Tell me about Swamp Thing

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Spider-Man And Friends 2

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Release Date: 6/22/2004
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ALBUM DETAILS:
Release Date: Jun 22 2004
Label: TURN UP THE MUSIC
Catalog No.: 1731
UPC: 790617173128

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ABOUT THE ALBUM

Album Credits

ABOUT THE ALBUM
Spider-Man And Friends 2
TRACK LISTClick on or link to hear an audio clip. To listen to samples you'll need a Windows Media Player.

1.

Clap Your Hands for Spider-Man 3:04
2.

Dancin' With Spider-Man and Friends 3:16
3.

Spider-Man and Friends at the Zoo 2:43
4.

Go Spidey Go 2:49
5.

Do What Spider-Man Tells You to Do 1:55
6.

Spider-Man on Halloween Night 3:17
7.

Surfin' Spider-Man 3:03
8.

Me and Spider-Man on Mars 2:46
9.

Spidey's on the Fire Truck 2:54
10.

Even Super Heroes Need Their Friends 2:46

this time Avril Lavine is credited. Hmmm...

but yeah, the Moore Swamp Thing was great, remember buying one out of idle curiousity and then going back to buy the entire run. plus, it gave us John Constantine which is a treat in and of itself.

is the current swamp thing worth reading? i like the characters/basic idea, but I feel worried at it being too po-faced.

Seconded! Been a long time since I read them, tho.

Doug Wheeler does a fair job of picking up where Veitch abruptly leaves off. It's an interesting run, let's say. Entertaining, overall. Millar's run is also quite decent.

Avoid the Nancy Collins run like the plague. It is one of the most badly-written runs on any comic ever.

Brian K. Vaughn's revamp: eh. What I've read of the newest revamp: very eh, bordering on ugh.

i0dine, re: Diggle - The Losers has been fun rock-em-sock-em espionage stuff. Also, the techno-samurai mini he's doing w/ Leinil Francis Yu for Wildstorm (Silent Dragon) is probably the best Diggle I've read. I liked Adam Strange just fine, but not as much as most folk. And I didn't touch Swamp Thing.

Mark, wouldn't it be safe to say that your evidence for Moore's not-so-veryness would have to include his works by default? (Not that I disagree w/ you, per se - I think it's more a case of AM's greatness being blown out of proportion than AM being not-so-very.)

JUST PRINT THE FUCKING JESUS STORY ALREADY, YOU DOUCHEBAGS.

Love,
Me

And I really dug the whole Matango storyline that came afterward. Although I realize I may be in the minority. But then I grew up reading Swamp Thing, so it has a warm & special place in my heart.

RELEASE THE HOUNDS.

(Haven't read any of the Losers, btw; have the trifecta trade on queue.)

http://www.horror-wood.com/plant.20.jpg

Yeah, i0dine, but Morrison's and Pollack's DPs were apples and oranges, really. GM's was about weirdness, RP's was about menstruation. Apples and oranges.

I really, really like the Marty Pasko issues, especially the ones on the cruise ship - with aliens that become a giant squid because of infection by herpes, how can it go wrong? Liz and Dennis are great in all their issues, and there are genuine WTF??!?!?!? moments like Casey becoming an adult before your eyes via her psychic powers, or Harry Kay and the whole concentration camp/Golem plot. Plus he came up with the insectoid Arcane.

They really deserve a trade.

not a whole lot of talk about millar's run here?

Andrew Farrell speaks highly of it.

What's not to like about G-Mo's MM's run? (actually not strictly true, the large-scale ELEMENTAL FITES were very dialogue heavy, perhaps too much so) The last bit, with a benevolent ruler over a transformed world, does feel a bit ripped off Miracleman though.

Am I the only one who feels nonplussed by Moore's Swamp Thing? I've read three or four different collections, and while all of them have had some nice moments, there's also way way too many captions, often filled with purple prose, and all in all there's lot of the worst type of Moore pretentiouness. Also, the love story between Abby and Swamp Thing is presented in a very clichéd and fairy-tale like manner, even though Moore generally tries to keep the characters down to earth. All this feels especially weird since Moore had already done most of V for Vendetta and Miracleman before, and was writing Watchmen at the same time, so it's not like he was an inexperienced writer or anything.

I think Swamp Thing maybe worked better in issues. That was the impression I formed when Vertigo reprinted it in black and white issues a while back.

way way too many captions, often filled with purple prose

sorta nails my issues w/ moore!

If you do pick it up, though, don't forget to get a copy of the related Swamp Thing Secret Files (featuring a story written by an ILXor!).

I’m probably going to begrudgingly work my way through it. I read some of Moore’s best issues when I was 9 or so and they still fascinate me. So much so that I want to see where the characters wind up. At some point it will get better than the Doug Wheeler era.

to the best of my memory, Swamp Thing never got 50% as good again as it was when moore was on it. reading books for the characters is totally understandable but I think you're at a dry well.

Hard disagree, but that's generally the line I draw with Hellblazer (the initial Delano run is fantastic, everything after is a pale shadow if not outright shitty).

(roaring rick excepted of course)

a dry well.

yeah, if you a) don't like Veitch and b) won't skip to Millar or c) jump over to Hellblazer/Sandman et al, you're definitely in for a tough slog. although Collins is probably better than Wheeler, if that's the totality of your bar...

Doug Wheeler's run is also shit, maybe because the art is so bad?

Several decades ago I bought every instalment of Quest For the Elementals as a bargain bundle and I remember the art being quite nice and clean, but the story sucking.

I forgot/never knew that Millar did a run. Wikipedia doesn't make it sound particularly worth reading.

It's pretty good, one of the better Millars IMO. Can't remember if it's still rumored or more or less confirmed at this point that Morrison ghosted quite a bit of that run beyond his initial four issues.

I don't believe I can ever be objective about Doug Wheeler's run, as the issue where Swampy traverses hell with Bartle at his side was my first ever randomly purchased (or semi-randomly, as that eye-catching Totleben cover depicting the infernal gates still looks pretty killer to me) mature readers comic at the ripe old age of 12 and I continued to fascinatedly buy that run and the Quest for the Elementals was just the most epic thing I'd ever read at that point and frankly still seems pretty great if you want my unvarnished opinion which, as I note, is untrustworthy as all get out in this instance.

I think I read it shortly after bingeing Moore's run for the first time so may not have been judging it on its own merits.

At the very least, you have to give it up to Wheeler and Millar for their willingness to get weird and swing for the fences. Both runs really push the boundaries with these long epics that mimic what Moore and Veitch did with their respective runs. And Wheeler took on the pretty thankless task of subbing in for Veitch (and Gaiman/Delano) at the last minute, which clearly didn't even pay off for him in the long term (the only other credit I recall of his was one of the Tekno Comics books right before that whole thing imploded).

The Collins run started out decently but the wheels came off quickly. Pretty much everything she did was low stakes as hell, which can be fine and which a better writer can pull off in a compelling way. But even her character development stank, so there was no real upside to scaling the title back into this domestic drama centered around Louisiana. The horror/supernatural elements are just dull as hell and often retreads of what came before (a serial killer, a ghost pirate, a patchwork monster, the return of Arcane, yawn). And, boy, I sure hope you like exclamation marks! Because at some point she starts ending every sentence with them! And I'm honestly not even exaggerating! Every single sentence! It's ultimately just a soggy, effortless endeavor where absolutely nothing of consequence happens beyond the very end of the very last issue of her run, where Abby leaves Swampy and one of the elementals drags Tefe away into the Green.

A slight derail, but I disagree on Hellblazer! I love love love the Delano run, but there is stuff worthwhile after that. I know that people like Garth Ennis for the wrong reasons (juvenile sensibility, violence), but some of his issues are really beautiful short fiction, particularly the issues where John leaves and it's just Kit and the book just becomes these funny/wistful short stories about Irish city life, sorta like Brendan Behan or an early Terence Davies movie.

Most people forget there was this Paul Jenkins/Sean Phillips run. It is less flashy and superheroic, but it has this tone of middle aged melancholy that I quite like and great moody art...

There are a few issues that are generally not as available by Eddie Campbell--it's not a perfect run, but it has a kooky texture and Australian politics; a kind of interesting vibe. There is also one issue by Gaiman and Dave McKean as a rare interior artist that is worth looking over.

However, I agree on the other stuff not being great!

Ennis wasn't bad but most of my disdain for his run is that he turned John Constantine into a stock Ennis character and then most subsequent writers just ran with his changes. Moore and Delano's Constantine was much more nuanced and not merely the swaggering, smirking Dreamworks caricature he later became.

There was well-written stuff after Delano but I'm generally just not that into the runs that lean more Ennis. Jenkins and Carey did alright and hearkened back to the OG Conjob a bit.

I prefer the writing on the Ennis issues (at least until Steve Dillon came onboard), and the art on the Delano issues (although iirc John Rxdgwxy refused to draw some 'blasphemous' content? - (sic) may know more - and also about Eddie's abrupt departure from Hellblazer)

Swamp Thing just seems like one of those titles that has had every possible variation wrung from it and has no real reason to keep on going other than copyright control.

I would agree with that. Even as a huge fan of the character, I quit a short way into the Diggle/Dysart run (v4, I believe?) and haven't returned. Millar's end to v2 is just fine as a stopping point.

I really liked Jenkins' Hellblazer run, at least most of it. To me, it felt like he combined elements of the Delano and Ennis versions of the character, but without the worst indulgences of either. Some of the stories related to Constantine's past, which had been kind of confusing up to that point (to me at least), and gave it some clarity. The only downside is that the last three or four stories were a bit aimless and disappointing.

The weird thing with Delano, for me, is that I enjoyed the one-off issue he wrote long after his actual run a lot more than the run itself!

Does Constantine ever discover the tree tattoo on his butt that Swampy got when he was controlling Constantine's body? Abby mentions it once but Constantine didn't seem to catch what she was saying. Does this pay off in Hellblazer or something, or did it get forgotten about?

idrc, but Constantine gets involved in enough opportunistic sex magick through the years that it probably doesn't bother him

also about Eddie's abrupt departure from Hellblazer

p much what you'd expect - he just didn't get on with the Big Two system of editorial involvement, and bailed out. he especially resisted the editor's chosen plot of sending white magician John to the Australian outback to go on a vision quest with a "witch doctor" from a made-up indigenous people. keen-eyed readers may note that Jenkins' run immediately opens with this cover

afair Campbell's only other stint on an ongoing WFH book was two issues on Captain America this century, in which he confidently drew Iron Man looking like this, having not kept up to date on costume changes in the previous four decades

one issue by Gaiman and Dave McKean as a rare interior artist that is worth looking over

the Morrison/ Lloyd two-parter that ran next to this is also good