Swamp Thing: The Garden of Earthly Delights

[alicemacher]

"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."
--Proverbs 16:18


From Swamp Thing #53 (Oct. 1986). 13.33 of 40 pages. John Totleben once again takes solo art duties.

The Swamp Thing, in the wake of the authorities' refusal to free Abby, has turned Gotham City into a jungle. While some residents engage in love-ins among the trees, others turn to crime; for example, a Manchester district gang frees the animals from the Coventry zoo.





While Alec and Abby share a tender, remote moment of psychic contact, the DDI higher-ups have an expensive consultation with Luthor.







Night falls. The Swamp Thing breaks off his gloating when he sees the Batmobile, outfitted with circular buzz saws to cut through the trees. From inside, Batman attempts to reason with him, but their response to each other's demand is the same: "I'm afraid that's not possible." So the Dark Knight, equipped with herbicide, steps out.









As the mayor, meeting with Gordon and Bullock, wonders what's been taking Batman so long, the Swamp Thing bursts through the floor as a giant wooden head. He tells them he's bested "Gotham's champion" and presents them with an ultimatum: "Remove my wife... from your prisons... or remove Gotham City from your maps. You have until dawn."


Despite this, a growing number of Gotham residents support the Swamp Thing, for environmentalist or other reasons. A small group goes to greet him in person. Some, like Chester Williams (from #43, "Windfall") and his new friend Wallace Monroe (from #35-36, "The Nukeface Papers") have hiked in from out of town. Others are locals, like six-year old Kirstin Hobermann who, in a scene referencing (and, fortunately, subverting) the 1931 Frankenstein film, offers him flowers.







Dawn approaches. Batman, no worse for wear, turns up outdoors with the mayor, Gordon, Bullock and the National Guard to face the Swamp Thing. However, the Caped Crusader is now having second thoughts.





Fighting off the swarm of insects from a higher-than-normal pollen count, Gordon suggests that the creature must be running out of vegetation to use. Batman points out that there's still the Botanical Gardens, which houses many species of trees, including giant redwoods...





The Redwood Thing announces there are no limits to the damage he can still inflict. "There are plants... in your reservoirs... There is flora... in the human intestinal tract... Do not... tempt me." With a final warning to give him back his wife, he abandons the body and lets it collapse. Batman demands of Gordon an immediate audience with the mayor. This leads to the moment many of you have been waiting to see again:







The Swamp Thing, certain of victory, dimly remembers a "dark" warning about power, but brushes it off. Sure enough, Batman comes by to tell him all charges against Abby have been dropped, and that he's to be outside the court building in an hour. "But if you ever do this to my city again... then I'll kill you."

Amused, the creature says, "Yes... yes, I do believe... that you might."

The Swamp Thing, in a show of good faith, allows the vegetation to decompose, and the media report that the city should soon be more or less back to normal. Meanwhile, however, DDI operatives prepare for their sniping attack. When the moment arrives, along with their target, Wicker tells his men to load the communications scrambler and prepare for launching.

Abby emerges from the courthouse, meets Alec's eyes, and the two run toward each other. Then, just as they embrace:





Alec, sensing something worse is coming (as do Chester and little Kirstin), pushes Abby away. Sure enough, the DDI bombards him with napalm.







What next, indeed? Well, Abby faces another threat back home as she has an unexpected reunion with an old friend... and then an old, er, former friend.

Comments

[locuatico]

I do remember reading this story solely for the scene of Batman with the Mayor. and it was worth it.
I love how Batman reads like he finds the whole situation beyond stupid and can't believe that Gotham is on the brink of annihilation because of a technicality of the law.

[icon_uk]

I will always love Luthor's little scene, highlighting how much of a genius he actually is.

And yes that Batman moment is ALWAYS a treat.

[wizardru]

When Moore chose to write the big heroes, he usually did a stellar job. I remember being wowed at this sequence; Batman isn't getting jobbed here, he's fighting with his own set of restrictions (something both are aware of). Likewise his scene with the mayor is one of the all time greats. You get the sense of Batman not as Batgod, but Dark Knight Detective, here. He's SMART, not invulnerable.

And the Luthor scene gave me chills. "Gentlemen, I KNOW invulnerable." Again, Moore really delivers that Luthor is a genius, whatever else his flaws.

[kamino_neko]

like Swampy comparing his destruction here to Alec Holland's death...I can certainly see how this would be triggering... Even if the memories were technically someone else's.

I kind of have to nitpick Batman's list, even though the guy he's talking to couldn't know he was exaggerating how many heroes he'd have to target (and, uh...the wrong part of the pair is getting arrested in these scenarios, using the Swampy/Abby situation as the model)...

He's totally telling the truth on Starfire, and Kori's never hid that...
Metamorpho is arguable, but he and Sapphire definitely potentially had a thing.
Superman...is an example, but they'd definitely be arresting him for the wrong relationship/arresting the wrong human, since they'd probably assume he was banging Lois and not know about Lana, or any of his other old flames (granted, not all of them were human, either)... Was he with Cat at this point? I forget when that started.
Hawkman...would be a total lie on Bruce's fault...this is way before they started making the Hawks a complete clusterfuck and introduced Fel Andar/Sharon Parker, so the Hawkman and Hawkwoman in play would both be Thanagarian.
Martian Manhunter...him I'm not sure on, but I don't THINK he'd taken a human lover (and certainly didn't have one at the time), so that feels like Bruce fabulating.

[locuatico]

If superman and Martian Manhunter are in a relationship is not the point. but rather that a non-human relationships law would be impossible to enforce and would only anger the superhero community.

it's less about wether or not Superman is Banging someone (other than Batman) and more that, if he was, it would be impossible to enforce because to go against him like that is basically political suicide.

Now, if it was over underage relationships, I think that's a different story that Hal would love to tell.

[agharta75]

Hmm. Superman and Martian Manhunter in a relationship ...

[icon_uk]

Superman - "Green has always been my weakness"

Batman "You mean Kryptonite?"

Superman (gazing longingly at J'onn) - "Yeah... sure... Kryptonite"

[crinos]

Regarding Starfire, IIRC when she and Dick were getting married they actually had trouble getting a marriage license for that very reason. And also had to deal with protestors.

Also I love an army of Swamp Things just beating the crap out of Batman. I feel like Swampy should be a bigger deal in the DCU than he is. Has he ever been on the Justice League?

[alicemacher]

He hasn't, but the resurrected Alec Holland, who eventually took the place of Original Swampy after Brightest Day, is now part of Justice League Dark.

[kamino_neko]

He was also a member of at least one lineup of the original JLDark, too.

[jmacq1]

Outside the Justice League Dark stuff, I've generally had the impression that those that know about Swamp Thing absolutely consider him a Big Deal (tm) and treat him with respect. But it seems like his tendency to keep himself apart from the usual superheroic business of the DCU means that not a ton of heroes really know much about him.

Out of Universe, it's kind of surprising he hasn't been a bigger deal given he's had a live-action TV show, two movies, and a short-lived cartoon series (and toy line) to his name. Even so, I'd rate him near the tippy-top of "B-List" DC characters. A lotta people know Swampy even if they don't know the details (or have them wrong due to media adaptation).

[kamino_neko]

The fact that most of the non-comics media he stars in sucks certainly doesn't help. (The only memorable thing about the cartoon was the extremely weird choice of theme song.)

[crinos]

I remember the cartoon, in it Arcane was the main villain and had mutated himself into this purple skinned weirdo, and he had an army of evil mutant guys, and their gimmick was that they could all mutate further into monsters.

I had one of the bad guy toys, and they way they did it is that they had these big rubber monster heads that would slide onto the upper torso of the toy. So I had this zombie looking guy called Skinman who had this big rubber bat head.

[zer0man]

Ah, yes, Arcane's minions, his Un-Men... Skinman, Dr. Deemo, and Weedkiller. And that's not even getting to the fact that Arcane had his own secondary mutation which literally gave him a spider form for a head. That's not even getting into the gimmicky sidekicks for Swampy including Tomahawk and Bayou Jack.

(Yes, I've had a few of the toys, and I've seen the cartoon series. Heck, I was lucky enough to get all 5 episodes recorded on VHS.)

[icon_uk]

Somehow I've never seen the cartoon and love bad animation though I do, based on the intro, I'm not sure how upset I am about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H5zXh6MVvg

I've seen the live TV series which was painfully low budget, but did have Mark Lindsay Chapman chewing the scenery with gusto, and Scott Garrison playing damsel in distress a few times, which was cute.

[crinos]

I remember specifically two episodes from the Swamp Thing Live action series. One was where this Satanic Rocker was hanging out in a cabin in the swamp after two of his fans killed themselves because of his lyrics, and Swamp Thing scared the guy into making amends to their parents, and another where this mysterious omnipotent wizard guy who I think was meant to be an expie for John Constantine showed up and gave Swamp thing the whole "You're not really Alec Holland you're a creation of the Swamp" line.

It was a weird ass show to be sure.

[alicemacher]

Re the intro: The funny thing is, during Veitch's run (well before the animated series) there was in fact a character called the Wild Thing. He began as Alec Bolland, an insane terrorist whom the DDI had recruited to assassinate Morgan Edge. He fails, and in the resulting conflagration becomes a plant monster... and very nearly the next Earth elemental, which would've been a disaster. Instead, he happens upon smarmy TV host Roy Raymond and his assistant Lipschitz, who invite them into their car under the impression he's the actual Swamp Thing, whom they want to exploit commercially. Then WIld Thing takes the wheel and things get ugly.

[crinos]

The thing is, I could see Skinman showing up in Moore's comic during the American Gothic thing. I mean he's suitably creepy looking even without the Bat thing (The toy wast at least, it was all gaunt with white dead eyes), and the name inspires thoughts of urban legends and bizarre folkloric boogeymen.

[tcampbell1000]

Can't argue with this. Superman would've been publicly single at this point, and I don't think Dick had disclosed his relationship with Kory to Bruce, though the World's Greatest Detective probably noticed the auburn hair on Dick's costume collar before he stopped showing up at the Batcave. He definitely knew about Metamorpho, too: he was leading the Outsiders until shortly before this.

But Batman knows the mayor doesn't keep up with the private affairs of superbeings, so the specifics don't matter as much as conveying the size of the political hornet's nest he's stepping in on top of everything else.

[icon_uk]

I'm not sure Kori ever discussed her people's origins, the only reason we know is we saw her in Madame Rouge's devolving pit where the Titans went ape-like and she went cat-like.

Also, I think the law prevents a person from having sex with a non human, so both Hawkman and Hawkwoman would technically be guilty.

[lordultimus]

I'm headcanoning that the Mayor isn't scared of pissing of Superman, but Lois Lane.

[randyripoff]

One of the better displays of sheer, raw power I've seen in comics.

[tcampbell1000]

It was a bit crazy to throw these forty pages into one issue instead of finding six extra pages somehow and splitting it into two. It has like three or four selling points you could slap on a cover: the fight with Batman, the Swampie cult, the redwood body, and the star turn of Lex Luthor, and that's assuming you don't want to ruin the shock ending.

Granted, these moments are somewhat compressed, but that's normal for Swamp Thing, where fight scenes are often short compared to long building-up sequences. "Sophisticated suspense" and all that.

The link between "anger is like wildfire" and Alec's fiery end is a lot clearer than the link between the "lessons" of "American Gothic" and the primordial handshake that followed it, once you think it over. The DDI has never stopped gunning for Alec, so you might at first think his actions don't put him in any more danger than he'd be already. But had he not come to Gotham and demonstrated the range of his abilities in such a public setting, someone like Luthor might not have been able to diagnose such abilities and their limits.

Still, I feel like the Parliament of Trees' warning was more about destroying the things one loves and cares about than about risk to oneself, though clearly Alec interprets it as the latter. It's not clear in Moore's run whether any plant elementals have died without joining the Parliament (Veitch implies such deaths are rare) and the only way it seems like they could die is if they never gained full awareness of their abilities and died in bodies they didn't realize they could leave. Though perhaps there were shamans in earlier times who could bind them with magic as Luthor does with science.

There is no way TV cameras aren't all over the scene of Abby and Alec's reunion. Even with sophisticated sniping techniques (and the memory of the assassinations of the 1960s still relatively fresh in readers' minds), it's a bit of suspension of disbelief that the DDI was able to hit Alec with two separate payloads on live TV and not get at least accused of it afterward. Especially after Wicker practically confessed his intentions to the police commissioner. I realize they know where Alec is going to be and don't feel they can pass on the opportunity, but their attempt to "silence the remaining Sunderland witnesses" has just created literally thousands more witnesses, some of whom would be very passionate about putting a name to the napalm. Maybe Alec doesn't have a monopoly on anger-driven recklessness. (Events toward the end of Moore's run would, however, make this issue moot.)

[wizardru]

This was 1986. TV cameras were expensive, heavy and not everywhere all the time. It's quite possible that there wasn't a host of cameras about to get quality footage. Even something like the Challenger disaster, filmed live on television, had only limited video coverage from a set of angles. A black ops conspiracy group could easily control the media on this. And as a government contractor attacking a non-human entity that had crippled an entire city and threatened it's inhabitants (or could be made to seem as if he had), it's not really a stretch to believe they would simply control the message. There was no social media, no web upon which to disseminate information or fact-check in real time. Let alone in a place like the DCU, where this would a weird week, but probably not the weirdest week that year.

[tcampbell1000]

You're right that the media landscape has changed a lot in thirty years, but 1960s media was even cruder. And even in those 1960s assassinations (JFK, RFK, MLK) there wasn't just a giant question mark about who did it. In each case, there were some competing conspiracy theories and one guy who got into the history books as a lone gunman. I happen to believe the lone gunman theory, especially in light of what lone gunmen seem to accomplish today, but you take my point. There are some answers, even if we don't all agree on which ones are right.

Here, there's just... nothing. Batman promises to work on the case, but we never hear he gets any results, and when Abby and Adam Strange bring it up later they still have no idea who did it.

I'd find this a lot easier to swallow if, instead, the DDI borrowed a page from those conspiracy theories and set up a fall guy who seems to have acted alone: an apparent suicide next to a toppled rocket launcher on a building, or if they're feeling confident they know someone who won't flip on them, a self-proclaimed terrorist or supervillain in their employ who can take credit. Or they could just frame Firefly. This probably would not fool Batman, but many of the other Gothamites and maybe Abby would be willing to accept the story and the partial closure it offers. Leaving it up in the air is just inviting further investigation.

(I guess I should qualify that this, too, is only the kind of thing that occurs to me after multiple readings. The death scene itself is certainly effective and, in its macabre way, satisfying.)

[zer0man]

As much as I enjoy seeing the Mayor's response to Batman's listing off of other potential 'offenders', the display of power and overall scale of the Redwood Thing remains my personal favorite scene in this issue. Totleben's art for it is absolutely incredible, especially in regards to the overall design and how unnerving it is. If you saw something like that in real life, I'm about 98% certain that pants would be darkened.

And honestly, I would love to see Moore's script for this. Hell, I'd be interested in seeing Moore's scripts during this entire run of his.

[lego_joker]

Well, Steve Bissette's already posted bits of the script to "Loose Ends" on his website; as for the rest, I reckon we'll have to hold our breaths...

... unless some of them might be found in one of Bissette's books? I dunno.

[captainbellman]

When Batman hugs, you know something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.