Swamp Thing: Roots

[alicemacher]

"Making the Justice League fit into a horror book was largely a problem of approach. What I decided to go for was a more oblique and shadowy representation of the JLA. They appear a little weirder and ominous and more frightening, unknowable entities of immense power that sit up there in space and watch over the affairs of men."
--Alan Moore, The Comics Journal 93 (Sept. 1984), 84.





Woodrue's recording states that, at the Green's behest, he's made the world's plant life output ten times the normal amount of oxygen, which will render the atmosphere flammable and destroy humankind within a year.





Back in Lacroix, Swamp Thing confronts the Floronic Man, who assumes he's returned from the Green in order to share in the destruction. Woodrue offers the "swamp god" the life of the woman he'd hoisted in vines the previous issue. Instead, Swamp Thing punches him and rescues her. Woodrue calls him a traitor and uses his control of plants to subdue him. A brave elderly local man tries to save the day by fetching his trusty chainsaw, Evangeline.





Fortunately, Swamp Thing manages to free himself in the nick of time and break Woodrue's arm. He tells Woodrue his actions are hurting the Green.





Actually, fungi also produce carbon dioxide, as do plants themselves at night. But I wouldn't tell Woodrue that.





As Woodrue runs off screaming, Abby asks her friend what he meant by saying he wasn't Alec. He says Alec is long dead, from the lab explosion.

"And who are you?" asks Abby.

"I? I am... the Swamp Thing." He assures her that he's happy with who he is and they embrace before he returns to his beloved swamp.

Also returning (rushing) to the swamp is Woodrue, who's now decided he's not a plant, but a human. Reaching his makeshift lab, he hurriedly dresses, puts on his wig and sprays on his artificial skin. However, he's let his bark grow out for too long, so when Superman and Green Lantern find him there, this is what they see:







"...and meet the sun."

Next: a visit from Jason Blood.

Comments

[lego_joker]

So! Moore's Swampy's first "superhero" adventure! It's very gripping, with great lines by the pageful, though the way Moore cheats with the science gets a little more annoying on every reread - the crux of Woodrue's crusade is that Earth's plants (most of them, at any rate) did fine without animals for millions of years, which is objectively true. For Swampy to go "Nah, man, we totes need the meatbags" shouldn't have swayed either his fanatic "VENGEANCE OF THE GREEN" side or his cold, calculating scientist side.

(Maybe Moore was aware of this, even at the time; thirty-odd issues later be seeing... whoop, spoilers...)

(Oh, and check that "Human like you" page - seems Moore got the whole "all freaks go to Arkham, even when we're nowhere near Gotham" ball rolling. Karen Berger-edited books seemed especially fond of this; everyone from Doctor Destiny to the freaking Cheetah - who's not even American - would get shoved in there.)

[tcampbell1000]

You piqued my curiosity, so I did a little reading and... not sure I'm seeing the cheat here. We could talk about the Great Oxygenation Event and mass die-offs in the planet's history, but I feel like the basic theory here is correct in broad strokes: if you kill all the O2-breathers by making more of your waste product than they can handle, you've set yourself up to choke to death on your own waste.

The only thing I might take issue with is that both sides are talking in terms of complete extinction, when it's more likely that some life on both sides would survive... but not much compared to what there was. Let's say less than ten percent, assuming the plants followed Woodrue's directive as long as they could.

Even the first time I read the story, I was cocking an eyebrow at what seemed like a huge flaw in Woodrue's reasoning, and so I was really satisfied when addressing it turned out to be the climax.

But I don't think swaying Woodrue was key here, necessarily. The JLA, the Swamp Thing, and Woodrue all seem to agree that this isn't a simple matter of Woodrue controlling all plant life on Earth. As Zatanna says, that's a manageable problem: all you'd have to do is fly him up into the stratosphere and punch him to sleep. The issue is that Kingdom Plantae has appointed Woodrue its commander-in-chief, and removing him wouldn't keep it from following his last orders. Hitting him with a simple question he can't answer, though, topples his authority. Nobody wants to serve in an army with a less than 10% survival rate.

You're probably dead right about the Arkham thing, though. Cripes, no wonder the Joker gets out so often: he's got people capable of creating holocausts by force of will as cellmates.

[alicemacher]

"The issue is that Kingdom Plantae has appointed Woodrue its commander-in-chief"

Have they? That's what Woodrue assumes in his madness, and the JLA members, oddly, take him at his word despite noticing he's mad. But no, I think Swamp Thing has it right: Woodrue thinks he's doing the Green's will. And because he managed to tap into the Green (which is what drove him insane in the first place, because his mind couldn't take the sudden awareness of all plant life everywhere), he managed also to take control of it.

[alicemacher]

Furthermore, the JLA simply taking Woodrue at his word is key to the other subversion Moore performs here with regard to the DCU superheroes. When the first-time reader sees the cover and the opening page featuring the JLA, the expectation is that they'll swoop down to the rescue, aiding the Swamp Thing in his battle with Woodrue. Instead, they stand by and do nothing--because they genuinely think there's nothing they can do--while Swampy saves the day. And they never realize it was he who did so. All they actually accomplish in this issue is take the villain away once he's already neutralized.

To be fair, Superman and Green Lantern do perform this clean-up duty with compassion, seeing the pathetic state Woodrue's reduced to. Note that Superman lends him his cape to make him comfortable. Nonetheless, Moore did something which must've come across at the time as unheard of: he wrote a story which opens with and prominently features the JLA, but in which they prove ineffectual as heroes, with someone else winning the battle.

[bruinsfan]

I do think it's kind of odd that Zatanna doesn't take any actions to approach the problem from another angle; say, ceremonially contacting assorted nature deities for their advice/help. With her powerset there are at least things she could try to do to defuse the situation. (For that matter, a team with both Firestorm and Green Lantern on it can make attempts toward undoing the problem of an oxygen imbalance in the atmosphere directly, though counteracting the runaway oxygen cycle of the whole planet may be beyond the scope of what even they can do.)

[silicondream]

I think it's particularly odd that Aquaman, of all people, believes that no one but Woodrue could possibly talk to plants. I mean, talking to nonhuman lifeforms is his whole shtick. He doesn't think there might be any kindred spirits out there?

Also, "Close your eyes and shout timber" is one of the most unintentionally (I assume) hilarious lines ever written.

[tcampbell1000]

Well, maybe! Honestly, it's a little ambiguous right up to the end, where Abby says "He realized the plants couldn't survive without man, and so the plants backed down" and Swamp Thing agrees.

It does certainly seem that Woodrue and the Swamp Thing (can't call him "Alec" right now) get very different messages from the Green, which at least implies that their nature shapes their response to it. But elsewhere in the text, the JLA talk about a "mass-plant mind" that Raven can telepathically reach but not fully understand.

It never really occurred to me to doubt the JLA's tactical assessment. It's radical enough that they're completely ineffectual in this story except as a cleanup crew, despite the way Moore mythologizes them. I figured he'd at least grant them the dignity of knowing what they're talking about.

[silicondream]

For my part, I have to agree with lego_joker; the science here is pretty garbled. Woodrue's plans are fatally flawed for a bunch of reasons, none of which Swampy correctly identifies.

Woodrue plans to ignite the oxygen in the whole atmosphere—but oxygen doesn’t burn by itself. Oxygen helps other things burn. And in a global firestorm, the fuel could only be the plants themselves! Earth’s forests and grasslands would be committing fiery suicide in the hope of taking the animals along with them. The few surviving plants would shortly starve to death from lack of sunlight; the smoke from a worldwide fire would be worse than nuclear winter. Land animals would only go extinct after the plants, because they can still scrounge for food in the dark.

…and meanwhile a lot of small animals would survive underwater anyway, because the seas wouldn’t burn, and toxically high oxygen levels couldn’t penetrate to all depths of the ocean.

But Swamp Thing’s counterargument doesn’t work either. Like alicemacher says, plants don’t need animals to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, because almost every other living thing does that too: fungi, protists, bacteria, and plants themselves. If you eliminated the animals, the other decomposers would happily munch on their corpses while using up all the surplus oxygen.

Even worse—remember those fires? Fire is the rapid conversion of carbon and oxygen into CO2! The fires themselves, and other forms of chemical oxidation, would regenerate all the carbon dioxide required by surviving plants. Again, no animals needed.

So oxygen overload is a red herring here. The real problem is that "Let's set ourselves on fire to hurt our enemies!" is a terrible tactic unless you're Orion fighting a Martian.

[tcampbell1000]

I'm starting to get a bit self-conscious about debating the scientific integrity of a comic old enough to have its own midlife crisis. I know that "planarian worms" thing was disproven, and I would kinda hope that our understanding on this front has moved forward too.

Still, saying "the other CO2-exhalers will just take up the slack" seems a bit oversimplified itself. The fungi would probably have similar problems to those of animal life and if plants could make enough CO2 to sustain their own photosynthetic needs, there wouldn't have been a great oxygenation in our planet's history. The one-celled creatures would probably thrive in this newly oxygen-rich environment, and EVENTUALLY life might restore some balance, but would that happen in time to prevent the end of humanity or a mass plant asphyxiation?

Hard to say that's certain, especially since the amount of O2 produced is kind of a magic variable: Woodrue's plants just decide to produce more, which is pretty much impossible, but no more or less impossible than anything else the plants decide to do in this story. Whether or not we agree on the science at the surface here, I think we can all agree it's only a veneer to dress up the fantasy, which is something you can say about most superhero or horror stories or a fusion like this one.

Still, one more thing's worth clarifying: Woodrue does not plan to ignite the world's whole atmosphere, exactly, just make it so dangerous that civilization as we know it is unsustainable. His vision of the end of humanity is slower and more sadistic than the phrase "it is the day" would imply ("the first to die will be the very young and the very old... the rest of you will live in an atmosphere so inflammable... you will regress to the Stone Age, and beyond. Within a year, you will all be dead"). It's an interesting variation on a lot of superheroes-vs.-the-apocalypse stories, where the timetable is measured in hours, not months.

[lego_joker]

I'm afraid my view is a bit miscolored by poor memory and general conflation... basically, when I espoused my view, I was paying very little attention to how Woodrue specifically said he'd be killing off the meatbags, because I'd conflated his powers with the ones Swampy himself shows off later in the series. "Jack up oxygen, let the town burn itself" is just one way a self-appointed warrior of the Green could kill off the meatbags; if in a week or a month or a year he/the Green in general figures it's self-defeating, he/they could always switch to just making oaks grow out of people's stomachs.

But on careful reread, I guess such things wouldn't have occurred to Woodrue in the first place. He's just nowhere near as creative as Swampy is/will be.

[silicondream]

I'm starting to get a bit self-conscious about debating the scientific integrity of a comic old enough to have its own midlife crisis.

Ha! Just forgive those of us who have been grousing about this same issue for almost that long.

I know that "planarian worms" thing was disproven, and I would kinda hope that our understanding on this front has moved forward too.

Yeah...but...IMO, this story overlooks major facts that Moore could have looked up in any encyclopedia since the 60s or 70s. I’m not talking about the details of ancient-earth biochemistry, but about things like oxygen not being a flammable gas. And Moore being Moore, I hold him to a higher standard than a lot of comic writers because the science seems to matter for him. Ditto for Morrison, Ellis, Waid...they write good science hero yarns, even if it’s not hard SF by any stretch of the imagination. So when they screw up on some well-established factoid, it’s jarring to me. (I will never stop being grumpy that Morrison once had Animal Man copy bacteria. Never.)

The fungi would probably have similar problems to those of animal life

They really wouldn’t, though. Most fungi are more resistant to oxygen poisoning than animals or plants, and they reproduce fast enough to bounce back after any series of fires. All they need are dead things to eat.

We can actually see this after a lot of ancient environmental catastrophes. Animals and plants temporarily vanish from the fossil record, but fungal numbers go through the roof. Supergod was dead right on that point.

and if plants could make enough CO2 to sustain their own photosynthetic needs, there wouldn't have been a great oxygenation in our planet's history.

Just to clarify, the great oxygenation occurred before plants and other CO2-exhalers even existed! The first photosynthesizers were anaerobic bacteria; oxygen was deadly to them, and they produced little or no CO2. But the eukaryotes—including plants, animals and fungi--evolved in the newly oxygenated environment, which is why our bodies can treat oxygen as a power source instead of a toxin.

In fact, there was a later period in the Carboniferous where oxygen levels were almost double what they are today...and both plants and animals thrived under those conditions. That was the era of the giant insects, and the vast rainforests that produced our modern coal deposits. And more wildfires, yes, but wildfires are pretty ineffective at causing mass extinction.

The one-celled creatures would probably thrive in this newly oxygen-rich environment, and EVENTUALLY life might restore some balance, but would that happen in time to prevent the end of humanity or a mass plant asphyxiation?

Re: the latter, yep, it absolutely would. Woodrue’s catastrophe would occur on the scale of months, as you mention, while most microbes can double their numbers in a matter of hours. Balance would be restored as soon as enough biomass burned or rotted, and Woodrue’s plan would produce a whole lot of fire and corpses. There would be no lack of CO2.

Now, whether humanity would survive...harder to say. We’re pretty fragile. People living at high altitudes would have the best chance--lower oxygen levels up there, and less wildfire risk. The real extinction threat would be that “nuclear” winter due to all that smoke.

(Of course, none of this really applies in the DCU. By the time the situation gets that dire, Green Lantern and Firestorm have recycled the planet’s entire atmosphere, the Flash and Superman have shrunk down all surviving humans and stored them in bottle cities, and then the Justice League starts clearcutting forests until the oxygen levels go back to normal. Man, now I want to see an Adventure-era version of this story where the heroes triumph by becoming complete anti-environmental maniacs. How’s that white kryptonite taste, you uppity ferns? Oh, the Green’s still trying to fight back? Toss the Amazon rainforest into the sun, that’ll send a message! We can always replace you with docile imported flora from Rann! MWAHAHAHA...I digress.)

Whether or not we agree on the science at the surface here, I think we can all agree it's only a veneer to dress up the fantasy, which is something you can say about most superhero or horror stories or a fusion like this one.

Eh, again, I don’t really agree with that. I don’t think Moore’s or Millar’s Swamp Thing runs would be nearly as compelling if there wasn’t an undercurrent of scientific reality, to them. This might be a really shallow example, but think of Woodrue’s climactic line when Swampy resurrects: “You can’t kill a vegetable by shooting it in the head.” That works because it’s true; it’s not just a superpower the author made up. Plant biology and ecology have all these stranger-than-fiction aspects to them, that we normally don’t think about, and Swamp Thing gets to embody that by going up against mutants and vampires and triumphing through his sheer plantness. Heavily embellished, I realize, but still.

Woodrue does not plan to ignite the world's whole atmosphere, exactly, just make it so dangerous that civilization as we know it is unsustainable.

But Woodrue expects all the animals to die, not just the humans. So there must be enough fires in enough places to cook or smother every critter on earth, directly or indirectly. Or else there must be enough oxygen to actually poison all those animals directly. And yet, the plants will be spared? Does not compute.

[tcampbell1000]

Honesty compels me to admit that I misread some work on fungi and the Great Oxygenation, and to thank you for bringing me to confront this. Now I probably have to write a story that uses this information, just to demonstrate to myself that I can.

What I meant to say with the more general stuff above is that if you scratch any superhero or horror story hard enough, you're going to find impossible things because that's the sheer nature of those genres. Assuming reasonable scientific consensus, plants can't think, plants can't move, plants can't superoxygenate, et cetera. The best one can do is build an insulating layer of science on top of that, but I'm willing to admit, having looked at it again, that the insulating layer here is indeed a bit patchy.

But even if you'd have to change the wording, I do very much like the climax, in which it becomes clear that Woodrue-- who, remember, is a brilliant botanist who has not only altered himself but discovered the Swamp Thing's true nature-- has grown so addled that he's forgotten basic ecology.

Moore does at least take pains to convince us that this League isn't capable of operating on the scale necessary to counteract Woodrue's insurrection, as various ideas are brought up and shot down, though obviously there's only so much you can do to sell their helplessness in four pages or so. Yeah, surely they'd probably try something else eventually, but I'm at least willing to buy they wouldn't resolve matters as quickly or with as little collateral damage as Swamp Thing's simple "Dude, come on."

[zylly]

I’ve always bounced between finding the whole “over people” thing poetic and deeply cynical.

[repto]

The way that the JLA is always shown in shadow, and almost always above the camera, really helps sell the "god-like beings watching us from above" angle.