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.