC's characters made Infinity War look like Life of Pi.)

Twilight of the Superheroes might've happened, maybe even as a flash-forward within JLA, a future to avert.

Watchmen definitely would not happen: some of its ideas would appear in JLA and some of the structural ones might show up in Crisis, but by the time DC inherited the Charlton characters, Alan would not be eager to leap into another large-scale superhero epic. Someone else would get the Charltons and do a passable but forgettable job with them, probably.

One thing would be constant: Alan needs a change every once in a while, because he always tries to work an idea until he's exhausted its creative potential, at least in his hands. And that means it'd be all but inevitable that he'd burn out on DC, though it would be willing to take a chance or two on something new of his.

It would also be inevitable that some creators'-rights issue would break that relationship. A couple of years after Moore left Swamp Thing, Rick Veitch clashed with DC editorial over a respectful portrayal of Jesus in the book, leading to Veitch leaving the series-- I could see the same dang thing happening with Moore's JLA, given time. But the tone of that breakup might've been different, depending on how things went.

[kamino_neko]

Poor alcoholic, manipulated Matthew...

At least he ultimately gets a good ending.

[gnarll]

He got to be a raven.

[captainbellman]

Yes, *do* let's start counting elements of Moore's "Swamp Thing" which got followed up/copied/outright stolen later in Gaiman's "Sandman"...

[strejdaking]

God, started reading this run so many years ago. May have been my first highbrow comic ever. Never got to finish it, dang it. After a long break, I figured that since I'm goign to re-read it form the start, I might as well read the rest of Swamp Thing prior to Moore.

Shame the TVshow probably won't do it justice.

[lego_joker]

Don't get me wrong - the story is as beautiful as the 20th reread as it is the first, but the art just loses something with all that bright digital coloring. I mean, digital remastering largely worked for Sandman so I'm not 100% knocking it, but here mostly just bulldozes the original's murky-yet-beautiful ambiance.

(I don't think the non-digital scans of this ish were ever posted to scans_daily, but for rough comparison here's an ish which was: https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3401112.html.)

By the way - Stephen Bissette gave a behind-the-scenes essay on this particular issue a while back on his own website, complete with snippets of Moore's scripts; the site seems to be down right now, but I've salvaged some links together:

http://mirrorfalls.tumblr.com/post/170891426261/so-apparently-srbissettecom-went-down#notes

[tcampbell1000]

Thanks for this! These are great.

[tcampbell1000]

Swamp Thing #21 gets most of the attention, but #20 is really worth studying, as Alan manages the sort of gentle transition with which sadly few writers even bother. He's clearly got no interest in maintaining the status quo of the old series, but he patiently lets it breathe a bit before euthanizing it, long enough that it's not obvious on first reading what he'll do.

By this I don't mean only Swamp Thing's quest for his lost humanity, which takes a big hit in #21 but doesn't die out entirely for a few more issues (and even then, it depends on how you define "humanity"). There's also the ensemble nature of the book: Dennis and Liz depart in a way that makes the reader think they could stumble back in at literally any point, and Matt, while doomed as soon as Alan depicts him alone, will not leave the series for another fifteen installments or so. And though the Sunderland Corporation would reappear a time or two, Alan pushes a showdown in this issue and the next that will make it less of a constant concern ever after.

Alan's gotten flak in recent years for violence against women in his own work and the work he inspired, which eventually gets you to the "Women in Refrigerators" concept that's still of concern today (see the two most recent Marvel movies for arguable examples). Some of that is deserved (most writers develop tics of some kind, and Moore is definitely one of them), but that has to be measured against two serious mitigating factors.

One, although one or two of Moore's victimized women are straight-up victims, others have stories that continue well past that: they make choices that lead them toward recovery. And two, in the age of the Comics Code and less diverse media in general, he called attention to real-life horrors that virtually no one else was acknowledging. Horrors that I think we sometimes still don't acknowledge enough.

I had a conversation once with a victim of domestic violence who could only speak about it and know that I'd understand because Alan had introduced some of the language into nerd canon. In a later lettercolumn,Swamp Thing casually disclosed that the Liz-Dennis story specifically was drawn from the life of one of Alan's relatives.

For better or for worse, that motif of Alan's more or less begins here. While it's pretty evident that Matt and Abby are headed for trouble, the Dennis and Liz plot is very, very subtle by 1980s or modern standards. You could be forgiven for thinking that the way they go on the run together is a cliched, romantic happy ending of sorts (see, he just needed the right situation to bring out his inner hero, and now she'll see him for who he is, hooray!)... as long as you don't pay close attention to those last few sentences of their arc.

[strejdaking]

I've never seen Moore criticized for fridging. What he mostly gets criticized for is his depiction of rape.