Swamp Thing: Fish Story

[alicemacher]

From Swamp Thing #39 (Aug. 1985).

Upon learning that their missing sons Nicky and Howard were last seen in the water at Rosewood, the boys' parents go looking for them, together with William's father. As they do so, the Swamp Thing looks underwater for the vampires: "This... is the place... where they are safe... and I... have come... to destroy it."

Howard, strung up upside down by the lake, asks the now-vampiric Howard (as the latter hunts and feeds on a rat) why the vampires haven't turned him as well. Howard says they're saving him for the Feast of the Firstborn, as it'll be hungry when it hatches, and "children are caviar" to its kind.

Under the water, the vampires herd the Swamp Thing to the site of the hatching.





Before the Swamp Thing can land a single blow, the Firstborn tears him to pieces, so he lets his body go...









The Firstborn swallows Mr. Shapiro in one bite. Howard's mother Tammy sensibly hurries her husband and son toward their car, and urges William's father Osgood to join them. But the macho Osgood insists on taking the creature out with his shotgun. Instead, he becomes its final victim as the Swamp Thing, his mind centered in the strip of land separating the lake from the river, begins to "flex [his] muscles."







Once the flood has subsided, Constantine meets up with the Swamp Thing and congratulates him for regenerating in only fifty-one seconds.





(The "red skies and funny weather patterns" are a reference to the Crisis crossover, which had recently begun.)

The Swamp Thing answers Constantine with a mere "Perhaps" and lets his body go. John comes across a couple of vampire skeletons slumped over at a bus stop. "Don't worry," he tells them, "there'll be three showing up at once in a couple of minutes." He walks away chuckling.

Next: a woman's curse.

Comments

[tcampbell1000]

The theme of this story is clearly family: the monstrous but oddly beautiful "family" of the vampire community and the human families of the boys in the lake, more imperfect but no less deserving of life. At first, Moore seems to be inverting the idea that the good are rewarded, as Nicky (har har) is the first victim just for being fat and slow and Howard looks to be the second because he has the decency to go back for Nicky when no one else will. But in the end, there's a certain rough justice at work here: Howard and his parents are neither venal like WIlliam's dad nor spiritually weak like Nicky and his parents, and they survive... though that leads to the most troubling part of the issue.

"A kid and his parents survived. They got out to tell the story. The whole point was to stop that happening." Errr... I think we're meant to read this as saying "You should've stopped this sooner, before anyone could bear witness to the Firstborn and could spread the story of its existence." But the phrasing... does lend itself to a darker interpretation, doesn't it? Just how amoral are you, Mr. Constantine?

[zylly]

Constantine’s amorality seems to vary from writer to writer, but at least at this time, I think it’s borne from a “bigger picture” mentality. Stopping the cosmic horror is more important than individual lives to him and they’re acceptable collateral damage.

[alicemacher]

And as we'll see in Issue 48, stopping the cosmic horror is more important to him than his own individual life. "The big, stupid idiot. He saved me. He let them change Judith, and he saved me."

[icon_uk]

I'm not certain it's amorality here, it's a regonition that certain unpalatable truths have to be said. The family surviving to spread the story might lead to more deaths down the line. It's recognising that that that is a dreadful thing to contemplate, but that doesn't mean it might not be true,

Has Constantine ever worked for Amanda Waller? I suspect that could be interesting.

[lego_joker]

Seems like a crapshoot they'll spread the story at all, IMO. Not everyone is that Paul kid - they could be so damn traumatized they retconned the whole night out of their minds as soon as they left the town borders...

... wait, I was supposed to be providing a happier alternative, wasn't I?

[tcampbell1000]

Well, look literally at what Constantine says. This is a "botched job" because "a kid and his parents survived. They got out to tell the story. The idea was to prevent that happening." Since Nicky had captured Howard before Swamp Thing or even JC had shown up, how was Alec supposed to "prevent" Howard's escape? Should he have flexed his muscles some more until Howard's family's car fell into an earthquake and got crushed, Superman: The Movie-style?

The generous reading is that JC has been waiting here even longer than it looks like and he blames Alec for not getting here faster, before Howard was given irrefutable evidence of vampires' existence. Had Alec purged the vamps before Howard could find Nicky, Howard would be left shaken up and wondering, but not sure, and that'd certainly be morally acceptable to anyone involved who was still alive.

Still, Constantine's wording is troubling, and considering that Alec straight-up punched the Demon for proposing a similar choice, I think John only gets away with it because he's giving Alec such a flood of information, in his infuriatingly oblique way, that Alec doesn't really have time to concentrate on this before we've moved on to the topic of Kennescook.

Your suggestion of Constantine and Waller IS really interesting, though.

[qalchemist]

I had this comic as a kid; the scene with Nicky and his mother was particularly horrific and jarring to me back then, and has stayed with me all my life.

Not to the worse, I think - it gave me a good grasp on how to make something truly scary.

[bruinsfan]

It gave me a very strong flashback to the vampire kid at the window in Salem's Lot, which traumatized an entire generation of kids back in the late 70s.