Swamp Thing Appreciation 2: The pieces on the Board

So yeah, a pretty damn fine beginning.
The story was good, and in spite of the strangeness of the concept, it all worked quite well.

     It was honestly quite surprising, because I confess I did go into this with some reservations. The whole concept of Swamp Thing is weird. It seemed more than a little silly. And it is. There's no real way around that.

But there was a writer at the helm who just made it all work regardless.

     Alan Moore is a legend in the field of comics, having had an enormous influence in the medium with titles such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Batman: The Killing Joke, The Ballad of Halo Jones and others. Of those others, it is the extra-ordinarily dark but phenomenally good Providence saga that is far and away the stand-out, in my very biased and Lovecraft-loving opinion. But it is Moore's work on Swamp Thing that first brought him to the attention of the world at large.

Swamp Thing started out being a horror character, and despite of how weird and far afield it eventually got Moore always kept him firmly in that same genre, all the while bringing a whole new, and quite effective, approach to the stories. He played around with art and dialogue, with structure and layering. He mixed dream-quest, metaphor and genuine literary skill. And what was once just another comic became a work approaching cerebral literature.

Like its titular character Swamp Thing had this stately, inexorable pace, this slow way of ramping up, and the way in which the story was presented; with a multilayered structure that, to keep it all in your head, you had to somehow overlap in order to make it run smooth, this in particular was a genius approach. Swamp Thing always demanded your attention.

But, it was also still a comic, and a part of the DC/Vertigo universe... And that means Superheroes... the one thing that I didn't want to read anything about. And before the end of the first volume, before even Swamp Thing had dealt with his initial brush of existential angst shit had already hit the fan; the capes had arrived. For me, this was quite jarring, I can tell you.

Though their initial appearance doesn't last very long, and ends up being hardly relevant, it does remind the reader that this series' setting is very close to the rest of the DC Superhero stories. The big danger is quickly dealt with and the Swamp Thing gets to return quietly to his swamp, where he would occasionally deal with emergent horrors, all the while growing closer to his friend Abby Arcane.

Eventually, disaster would strike and lead him to team up with various characters from the darker/ occult side of the DC/ Vertigo universe. Etrigan the rhyming demon, Deadman, The Phantom Stranger, Spectre and the Swamp Thing himself would prove a compelling team for readers, making them hungry for more, and the earliest seeds for Justice league Dark were born. And you know what?
Despite my bias against, my loathing for superhero stories, I was having a lot of fun.

And then came Rites of Spring, a landmark in the Swamp Thing series itself. A moment of peace and love for Abby and Swamp Thing at the end of the horrors and the drama of the first arc of the Saga of Swamp Thing. It is an issue that is daring and experimental, its story and the direction it goes in gentle, passionate and rewarding. And the art is completely psychedelic.

But, even in the quiet, even in the happy moments, the question of his nature, his powers and capabilities remained. Man, monster, Swamp Thing, all of these, but what did this actually mean, what possibilities were there?

Moore had some ideas that would make the character truly great.

But he needed a way to shunt Swamp Thing along, he needed to have a guide to help him understand himself and to access his hidden potential. And so Moore created a character who was to be crucial to Swamp Thing's development: a certain mysterious Englishman, clad in trenchcoat and armed with snark and wit, a cigarette forever dangling between his lips.