Swamp Thing: The Flowers of Romance

[alicemacher]

"After [the Arcane Apocalypse story] I'd like to pick up on Liz and Dennis for a very down-to-earth non-supernatural horror story about just what Dennis has done with Liz in his efforts to keep her as his property and one true love. I've got an utterly sickening true story that I can use as a basis for this, something that happened to a remote relative of mine, and which I heard about through my favourite aunt who had picked up the pieces afterwards."

So wrote Alan Moore to Stephen Bissette in August 1983. For whatever reason, that story didn't, of course, immediately follow the "Arcane possesses Matt" arc. Moore revisited it when, according to Bissette, he found himself with writer's block after completing two extra-sized Swamp Thing issues just a few months apart, in addition to his other commitments. What resulted is, despite the disturbing subject matter, one of my favourite issues from his run on the title.

Warning for domestic abuse and misogyny.


From Swamp Thing #54 (Nov. 1986).

First, a little background. Liz Tremayne was once a successful TV journalist, author of a bestselling investigative book on the Swamp Thing, and a friend to him as well. She was confident, assertive and even cocky at times.

Dennis Barclay was once a psychiatrist who worked for the Sunderland Corporation (and in fact was the one who gave Matt memory-erasing ECT under Sunderland/DDI's orders). When he realized the truth about his employers, he joined with the Swamp Thing, Liz, and eventually Matt and Abby in opposing them. Along the way, Liz and Dennis had spontaneous sex after a tense ordeal. As we saw in Moore's first issue (#20), "Loose Ends," Dennis saw this as the beginning of something beautiful between them. Liz told him she didn't: "All we have in common is the horror in our lives, Dennis."

Everything changed that same issue when Sunderland and the DDI targeted the group as witnesses to their crimes, whereupon Liz and Dennis narrowly escaped death from a bomb in their hotel room. Liz was left in shock, a situation which Dennis -- a Vietnam vet also seriously triggered by the explosion -- exploited by taking her with him.

Now, somewhere in Texas two years later, Liz curls up, shabbily dressed and unkempt, in the corner of her den, feeling anxious over Dennis having been gone three days. She decides, after much vacillation, to plug in and watch the television, despite Dennis's warning that the electricity from it could kill her. She sees on the news that Abby, despite his claim to the contrary, is alive and, in the wake of the Swamp Thing's apparent death, has returned to Houma. Shocked that Dennis would lie to her, she tries reminding herself that he's brought her flowers but remembers that was months ago. Before long, she gathers the courage to take a bus trip to Houma.

Abby visits the swamp and remembers what three people told her before she left Gotham. Commissioner Gordon had invited her to attend an upcoming memorial service for her lover. Chester Williams had invited her to join an environmental activism group he's forming in memory of the Swamp Thing. And Batman offered some advice, drawing on painful experience known to the reader if not to her:





Returning home, Abby attempts to throw out a dead houseplant and is triggered. She collapses to the floor in grief, until Liz's ringing the doorbell snaps her out of it. As they catch up, Abby senses something's not right about Liz, who talks as though Sunderland were still alive and constantly hunting down her and Dennis. (Meanwhile, Dennis comes home and, noticing the plugged-in TV and a map with Houma circled in crayon, deduces where Liz has gone and comes after her, taking with a machine gun.) As Liz takes a bath (standing up for fear of drowning because Dennis had so warned her), Abby finds her stitched-together ragged underwear (because Dennis claimed Sunderland agents might spot him buying her clothes).

"Aww, Liz... Liz, you poor kid," Abby says. "I think somebody's done something to you."

The doorbell rings again. Answering it, Abby dodges a round of gunfire from a psychotically grinning Dennis, who finds and berates Liz for running away, and tells her this isn't Abby, but one of Sunderland's agents in disguise. Abby knocks a vase over his head, grabs Liz and runs for the swamp, before realizing she'd neglected to disarm him. Quickly recovering, Dennis pursues them in his jeep.

















A harrowing story, but one which also shows Abby successfully tapping into strengths she didn't know she had, despite her recent trauma. And although Liz's ordeal will take rather longer for her to recover from, and she'll need Abby's and others' help with that, it was Liz who took the first step by mustering the courage to leave her abuser. That's why this is one of my favourite issues of the series.

Next: Gotham pays tribute to the Swamp Thing.

Comments

[arilou_skiff]

I love how expressive Batman's mask is.

[tcampbell1000]

Agreed on pretty much all points, Alice. I'll bet this was a hard one to figure out how to excerpt: it's pretty much all great, but the opening scene and closing scene are amazing.

"Heyyy, DENNIS BARCLAY FANS! We've got the story you've been waiting almost THREE YEARS TO SEE! You THRILLED as he found his moral center and left the Sunderland Corporation! You CHEERED as he and Liz shared a moment, then SNIFFLED as it seemed they weren't meant to be! You JOLTED as he fled the Sunderland forces, but HOPED his soldier's training could guide him to discover the hero withi--" [assistant emerges, begins frantically whispering in announcer's ear] "--er... Oh. Uh... Hey, LIZ TREMAYNE FANS! Ready to see more of the strong, independent, take-no-prisoners Lois Lane of Louisiana? Well, just--" [more whispering] "OH, COME ON!!"

Kidding aside, it's shocking to see Liz and Dennis' transformation here, even at the hands of a writer who's not shy about "murdering childhoods" by corrupting other writers' heroes (see: Kid Miracleman, most of the Watchmen and their related Charlton characters, James Bond and Harry Potter as rendered in LoEG). In Liz's case, we spend much of the issue explaining why she is so different now. And there is at least the memory of who she once was to inform her actions.

Dennis is harder to recognize, though maybe not impossible. Moore makes much of his Vietnam trauma and, more subtly, his training as a psychologist, but what classic fans might've found recognizable is the mutability of his conscience. When he was introduced, he was justifying atrocities for his job; now he's doing it for his "love." Like Matt, he seemed to have overcome the worst parts of himself in Saga of the Swamp Thing #19. Like Matt, he started backsliding rapidly in #20, just as Alan walked in the door.

I think the key to understanding Dennis' transformation lies in Matt Cable's last conscious words: "There isn't any evil, Alec... There's just weakness. I had a choice." Dennis' last words before Moore starts writing him, just before he and Liz have sex for the first time, are about how he can't resist her: "I don't have the strength."

There are of course some differences between Matt's and Dennis's stories. Matt never quite stopped being a victim in Moore's run, of Arcane, of his own demons, and of powers he could never control for long. We saw Matt becoming petty and frightening to Abby even before Arcane took him over, but at least he retained enough of himself to feel regret and shame about that. And he never planned to hurt her. The weakness of evil had not consumed him altogether.

Dennis, knowing full well that a psychologically healthy Liz would not take him as a long-term lover, set out to break her and make her his in the worst possible way. Probably he told himself early on that he would start being a good, kind lover once he'd finished that process. If so, that was clearly a lie. Late-stage Dennis is what happens when you let yourself justify so much cruelty for so long, you forget there was ever anything else.

That said, the similarities between the two abuser-abused couples are a bit striking. Had some version of this story run just after the Arcane arc, with Matt's failings fresher in our minds, those similarities might have felt more like monotony than motif. And Abby certainly wouldn't have had to outwit Dennis all on her own. This isn't the first time a Swamp Thing story got moved around in the schedule and ended up benefiting from it.

I don't mean to neglect Lizabeth with all this Matt and Dennis talk-- her arc means a lot to me, for reasons. Violence against women may be a motif of Moore's, but for my money, "Flowers of Romance" deals with it more effectively than any other story he ever wrote. Liz does indeed show buried courage in leaving Dennis, but she's still so scatterbrained from her treatment that she leaves an obvious trail behind her. She can't even conceive of herself as truly having "left" him. She cites his draconian rules and their paranoid rationales like they're Scripture (I felt bad laughing at Abby's "Let's risk the tetanus, okay?"). There is no doubt that her scars will linger after Dennis' death...

But oh, that death is still IMMENSELY satisfying, and not least because it's delivered by Abby, with the memory of a truer, more nurturing love guiding her feet. That memory's importance to the climax is just enough to give this tale better nuance than "The Curse," without being "#NotAllMen" in a way that would've blunted its force.

[tripodeca113]

How horrifying mundane things can be.

[icon_uk]

Yes, after the sheer scale of the Gotham story, to have such a... domestic story, albeit a twisted, toxic domestic story really hits home.