Swamp Thing: Swamped

[alicemacher]

From Swamp Thing #22 (March 1984).

Abby and Matt, returned from Virginia, find "Alec" lying unresponsive and rooted in the swamp. Jason Woodrue's explanation as to why only makes Abby further distraught. (She even throws up when Woodrue points out the possibly-edible tubers growing on her friend's body. Woodrue, in contrast, later cooks and eats one of them.)

Meanwhile, we get a series of glimpses at the Swamp Thing's nightmares as he struggles inwardly with the transition out of his human identity, starting with the memory of "his" wife, Linda.









That's Woodrue again, glad to be rid of those pesky meat-humans so he can continue to explore the Swamp Thing's embrace of his plant nature--and thereby learn himself what it truly is to be a plant, not a plant-human hybrid. Back in his lab, he takes a flower clipping from the Swamp Thing's body and connects it via EEG device to his own brain.





"No point at all," says the Swamp Thing. Ignoring the protests of his "humanity" ("This is the human race! You have to keep running, or you get disqualified!"), he lies back and lets his body smother and absorb it.

Meanwhile, Woodrue communes with the Green, finding himself "Swamped..."









Fun fact: According to inker John Totleben, Moore, Bissette and he intended Woodrue's EEG device as a smokescreen for how he really tapped into the Green: by eating one of Alec's tubers. At that point, of course, the title was still operating under the Comics Code and thus they couldn't actually depict psychedelic drug use, but Totleben pointed out that the panel in which Woodrue eats it shows his pupils notably dilated. Sneaky! Some months later, as we'll see, the comic no longer had to take such restrictions into account, allowing the creative team to get seriously trippy with depictions of the tubers' effects.

Comments

[kamino_neko]

I can't stop laughing at 'I come from Holland'. (The 'Nazi worms' context is in that weird space where I'm laughing at the absurdity, while still shuddering a bit... *Illinois accent* I hate planarian Nazis.)

[lego_joker]

Man, Moore might be remembered as one of the Founding Fathers of the Dark Age, but in reality the man's love of puns probably rivals Terry Pratchett's... though I don't think Pratchett ever mined it for comedy like this.

(Also, I'm not sure why the Hazmat-suit alien is part of Swampy's nightmares... in its debut issue (#10, I think, of the original Len Wein run?) it turned out to be entirely peaceful.)

[laughing_tree]

Heck, you can even see a lot of the formalist play in Watchmen as an extension of his fondness for wordplay. A person standing on the edge of a building in the same panel a word balloon mentions feeling "on edge" and stuff like that.

That's a big part of what makes Moore so readable. Even when the actual plot's kind of pedestrian, you can enjoy the cleverness he puts into it along the way. (If you consider puns capable of being clever, WHICH I DO.)

[tcampbell1000]

What he could have done with CAPTAIN CARROT AND HIS AMAZING ZOO CREW...

I loved the puns because there seemed something Shakespearean in the way he was celebrating and having fun with this new language (of comics) at the same time he was using it for more serious explorations. One of those elements inspires the other a lot of the time when you're in a new field.

[alicemacher]

The puns also help to lighten things up, while still preserving the underlying drama (again, rather like Shakespeare did). Moore is widely held responsible (and has even sometimes blamed himself) for helping start the "grimdark" trend in comics. And in fact much of his work, then as now, is pretty dour.* But his Swamp Thing run isn't grimdark at all. There's drama (and, of course, horror) aplenty. But there's also a good deal of humour and, more importantly, a sense of fun, an element missing from comics (not necessarily by Moore) that are truly grimdark.

*Leaving aside Moore's humour series such as The Bojeffries Saga or D.R. & Quinch.