Writer: Alan Moore
Artists: Stephen Bissette and John Totleben
My only exposure to Swamp Thing, before reading this first collection of Alan Moore’s famed run on the DC comic starting in 1983, was the 1982 Wes Craven film. Images of Dick Duron tramping around the Virginia jungle in a rigid plastic monster suit saving a sweaty Adrienne Barbeau from falling out of her torn white top reinforced my prejudice of a trashy comic book conceit only a step or two above the ludicrous Toxic Avenger. Little did I know that Moore was able to take an aging character (Swamp Thing was created in 1970 by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson) as far away from Troma stupidity as the comic book medium would allow. While Saga of the Swamp Thing is a piece of horror fiction and therefore subject to the strange flights of fantasy only edible with a healthy dose of suspended disbelief, Moore’s integration of the plot into the fibers of his characters makes reading Saga a powerful delight nearly thirty years after it was created. Ramsey Campbell, in his introduction to the 2000 edition of the collection, writes, “Here as elsewhere, Moore’s language and imagery is simultaneously comic and horrifying, as is the way with horror fiction. Horror fiction at its best is in the business of pushing back the barriers, of risking the absurd in order to reach the sublime, just as Jason Woodrue does by eating a tuber of Swamp Thing’s. By this stage no reader can doubt that here is a story prepared to go to the end of itself, whatever it may find there or on the way.”
Closer in content and aim to Watchmen than Moore’s later work in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore’s run on Saga (which began with issue # 20) starts with a gritty paranoid vision of the military exploiting the Swamp Thing and the monster realizing his place in the world is shrinking. Through the research of Dr. Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man, we see the true nature of the Swamp Thing in the brilliant issue # 21, The Anatomy Lesson. The Swamp Thing is not, as was believed before Moore’s tenure on the book, a reincarnated and plant-reinforced Dr. Alec Holland, but a completely vegetable entity that thinks it’s Alec Holland. What’s so thrilling is Moore’s ability to make such a strange and unbelievable conceit so emotionally and ecologically devastating. It’s nice to see Moore use his considerable storytelling talents to tell such a gritty, anti-capitalist tale of environmental rage. The Floronic Man’s hatred for mankind manifests as a raging terrorism, a hypocritical stance that could only be taken by someone who was originally human. Here, only the Swamp Thing truly speaks and acts for the benefit of the planet. Even a later enemy, Satan himself, manifests to the Swamp Thing and his world as an ecological condition – autumn. The creature’s ability to reason in a moral fashion wins out over his pure physical prowess, which is almost never employed. He’s a Frankenstein’s monster who knows restraint, who shows readers the kindness and compassion manifest in the grotesque.
Bissette and Totleben created a dark, restrained look for the book. Their influence is seen in later 80s books such as Sandman and then pops up again in some of the quirkier titles in the 90s. I can’t imagine Sam Kieth’s dreamlike The Maxx without the precedent of Bissette and Totleben’s Saga books. Their panels flow organically through the story, and they never worry about wasting space for the emotional tableaux so necessary to create a superhero comic which can be enjoyed on levels other than muscle and breast worship. In a particularly memorable series of pages, the Swamp Thing chases a billionaire industrialist through a vast office complex, while Dr. Jason Woodrue narrates the set piece he has orchestrated. “And will there be blood? I don’t know. I don’t know if there will be blood. It isn’t important. It won’t spoil things if there is no blood. The blood doesn’t matter. Just the dying. The dying’s all that matters.” You’ve got to see these pages to believe the power of Moore paired with Bissette and Totleben. They created a pop-art language that is much underused, even in today’s glutted comic book market.While the environmental message of Saga of the Swamp Thing can easily be overstated, it should not be neglected. Like other late-70s and early-80s American art, Saga tackles the excesses of an empire reaching its manifest destiny – to exploit not only the natural resources of its land, but the very fabric of nature, the forces of the universe.
Related Links:
3. Wired Review
4. IGN Review
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