Tell me about Swamp Thing

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!

I'm not sure Tuomas is reading the same book that I did. Abby/Alec's love was presented as unearthly, but also grounded in the same sorts of experiences that are common to everyone, hence the "Rites of Spring" issue. As for it being a fairy-tale, well, it was presented in a book that was marginally, a superhero book, and superheroes (at the time) were pretty much just modern fairy tales. Though I don't see how you could reconcile that term with the horrors presented with The Monkey King, Arcane and Abby's trip to Hell.

And anyone who didn't start out on text-heavy comics (of which you had many examples in the 60s-80s in the US, actually it was the primary mode) would think that SWAMP THING is completely out of control when it came to text on the page. I actually like it. It feels like it was written as much as it was scripted. Haven't read it in several years, but I'm not sure I'd take the pruning shears to it. Different strokes, etc.

If you think there's a huge difference between SWAMP THING and his other contemporary work, I'd look to his editors and collaborators, since no writer is an island in comics, not even Alan Moore (who at the time was just another new writer and not the titan he is in the field now.)

Yeah, I love most everything Moore's done, but I've never been able to get into his Swamp Thing run. Too much caption-itis, etc.

It is too bad that Swamp Thing has not been put out in some Showcase editions, both the Bernie Wrightson and Totleben/Bissette artwork would look great in black and white.

I got into the Moore run on Swamp Thing pretty early on. It is a pretty crazy book when you think that the thing used to be sold in grocery stores, it wasn't even a direct title until way later on. I have not read any of those issues in twenty years, but they are on my list to go back and check out. I remember the issue where Abby eats the tubar was very trippy and the issues where Batman shows up with one of the Arcane arcs was really great.

I've read Moore's run more times than I can count - the first thing of his I ever saw (since it was the first American mass market thing of his available...? I remember seeing issues of Warrior around the same time). I musta been 12-13. The captions do get pretty purple and heavy-handed. Otoh it allows for him to do all kinds of great transitions - stuff he would later get a lot of mileage out of on Watchmen - it made the stories feel bound together by a creepy synchronicity.

Waiting for Heave Ho to start the Adrianne Barbeau thread on ILHTML.

I'm pretty sure there's some recent (last two or three years) pocket book format pre-Moore Swamp Thing repring.

yo: Secret of Swamp Thing

I guess the Moore run isn't that bad, it's just that too much text in captions is the one thing I hate most in comics, I've left quite a many comics in the shelf that might've been good otherwise (like Sacco's Palestine) because of that. It just totally undermines comics' own strength as a medium, since most of the stuff in the captions could be told with images. Also, it's often even so that the captions could be left off without changing anything else, because the images themselves already tell the story strongly enough, but it feels like the writer doesn't trust the images enough, so he has to include the extra text. This happens in Swamp Thing too, and the reason I find especially strange is that Moore is normally such a visual, anti-caption storyteller.

"Normally" needs to be placed in context - the majority of his work between 1978 and 1983 is very word-heavy. It's far more the style of the text than the wordiness itself that changed on Swamp Thing.

I haven't read a lot of his early work, but he'd already started V for Vendetta before Swamp Thing and was writing Watchmen around the same time, right? So the wordiness seems more an aesthetic choice than something he hadn't grown out of yet.

If you have real problems with wordy Alan Moore, check out the final Miracleman book he did.

Watchmen is two-three years later.

Watchmen hit the shops in 1986, and Moore's last Swamp Thing issue was in 1987, so he was writing them at the same time. I've read some 1986 Swamp Thing issues, and they still have that caption thing, so I think it's safe to say Moore simply chose a different aesthetic than with Watchmen.

From Hell = wordiest thing he ever did

(altho not captions)

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