Swamp Thing: A Halo of Flies

[alicemacher]

From Issue 30 (Nov. 1984). Art by Stephen Bissette and Alfredo Alcala.

Arcane, having stolen Matt's body and reality-warping powers, spreads his malevolent psychic influence through the continent.





While doing so, he tells his captive niece that after he died, he rose out of Hell through sheer force of will and found his giant insectoid body.











Arcane's shockwave continues to emanate, causing disruptions in nature, amplifying people's hate into violence, and attracting the attention of the Monitor and his assistant Harbinger in an early pre-Crisis appearance. (There'll be another one the following issue.) The ripples, unsurprisingly, also affect the already-disturbed residents of a notorious institution:





Having dismissed his undead serial-killer servants so they can resume their live-person guises and find new victims, Arcane brings snow to the wetlands. And he reveals himself to the Swamp Thing, who's unmoved by his threats of vengeance until Arcane tells him he has Abby. The Swamp Thing follows him into the Cables' house, then goes up to the bedroom where he finds Abby and attempts to rouse her.

Comments

[zylly]

"The Joker's stopped laughing" has to be one of the spookiest things ever put to page.

And maybe it's just me, but I find the bit with the cat and the baby deeply, deeply upsetting.

[broblawsky]

Did they ever explain how Matt got reality-warping powers?

[alicemacher]

Yes, during Marty Pasko's run. Matt was working for Sunderland's partner agency, the DDI (not yet realizing it was evil) and at some point his superiors decided they needed to erase his memories of certain DDI business. So they told him he'd been selected for a scientific experiment... and gave him electroshock. While that did erase those memories, it also gave him chronic headaches, which is why he took up drinking. It turned out the electroshock was also, through some unexplained fluke, the source of his powers.

[tcampbell1000]

Having wrecked the paradigm he inherited for the Swamp Thing, Alan does the same for Anton Arcane, more subtly. In the early stories, Arcane's main goal was to take the Swamp Thing's body for his own, since he considered it nearly indestructible, and he wanted power and immortality. This was a nice counterpoint to early Alec, who wanted to be rid of the Swamp Thing's body but just didn't want that quite badly enough to let a horror like Arcane have it.

However, Arcane doesn't need to be chasing his old goal now, having found another powerful figure with less strength of spirit. Matt's body may not be as tough as Alec's, but it's youngish and healthy and its powers are much better equipped to work his will directly. He now has everything he wanted in his earlier appearances, including revenge against Alec and his hated niece, and has enough energy left over that he's starting to just fart around because he can. And at this point, Alec's still his focus: imagine what he'll be like with nothing to distract him.

Note there's a bit of a callback here to the Floronic Man, whose power was also defined in terms of geography.

[alicemacher]

Another point of comparison would be Johnny Bates' super alter-ego from Miracleman. Both Kid Miracleman and Arcane, under Moore's pen, are explorations of the question: What would someone with near-unlimited power do if they had (or thought they had) no one to keep them in check? The answer, in both cases, seems to be: end the world as we know it, just for the lulz.

In contrast, there's Dr. Manhattan. His near-omnipotence is a danger to the world not through any malice or sadism on his own part, but because his simultaneous perception of past, present and future has made him so fatalistic and passive that he allows the U.S. military to use him as a deterrent to Soviet expansion.

[donnblake]

I'm also a little reminded by this of Gaiman's take on Doctor Destiny later on when Sandman came out.