Swamp Thing: The Brimstone Ballet

[alicemacher]

From Swamp Thing #31 (Dec. 1984). Art by Rick Veitch and John Totleben.

The grieving Swamp Thing carries Abby's body from the Cables' home just in time for Arcane to blow the house up and taunt him further: "Well, Holland? Have you at last learned despair?" Arcane tries to trick him by claiming her body's just one of his illusions and urging him to tear the head off in defiance, but Alec knows better. It's really Abby, and she's really dead.

Arcane then reveals he hasn't just killed her, but cast her soul down to Hell "just to hear it scream." As Alec picks her body up and runs for the swamp, his enemy boasts of his spreading "apocalypse" and claims there's no one to help him...





Side note: this Monitor-Harbinger appearance, and the one in the previous issue, weren't included in early U.S. trade collections of the series. Possibly DC felt their appearance would confuse readers unfamiliar with Crisis on Infinite Earths, which hadn't itself been collected in trade yet. Later editions restored the pages. This was the right call especially for the present issue, since the Monitor's out-of-character moment here, like that of the Joker in the previous issue, really underlines what Arcane's doing to the world.

Having reached his home turf, the Swamp Thing lays Abby down and tells Arcane there's no need for him to flee any more.







"Some elemental force?" is the first hint that there's still more to the title character's nature that even he doesn't know. There'll be a few more of these.

As the Swamp Thing beats the crap out of Arcane, the "dark souls" he'd summoned to Louisiana stop in their tracks; Sally Parks reverts to her zombie form, enabling the sailor she'd picked up to flee, and the Blackriver Corporations building... melts. Then someone makes an unexpected return.





Arcane's spirit, too weak now to resist, plunges screaming down to Hell. Matt is back--sort of.





Matt crawls over to Abby's body and manages to reverse the slight decomposition and restore her breathing and circulation. "If I can only... reach her soul..."




Alec leaves the comatose Matt (he'll be in that coma for the rest of Moore's run) by the roadside for the police to find, and wonder where his car is.





"...And when I open them... Abby is still dead."

Next: the Swamp Thing harrows Hell.

Comments

[zylly]

The "you have never encountered me before"/"the is our first battle" is a great moment. Really reinforces the idea that Swampy has made peace with what he is and that in doing so, really has become something more than a scientist moping about for a cure.

[tcampbell1000]

Agreed. This is surprisingly solid, given the difficulties of defeating someone whose powers have been described as limitless without it feeling like a cop-out. Of course, sacrifice helps there. Matt's heroism feels earned, but even that is tinged with failure.

The bit where Arcane's all "Oh, she's not dead, I just made an Abby flesh-mannequin to fuck with you" is a little of Moore's dark humor at work, because it's just the sort of bait-and-switch that comics pulled pretty often, especially in the sixties and seventies. It's even a believable lie at first: creating a mock-corpse certainly seems to be within Arcane's power, and he's taking his sweet time tormenting Alec, so why couldn't he be taking his time tormenting them both? He overplays his hand a little when he suggests Alec maul the body, but I get the feeling Alec would've seen through the ruse regardless. An artist cannot create what an artist's mind cannot see, and the beauty of purity, even in death, is beyond Arcane's understanding.

Amazingly, Bissette and Totleben save their most jarring visual for last (or almost last). For most of the issue, Abby looks as if she might be just asleep. Even the snow-mask that settles over her facial features near the end, confirming that she isn't breathing, is sort of a demure, restrained depiction. But that last close-ish look at her, where her brain-dead eyes are open and her mouth is inhaling in a mindless snore, is somehow more of a gut punch than all the rest of it.

[jlroberson]

"There's no evil." Yes, there obviously is, Matt. Just not you, at least not beyond the pettiest ways. You were weak, and you enabled evil. But it doesn't mean there's no evil; we just saw it.

Matt is such an idiot.

[alicemacher]

Many millions of words have been written throughout recorded history on the nature of evil. Is it simply the absence of good, as empty is the opposite of full? Or is evil a phenomenon in its own right? Are there universal, rationally derivable criteria for distinguishing good from evil? Or is the distinction relative to a particular society or situation, and if so, to what extent? Does evil originate from supernatural entities (deities, demons, spirits), from disobeying the will of supernatural entities, from ignorance, from faulty brain chemistry? Are good and evil separate and mutually irreconcilable absolutes, or are they dependent upon each other in some way?

My point being: it's not as simple a matter as that, or the question would've been resolved long ago.

In any case, Moore would revisit the idea of "evil as weakness," in a narrower sense, in a From Hell scene. Prince Albert Victor (aka Eddy) has learned that his dalliance with a shopgirl has indirectly led to the Whitechapel murders, and feels responsible. "I'm so weak, Jem," he tells his tutor and friend as he reluctantly submits to oral sex. "I'm not bad. Just weak."