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.