Scans_Daily

"I'll never forget standing in Totleben's studio [...] and getting my first look at the pages of art he was sculpting (yes, sculpting) for this story. [...] Metallic scraps shared space with pasted-down photos of machinery on a base of heavy illustration board, a crazy quilt of almost Gigeresque 'biomechanics' [...] At the center of each page was our beloved protagonist, composed of retouched photographs of a tiny model of the character that John and I had molded out of Super-Sculpy, various resins and actual bits of mold and vegetation. [...] It was stunning, and I'm sorry to say that as beautiful as the printed version is, it is but a pale shadow of what I saw and held that night. If only today's computer production techniques could resurrect what that original art embodied!"
-- Stephen Bissette, TPB introduction, 1988/2011

Trigger warning for rape, albeit of a somewhat abstract sort.

( 'The ghost was growing a body, a sentient tumor from the substance of my own.' )

"I wanted to suggest that the real curse isn't menstruation but rather men's attitude toward it, and by extension their attitude to women as a whole. I wanted to get across, without being heavy handed, that it is the way in which men see and treat women that can often crush and trample women's minds and personalities into such tortured and self-destructive shapes."
--Alan Moore, Letters page, Swamp Thing #46

"The Curse" was Moore's most controversial Swamp Thing story, in terms of both industry and reader reaction.

Warning for misogyny/sexism, body shaming, and suicide.

( 'Their anger, in darkness turning, unreleased, unspoken...' )

"Swamp Thing 34 features no heroes and villains. No grand conflicts or costumed characters. For a superhero/monster comic from DC, available on the newsstand (as far as I know), it’s a radical issue. It’s basically the consummation of the love between Abby and Swamp Thing. It’s a sex scene, involving biological hallucinogenics. Abby takes a bite out of one of the tubers growing on the 'man' she loves, and Steve Bissette and John Totleben and colorist Tatjana Wood give us page after page of trippy collage-style imagery, as Abby and her man-monster commune on a higher plane. That was a comic published in [March] 1985, and it would still seem experimental today."
--Tim Callahan, "The Great Alan Moore Reread: Swamp Thing Part 2, Tor.com, 30 Jan. 2012

( 'Spring came, and everything in the world woke up...' )

The conclusion to the "Monkey King" trilogy. Warning for gore.

( 'It seems where demons fail and monsters falter... angels may prevail.' )