Swamp Thing Appreciation 1: A Monster Re-made

Usually when anybody asks for recommendations for a comic to get into if you want something in the same vein as Hellblazer, they'll point you to Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. Apart from being the series where John Constantine was actually first introduced, the character itself created by Moore and visually based off of Sting (which is why that Hellblazer 30th year anniversary had that rather odd introduction by the artist) it does indeed also comes pretty close to it in tone, as we, in a sense, follow around a tortured character as he comes face to face with various supernatural threats. In Hellblazer we follow Constantine laden with feelings of guilt, in Swamp Thing, we follow around the titular character who's constantly struggling to come to terms with his very nature. But where with Constantine the tortured nature of the character is kind of the thing and will always be present throughout the entire 300 issue run, with Swamp Thing the quest for identity is simply where we start.

You see, people point to Alan Moore's run of Swamp Thing, and they leave out the 19 issues before it, because Moore completely reinvented the character, turning him from something that once had been a man, by disaster turned monster, and he turned it into something uniquely different.

In issue 20 of the second Swamp Thing series Moore took over and by the end of it he had killed its titular character off, or at least this seemed to be so. Death in comic books tends to be a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, the powers that be always unwilling to actually let the cash cow be led to slaughter in any permanent sort of way, and so heroes die only to be resurrected again and again.

and here we are, almost 50 years later, and hasn't it all gotten rather stale indeed?

But this death would be different.

Though Swamp Thing would rise again by the end of the next issue he would be fundamentally different, even though nothing had really changed. Moore killed off Swamp Thing in a spectacular manner, and then, in issue 21, the brilliant 'The Anatomy Lesson' he reverse-engineered him by literally taking him apart piece by piece, and revealed some startling, and yet somehow plausible explanation for the phenomenon of the Swamp Thing.

Through the narration of a small-time villain of the DC-universe, who is hired to dissect the Swamp Thing and uncover his secrets, we learn his strange true nature; we learn that the thing that thinks of himself as human-turned-monster, never was human at all, and that it had merely borrowed the mind of a man who fell into the swamp and died; that it was in fact, a plant-based consciousness that was under the illusion of being human.

And believe you me, I know that that sounds silly, but one should accept it regardless. Because it's not really about how plausible or implausible this concept is. It's about what this information might do to any thinking, rational creature. For someone to be told in clinical, dispassionate terms, it is not what it thought it was. And about what the consequences of this would be. What would this being do when it had this comfortable sense of identity, this oh so crucial thing, so brutally torn away?

There would be sheer existential terror, and rage.

And so it all begins. The Saga of the Swamp Thing.

John's World

I've already mentioned that the ending to the Hellblazer series is in sight and that that is bumming me out a little bit. I've come to absolutely love John Constantine's world and as depressing as it sometimes can be, I really don't want to leave.

And so, after reading Hellblazer volume 20 I decided to collect and read some of the series that, at times, have overlapped with Hellblazer. There were some obvious avenues of exploration, the protagonists from different comics usually standing out like a bloody nose, easily straining the seams of the story and the very fabric of the world Constantine inhabited simply by their nature alone, simply by showing up.

As mythological fiction is one of my favourite pastimes there were a few series that had been hinted at in Hellblazer that I had already become acquainted with solely because of their own merit. The one that I had started reading at about the same time as I read Original Sins (HB 1) was Neil Gaiman's dark fantasy epic Sandman, which, unaccustomed as I was with comics as a whole at the time, I definitely had some problems with: The art style was terrifyingly inconsistent, the stories themselves meandering and sometimes connected only by the loosest of threads to the main narrative; if said main narrative could be even said to exist. And though it all was quite excellently written and the series as a whole quite satisfying on its conclusion, I was far more fond of Hellblazer, and it didn't really feel as if these stories, these "Endless", could inhabit the same world as Constantine.

My main desire (in the past?) in collecting and reading fiction was to have a complete set of stories, to have a library of fiction, with my chosen and favoured sagas to be complete, present and accounted for, on the shelves. All the stories that were connected with each other would be available to any peruser, with nothing left out and everything to find.
And Sandman made me realize that even though it seemed to exist in the same realm as Hellblazer, it also did not, not really, and that this was something that was very present in comics as a whole. It bothered me for a while, but these days, I've come to see it as more of a bonus rather than a reason not to pick up any given series.

Either way, and anyway, Constantine showed up quite early in Sandman's run, and then disappeared back into his own stories. Apparently there were a few references to his continuity squirrelled away in the pages of Sandman, but they've not managed to stand out enough to have made them memorable. To me at least.
But Sandman did give rise to something that was memorable, something infinitely more in my ball-park; the excellent Lucifer.

I'm still not done reading the whole thing, but even now, on a re-read of those books that I had already read and which will be continued on into the one I hadn't, it's still pretty undeniable how insane this comic is. It all keeps escalating, and because of this it's a good idea to space this series out a bit, as after a while your mind just gets numbed by the constant universe-shattering stuff. I read the first 4 books when I was high on pain killers but I stopped short of reading the fifth and final one. Lucifer at that point just became a little too 'big' for me. I tried to continue on into book 5 but I just couldn't keep it all in my head. Too much wildly escalating epic stuff mixed with a very detached state of mind courtesy of medication.

And so that's why I'm here for round 2, doing the devil's dance again.

And as for how this one ties into the misadventures of John Constantine?
Well, you'd think that Hellblazer and Lucifer would be closely linked, because what's in a name after all? but they really aren't.

Hellblazer occasionally mentions the Morningstar as being absent from hellish affairs but on the whole prefers to create its own pantheon of devils and fallen angels. I remember being quite confused at who exactly the First of the Fallen was when I realized he wasn't actually Lucifer.
The answer to who this being was, when it finally was revealed, was rather mind-blowing, and if this was any other series than Hellblazer the idea itself would have been explored and played around with. But this is John's world, and the big mythological bastards usually end up with nothing other than a huge middle finger.

Either way, and in any case, Sandman and Lucifer, and then of course the standalone Death comic, exist in a realm more or less their own, even though they don't really. They don't 'feel' like hellblazer and they don't work well alongside its storylines as Sandman and Lucifer have consistently and improbably huge mythology-uprooting journeys. They're these bafflingly massive things, completely incompatible with any story on a human level - at a macro-level (if you see what I mean?), because their smallest collateral side-effects tend to uproot human reality in a universe-altering way. Every mythology you can think of is incorporated in a story wherein gods and devils routinely die, where new realities are created par the course, and where every 2- or 3- parter will likely violently end in a cataclysmic, and quite frequently also in rather an emotionally upsetting, manner. That's mostly Lucifer though, as I remember Sandman being quite benign, though not afraid to kill off major characters.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that, even though they technically exist in the same sandbox with Hellblazer, there are other comic series that are comfortably quite a bit closer to Hellblazer while also having a more active hand in its stories. And so, when I decided to venture further into the Hellblazer-universe one title immediately presented itself:

I had previously dismissed it, despite its pedigree, despite its impact on comics as a whole, simply because I don't like superheroes. Not the capes, not the ethos, not the endless reboots and cross-overs. But either way, it's not that this thing looks like any conventional superhero, right?

And so I picked up Alan Moore's Swamp Thing.

And you know, it was okay.

Review: Beehive Books' The Willows

A short little look at the contents of Beehive Books' The Willows.

     First off, the Introduction by Ramsey Campbell is an odd one, as there are definitely insights to be found here, but nonetheless, there seems to be something a little off. There are words out of place, misused (or at the very least, they seem to be misused, though I might just be stupid.), there are also a few missing letters, and most annoyingly, some of what Campbell has written seems to be a bit out of sync with what the stories are actually about, as if he wrote an introduction to something he barely remembered rather than something he had read recently.

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     The Titular The Willows is the first and longest story in this collection, and takes up, together with its own many double-page artwork pieces, around half of the book. The choice to lavish this much time and effort on it is quite understandable, given that the story itself is legendary in some circles, frequently dubbed one of the best tension-building horror stories of all time, effortlessly evoking awe rather than horror, something that is very hard to do.
     The art is moody and striking, and manages to gift the text and the imagery it conjures up, already pretty strange, with an added layer of strangeness, an alien colouring to all its elements. The art didn't really always follow what was described though, and the 'scribbles in the air' were definitely a loose and rather more ethereal depiction of the strange phenomenon the narrator is presented with as he stares out of his tent in the night.
     However, the story itself is pretty good. We follow the narrator and his companion on their canoe-journey down the Danube as they arrive at a place where the mighty river pools into a vast marshland, isolated and dotted with islands overgrown with willow-bushes. Struggling with the river and irritated by the ever-present roaring wind, they decide to make landfall on one of the islands to set up camp.
Shortly after they begin to experience various strange phenomena and a building sense of unease. Try as they might, they aren't able to dispel their misgivings and soon after they come face to face with an undeniable supernatural presence.

     The story does indeed manage to slowly ratchet up the tension to a level where the reader is compelled to venture further. It never ends up getting  really scary, but I've never found this to be the case in most horror literature anyway. But I did really appreciate that some events that at first were thought to be commonplace later were revealed to be quite ominous portents of the things to come. It gave quite a thrill, and even though it's a writer's trick it's pretty effective when delivered with skill.
     The conclusion is undeniably a deus ex machina though, and there is absolutely no information concerning the exact element that manages to divert the what seemed to be up until that moment an unavoidable doom for the two travelers.

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     The second story, Accessory Before the Fact, is a bit of a lesser tale, a lot shorter and trying for the same vibe of a supernatural experience in a lonely, isolated area, as a man on walking holiday is overcome by a strange and subtle compulsion to take a different road than the one he had planned on. On the unfamiliar road, he meets 2 vagrants who seem to harbour ill intentions towards him. As they attack him, he passes out and then wakes up out of a trance at the very crossroads that had sent him awry earlier.
     Overcome by terror he hurries along to his destination, but he's plagued by doubt and yet also overcome by the certainty that what he had just experienced had not been meant for him.

     Though its goal is very similar to that of the Willows it maybe pulls it off a little better, but only by the grace of never even giving a hint of what this supernatural agency might be, which is something where the Willows might have overplayed its hand a little. Also, the title of the story is a bit of a misnomer as it seems to be exactly the point of the story that the protagonist wasn't even supposed to know of the thing that is to come, let alone act to stop it from happening. As such, just dubbing this tale 'The Glimpse' or 'The Message' would have been way more apposite.

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     Thirdly, Smith: An Episode in a Boarding House is good little tale, catering quite nicely to my specific tastes.
     A professor tells a tale of a supernatural experience from the time of his student years. As the audience sits with baited breath, he tells them of the man Smith, a charismatic and intense fellow, who inhabited a different room in the same boarding house where he had his residence, and whose mysterious activities led him to experience a glimpse of the truly awesome heights attainable by those deeply interested in the occult.

     It's a fun little tale, but I find I don't have much to say here. Smith is an interesting and intense character, his physical description evoking a sense of the alien with his seemingly mismatched body parts, and his manner effortlessly evoking attention and interest. Oddly, in these 5 tales, only 2 characters are given an in-depth description; Boarding House's Smith and the Swede in the Willows. Both characters are almost eerie in their interactions with their surroundings and seem more removed from the world than the narrators they live alongside with, as if they are more vulnerable to whatever is about to encroach on the borders of their reality.
     The theme of awe in the presence of the supernatural and the unexplainable rears its head once more, and by now I've come to realize that this, in Blackwood's tales, feels different than the supernatural in other fiction, less overtly malign maybe, or maybe just inimical because it operates in different realms than us, (living) according to different rules.

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     An Egyptian Hornet then is a bit of a surprise as it's not at all what I expected. I was expecting maybe something along the lines of Marsh's The Beetle except immensely shorter, but instead what I ended up getting was a comedic little tale of man's pettiness, which also at the same time manages to give one an insight into the theory of relativity; one man's mere-bug-to-be-swatted might as well seem like a dangerous monster to another.

     It's a bit of a throw-away story maybe, but it shows that Blackwood had more up his sleeve than horror stories. There are also enough elements here to, if one is so inclined to do a Freudian reading of the the story.

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     The tale that closes out this collection has a theme that'll be familiar to any avid horror reader. Led by dreams of prophecy, a scientist goes on a quest to find a forbidden tome of secret knowledge. He leaves a hopeful optimist, and comes back a changed man. Though successful in his quest he seems to have found more than he expected, and gripped by the revelations of The Tablet of the Gods, the once-great man begins to spiral into a deep depression.

     His assistant, unable to do anything but watch his friend's decline, is forbidden from reading the tablet until the man's death. But with the scientist's rapidly declining health, the time of revelations draws swiftly closer.

     The Man Who Found Out (A Nightmare) is probably my favourite story in here, with elements of nihilism, occultism and even a few mentions of 'Gods', though this is probably more of a metaphor, rather than any real indication of divine mythology.

     The story's resolution hints at truly terrible revelations, though of course, we aren't privy to them, and we are left outside, wondering if any text, book or tome, could ever engender from us a reaction such as that of the narrator. Probably not, but one can hope.

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     The artist's note is worth a look and quite insightful in some places, though it stopped short of being able to explain to me why, in certain pieces of art, the imagery didn't correspond with the text at all, e.g.; a naked man depicted where there seems to be no naked man in the text, or, violently iridescent sky-scribbles where the text seems to point to a more bronzed palette, and limbs of flowing darkness, etc...

     Minor quibbles aside, Paul Pope's piece really does manage to give some rather interesting background on Algernon Blackwood and specifically on how The Willows short story came about. 

     On top of that it gives some insight on the collaboration between the artist and the producers of the book. It seems to reveal that the artist had a lot of say on what'll be put in the book, etc, down to the choosing of which stories to put in. It's something that caught my attention, is why I mention it.

     Anyway, Beehive Books' edition of The Willows is lovely, and the short stories therein also turned out to be rather good. A great addition to the shelves.

The Witcher Zeitgeist

I've been drinking, and in this period of bliss I seem to have stumbled on the realization of how much Sapkowski's Witcher (Hexer) novels have already been brought to the awareness of the audience at large. The CD project Red games and now the upcoming Netflix Witcher tv-series have managed to elevate this, really quite sub-par series of fantasy novels, to a level of fame that in a different age, an age not immedia-fied by the existence of the internet, would never have come about. It certainly isn't as popular as it is just by the merits of Sapkwoski's writings, which are quite frankly fucking dismal (see the Ciri Quintet), but despite of this, the Witcher Universe is definitely more popular now than any work of fantasy has been since a Game of Thrones was announced to be adapted to the small screen.

I was listening to Malukah's rendition of Priscilla's song, said original rendition which one can stumble on when one does the Novigrad questline in the Witcher 3 when looking for Dandelion, and I was struck at the level of passion this one thing has inspired.
And indeed, the long-running 'love' storyline of Geralt and Yennefer is likely one of the most compelling things the books have offered. I remember being quite taken by it when reading the short stories.

For your pleasure; Malukah's rendition of Priscilla's Song.

The Willows, Beehive Books Edition

Well, Hot damn.

Look at that beauty.

The second Beehive Book to grace my shelves is the gorgeous 'The Willows' which collects some of Algernon Blackwood's best short stories. Like The Island of Doctor Moreau, it arrived in a custom-made cardboard shipping box. You're not really supposed to keep those unless you plan to return the book to sender (in which case you really have to have the cardboard box), but who really would want to return this?

The slipcase this time is a beautiful matte black on glossy black rendition of the novel's cover artwork. Pictures can not do it justice, though this is also in large part to my cellphone not being up to snuff. In frustration I switched to a Canon about halfway through. Some of the pictures are over saturated, others suffer from lighting issues. Guess I just suck at taking pictures.

Oh and by the way, since some people were confused about the size of a Beehive Book, here's it together with the trade paperback of the Lyonesse Fantasy Masterwork, which I'll be reading when I finally manage to finish up the Grendel review.

Just like before, loads of work went into the design.  It's again some amazing work from Maëlle Doliveux.

The artwork this time is by Paul Pope, and colourization is by Omar F. Abdullah.

I'm not a huge fan of the pink overtones everywhere, but it does feel suitably surreal.

There's an introduction by Ramsey Campbell, of whom I haven't read a single thing. Which is rather bizarre but I actually checked through some of the Horror anthologies I'd read and he's not in any of them. Maybe I should remedy that.

Besides the titular The Willows short story, the book collects 4 other short stories by Blackwood, but the Willows is comfortably the longest one. It also has the most internal art dedicated to it, I didn't take pictures of all of it, because of vague reasons.

Here endeth the artwork for The willows.

Artwork for Acessory Before the Fact.

Artwork for Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House.

Lovely little piece.

I didn't include the Egyptian Hornet artwork, but the Man Who Found Out's piece is right below.

There's also an Artist's Note by Paul Pope, and a few words on Algernon Blackwood and on Paul Pope.

As I haven't read any of these stories I'll do a review of them when I get round to the reading.

In the meantime, if you're a fan of great book editions, by now it should be obvious that you should probably put these on your wishlist.