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Saga of the Swamp Thing #5

Story Title: “The Screams of Hungry Flesh” (main story), “...But the Patient Died!” (back-up feature)

Writer: Martin Pasko (main story), Mike W. Barr (back-up feature)

Artist: Tom Yeates (main story), Tony DeZuniga (back-up feature)

Editor: Len Wein

Colorist: Tatanja Wood (main story), Cal Gafford (back-up feature)

Letterer: John Costanza (main story), Milt Snappin (back-up feature)

Release Date: September 1982

This issue exists in a weird sort of twilight space within Pasko’s run. While the last few issues have been united by the common thread of Swampy’s relationship with the mysterious psychic half-pint, they’ve also been self-contained. This issue acts as kind of a transitional segue into the much more serialized stories that follow. Here we’re introduced to Dr. Dennis Barclay, a massive piece of shit who’s just the absolute worst. Still, that won’t become apparent until a ways on, and here he’s presented as being as sympathetic as a cardboard cut out can be. We’re also reintroduced to fashion disaster/probable Nazi Dr. Harry Kay, who last time we saw him had all of his skin, and more importantly his awful clothes, burned off in a fire. 

When we last left our Jolly Green Giant, he was being shipped off to a clinic belonging to the mysterious and sinister Sunderland Corporation after nearly dying in a fight with a child-murdering demon. You know, we’ve all had those days. Arriving at the clinic, Swampy meets Dr. Barclay, who claims to have magic hands. Typically the correct response to any doctor claiming to have “magic hands” is to run away as quickly as possible, but Barclay seems to be telling the truth when he rubs those hands all over Swampy’s chest, healing him. This makes him significantly cooler than our previous handy man, Grasp. (Magic hands are cooler than robo-hands. Sorry to any cyborgs reading this. I don’t make the rules) Barclay has been studying under Dr. Kay for a while, and he views him as a sort of surrogate father. This really blows for Dennis when he finds out that his magic hands are actually just regular old hands, which makes him significantly less cool than Grasp. It also turns out that the clinic hasn’t been using FDA approved methods to heal its patients. Instead they’ve been growing homunculi in a secret basement and pumping the afflicted’s afflictions into those boys instead. Dr. Kay uses one of them to heal his own burns, and we’re treated to the revelation that he’s had a mustache this whole time, hidden by the line work. Naturally the artificial humans aren’t too happy about being made biological scapegoats, and attack Kay and his cronies. Like with Michael Bay’s 2005 science fiction masterpiece The Island, this whole thing could have been avoided if they just lobotomized the suckers before subjecting them to horrifying biological atrocities. The issue ends with Swampy and Liz, now fugitives from Sunderland, hitting the road along with Dennis, because what this series was really missing was a mediocre male protagonist to round out the roster. 

This story is... fine. Aside from the obvious of logic of why is this even an issue in the first place, it’s executed well enough to remain interesting. The biggest disappointment is that there’s barely any exploration of what could be an interesting moral quandary, instead using the premise purely for shock value and horror. This is a major missed opportunity, but it’s possible that it was an intentional move to balance out the heaviness of the preceding issue.There’s also some delightfully macabre art near the issue’s end as the abused monstrosities rise up against their abusers. The issue does a decent job of reintroducing Kay back into the fold, establishing him as a major player in the issue to come. The Phantom Stranger backup is a charmingly retro conclusion to last issue’s cliffhanger, and while the reintroduction of Tannarak as a villain isn’t quite as compelling as the anthology format that proceeded it, it’s still a fun little story. All in all, this  is a mostly unremarkable issue other than introducing elements that will be important in the stories to come. I’ll see you there. 

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The Saga of the Swamp Thing Annual #1

Story Title: “Swamp Thing”

Writer: Bruce Jones (based on the screenplay by Wes Craven)

Artist: Mark Texiera & Tony DeZuniga 

Editor: Len Wein

Colorist: Tatanja Wood 

Letterer: Gaspar Saladino

Release Date: August 1982

I’m gonna go ahead and start by giving this book the most damning criticism that can be bestowed upon a piece of media: this thing has absolutely no reason to exist. 

Here we have, in lieu of a new story, an adaptation of Wes Craven’s live-action Swamp Thing. Now, the film, contrary to what one might expect, isn’t actually the worst thing ever put to celluloid. It’s not good, per se, but it does a surprisingly competent job of capturing at least a little of the dark poetry at the heart of Alec Holland’s story. Craven is unquestionably a talented filmmaker, and while the film is definitely not one of his career highlights, it’s also not as bad as it could have been, which is probably the best praise that could reasonably be achieved by a live action Swamp Thing movie made at the dawn of the Eighties. 

This puts this “Official Adaptation” in an uncomfortable place. It’s a completely superfluous product, as the movie’s greatest strength is Craven’s direction, something that can not be replicated on the page. While a perfectly competent comic from a technical standpoint, there’s no reason to read this rather than watch the film. The only advantage it has over its source material is that it can be consumed in an eighth of the time needed to watch the film, and even that barely qualifies as a selling point. I’m guessing most people would rather eat a large amount of bland spaghetti than a rotten tomato mashed up with a handful of uncooked penne. 

I can’t help but wonder who the intended audience for this thing was. If it was designed to get fans of the film interested in the comics, then it’s a poor place to start, as the major alterations to the characters will do nothing but confuse and alienate the audience. If it was meant to entice comic-readers towards the film, then it fails on that front too. Changes that might be more forgivable onscreen become completely alienating on the page. For example, Holland’s friend Matt Cable, a major player in his life, has been replaced in the film with a new character named Alice Cable. This change might have even been interesting if it were a simple gender switch, but despite apparently being a badass federal agent, she exists mostly to be the Beauty to Holland’s Beast.

I’m not going to recap the plot of this thing, because it really doesn’t matter. I will, however, outline some of the stupider changes made to the material. Alec’s wife Linda is now his sister, presumably to make his subsequent romance with Cable more palatable, but that raises the question of why she’s in the movie in the first place. In the comic Linda’s death provides for about 50% of Holland’s moping and main-pain, but here she exists to get killed and then never mentioned again. Swamp Thing’s nemesis, Anton Arcane, is no longer the menacing sorcerer/scientist he is in the comics, but is now a dopey businessman. My favorite alteration, however, is the revelation that the Bio-Restorative Formula does not alter DNA, but rather “amplifies the true nature of what it affects”, demonstrated when one of Arcane’s henchmen is tricked into drinking it and becomes a weird little rat man. This scene is evocative of the scene in the live-action Super Mario Bros. where Koopa mutates his henchmen into lizard people. By this logic, Holland was always a shambling Jolly Green Giant inside, he just needed the formula to realize that. 

The artwork is perfectly functional, even at times quite good, but all that does is serve to highlight the fact that it’s being wasted on a mediocre product. One particularly minor alteration sums the whole affair up rather nicely. “Oh shit, there goes the neighborhood,” becomes “Uh-oh, there goes the neighborhood,” nicely illustrating the way this adaptation takes away any minor bite the film had. The only purpose I can imagine this annual serving is as a historical curiosity to total Swamp Thing geeks like me, and even then there’s no reason to actually read the whole thing unless you really hate yourself. Luckily for you, I do, and can tell you from experience that this is one comic that would have been better served by being set on fire and thrown into a swamp. 

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The Saga of the Swamp Thing #4

Story Title: “In the White Room” (main story), “Hospital of Fear” (back-up feature)

Writer: Martin Pasko (main story), Mike W. Barr (back-up feature)

Artist: Tom Yeates (main story), Tony DeZuniga (back-up feature)

Editor: Len Wein

Colorist: Tatanja Wood (main story), Adrienne Roy (back-up feature)

Letterer: John Costanza (main story), Ben Oda (back-up feature)

Release Date: August 1982

This is a fascinating issue. While Pasko’s last few stories have prodded at some deeper and more complex themes, they’ve still been mostly constrained by the typical Comics Code Authority formula. This issue is a big flashing sign that the CCA was starting to be relaxed, because the fact that this story is what it is is actually pretty surprising. For those of you not in the know, the Comics Code Authority was a set of content guidelines instituted several decades earlier as a response to the moral panic over those nasty comics eroding the moral fiber of America’s youth. These guidelines were self-imposed by the publishers as a compromise, an act of good faith towards the concerned PTA moms to let them know that they would do their best to not rot children’s brains from now on. It was this new restrictions that lead to the dorkiness of the Silver Age, changing characters like Batman from a dark and brooding spectre of vengeance (not to be confused with DC’s actual Spectre of vengeance) to the pun-spouting boy scout fighting his way out of ridiculous deathtraps. 

In this issue, we’re treated to exactly the sort of story that put the moral guardians up in arms in the first place. Following up on the thread of the murdered minority children, the issue opens with the killer in custody. It turns out that out culprit is none other than a beloved public broadcast children's host, Uncle Barney, a thinly veiled clone of a certain sweater-clad TV icon. But this being the type of comic that it is, it turns out the Barney that he plays host to more than a TV show, and is under the influence of a demon. He was originally a timid loser, so he summoned a spirit to grant him confidence. The demon inhabited him, turning him into the coolest kid show host around. and making his TV show an instant hit. Of course, nothing comes cheap, and the demon started using Barney to kill children and feed on their life force, much to his horror. Once captured, the devil inside decides to hightail it out of there, and he dies once the spirit has fled, leaving the sheriff scratching his head. Speaking of, this guy is a riot, speaking in a ridiculously rendered phonetic Arkansas accent.

We meet back up with our hero, still pursuing Casey, guided by some sort of psychic link she’s set up between them. After coming into contact with Liz Tremayne, the reporter from last issue, she’s shipped off to some sort of orphanage, which she quickly escapes with her powers. Her freedom is short-lived, however, when she is captured by Liz’s assistant, the demon’s latest joyride. Swampy pursues them to an old meat processing plant, and the demon declares its intent to feed on Casey. It explains that she won’t be quite as nourishing as the minority children upon which it has already fed, because apparently racism is the demon equivalent of barbecue slow cooking. Apparently it targeted minority children because the more downtrodden the kids are, the tastier and more fulfilling their murder. Sure. Okay. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and engage in some really cynical speculation, but I can’t shake the feeling that if it had been white kiddies getting butchered, then this story wouldn’t have made it past the censors. I could be flat wrong, and the issue definitely doesn’t skirt around the subject of racism, but the topic isn’t explored with quite enough depth to justify its inclusion. Anyway, after getting his ass whipped and thrown on a meat hook, Swampy offers to become the demon’s new host in exchange for Casey’s life. It accepts, and just as it enters his body Big Green throws himself into a walk-in freezer, which somehow destroys the demon. The issue ends with the injured and possibly dying Swamp Thing loaded into a truck and shipped off to the company Liz works for, which turns out to be the Sunderland Corporation. 

The back-up feature takes a turn from the usual formula, ending with a “to be continued” instead of the usual one-and-done. Here we meet the nephew of one of the Stranger’s old foes, Broderick Rune, a surgeon who uses a medallion to save the life of a patient. Turns out the medallion was given to him by Tannarak, an old enemy of the Stranger’s, and the issue ends with our mysterious hero strapped to a gurney and at his foe’s mercy. 

This issue is an absolute mess, but there’s something really admirable about it. It doesn’t quite pull off the story its trying to tell. Though the racism element comes across as dated at best, the story attempted to tackle some serious themes that other comics at the time wouldn’t have dared to touch. At times it feels more like a proto-Hellblazer story than a traditional Swamp Thing yarn. In addition, there’s a running theme about the nature of children’s entertainment. Liz confronts the head of the network, urging him not to replace Uncle Barney’s show with a similarly saccharine program. She argues that the sanitized version of reality presented in this sort of kid’s entertainment desensitizes kids to the real world, and that the cleaned up morality of Barney’s show contributed to the ease with which he was able to lull his victims into security. Kids, the issue argues, are smart enough to understand the real world, and deserve entertainment that will prepare them to live in it. It’s hard not to read this argument as a meta-comment on the medium of comics, pushing back against the squeaky clean stories of the last few years. Villains, the issue argues, don’t always try to rob the Second National Bank on the second day of the week. Sometimes the bad guys do cruel things, inexplicable things, and the bad things aren’t always wiped away at the end of a thirty page adventure. It’s a noble sentiment, and it’s likely that without Pasko paving the way with stories like this, Moore would have been unable to achieve what his predecessor attempted. In the end, it’s about as good as an issue that can be roughly summarized as “What if Mr. Dressup was a murderer?” could be. 

See you next issue, where we take a look at the first annual, which says nothing meaningful or of any consequence to anyone!

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The Saga of the Swamp Thing #3

Story Title: “A Town Has Turned to Blood” (main story), “The Beauty of the Beast” (back-up feature)

Writer: Martin Pasko (main story), Mike W. Barr (back-up feature)

Artist: Tom Yeates (main story), Dan Spiegle (back-up feature)

Editor: Len Wein

Colorist: Tatanja Wood (main story), Adrienne Roy (back-up feature)

Letterer: John Costanza

Release Date: July 1982

All you really need to know about this issue is that at one point a bunch of vampires sleep inside of hollowed-out pinball machines instead of coffins. Is this remotely important to the plot? No, but it’s awesome. That right there is a prime cut of… some type of Gothic. I’m not sure what kind, but the important thing is that the vampires sleep in hollowed out pinball machines.

Last issue, I mentioned I Am Legend, which proved oddly prophetic, because this story owes a lot to Richard Matheson’s vampocolypse. (For those of you only familiar with the version in which Robert Neville copes with the end of the world by memorizing the script to Shrek, in the book he copes with it by… well, not coping with it at all, really. He does fantasize about sexual assault, though,so at least he still has hobbies. Oh yeah, also the book is about vampires, not CGI orcs. Spoiler alert.) Anyway, this too is a vision of a society which has been completely overtaken by a bloodsucking menace, though on a much smaller scale. We find ourselves back in the town of Rosewood, Illinois after last issue’s teaser, which has been completely Count Choc-ified due to, you guessed it, Stiv.

Swampy and Casey are still in the box car where we left them last issue, and after a page or so of musing about the meaning the girl has brought back to his life, the train is accosted by Stiv and his gang of undead fashion emergencies. Despite all of the obvious signs pointing to the fact that these are vampires, Swampy (who has fought werewolves, evil robots, and giant psychic worms) at first refuses to believe it, because vampires don’t exist. I guess everyone in the DC Universe has to have a bullshit line, but you’d think a guy made of muck’s would be a bit more out there. Swampy dispatches the baddies, but not before being knocked out of the open boxcar, sending Casey alone down the rails. Going into town to try to figure out where the train is headed, he is shot by an arrow which somehow knocks him out. When he comes to, he meets Larry Childress, his son Steve, his sister Hillary, and her boy Bobby. Bobby is a big fan of the Swamp Thing legend, and is thrilled to meet his hero, even if the circumstances aren’t the greatest. He apologizes, explaining that they thought Holland was a vampire, because most vampires are eight feet tall and green. (Alright, there’s a throwaway line about how the vamps can change shape, but we never see them do it, so pbbbbfffft.)

We take a quick break from the main story to meet Liz Tremayne, the ornery reporter and author of Swamp Man: Fact or Myth?, which I’m sure is a fine book but loses points for the lack of alliteration. Seriously, she had two routes she could have gone: the old standby “Fact or Fiction?” or, if she was feeling frisky, “Monster or Myth?”. This bit also sets up a plot point about a serial killer targeting minority children, which I’m sure will be handled with grace and class in the next issue. At a later point we also see Tremayne appear on a television set along with Casey, so at least we know the creepy little girl is safe.

Back in Rosewood, Childress explains what’s happened to the town, telling Holland that he’ll understand if he doesn’t believe such a ridiculous story, because after all, he’s a giant talking herb garden of science, not superstition. Swampy also starts to suspect that Childress is a bit on the unhinged side, but is too busy saving Bobby from a newly-turned Hillary to do anything about it. Swampy and the kid are accosted by the vampires, lead by the ever-tenacious Stiv. Stiv explains that he was turned by a drifter, and then convinced one of his friends who worked at a blood bank to replace some of the blood with Stiv’s leading to more people getting infected and eventually taking over the whole town. And to think, all of this could have been avoided if his parents had named him Lawrence or Frank. Meanwhile, Childress and his boy Steve have wired the dam to explode (So this town is big enough to have a blood bank and a dam, but no one outside noticed that the whole city had gone radio silent?), and the crazy son of a gun detonates the thing with both of them still on top of it. This leads to a really emotionally charged scene where Steve calls his father out on sacrificing both of them without his consent, which is a surprising amount of moral ambiguity for the previously black-and-white narrative, and adds some real depth to the issue. Childress’s plan works, flooding the town and destroying the vamps with running water, which is frankly a great idea and a unique resolution to a familiar story. Where the story really falters is the ending, where rather than taking the boy to safety, Swampy leaves Bobby on a floating rooftop, simply giving him some vague platitude about him “being needed to rebuild the town”. And a twelve year old boy, the last survivor of a city that is now underwater, is supposed to “rebuild” how exactly? It’s a lazy way to write him out of the narrative, and feels extremely out of character for the big green guy.

It doesn’t help that immediately following the poor ending, we’re treated to an absolute stinker of a Phantom Stranger back-up, which is chock full of idiotic unfortunate implications. There’s a pair of sisters, one ugly and one beautiful, with the beautiful one being a real jerk-o-rama and the ugly one being kindly. When they switch bodies, they also switch dispositions. The story ends with the Stranger making them both beautiful, which by the story’s logic means there’s now one more alpha bitch in the world. Nice job breaking it, hero.

This is a hell of a fun issue until the abysmal ending, and while it doesn’t quite ruin the whole thing, it definitely casts a shadow over what came before. See you next issue, where we’ll follow up on what I’m sure will be the completely inoffensive and not at all cringey resolution to that plot point about murdered minority children. Ciao!

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The Saga of the Swamp Thing #2

Story Title: “Something to Live For” (main story), “Soul on Fire” (back-up feature)

Writer: Martin Pasko (main story), Mike W. Barr (back-up feature)

Artist: Tom Yeates (main story), Dan Spiegle (back-up feature)

Editor: Len Wein

Colorist: Tatanja Wood (main story), Adrienne Roy (back-up feature)

Letterer: John Costanza

Release Date: June 1982

I’ve always had a strong and irrational aversion to movie-branded book covers. The only time I’ve ever actually shelled out cash for one of those monstrosities was when I needed a copy of I Am Legend for a class, and it was between paying fifteen dollars for a new copy or two bucks for Will Smith looking all dour and intense. Now, I want you to take a good long look at that cover, er… art? Really feel it. Let it seep into your soul. This is what movie-branded books look like in the Fifth Circle of Hell.

And yet… somehow I can’t find it in my jaded little heart to be mad at this. It’s almost adorable in how dated and inept it is, from the ridiculously stilted pose they chose to the blue-green gradient background. I wish I had a physical copy just for the novelty. Besides, as tacky as Dick Durock appears in what looks like the world’s most ill-conceived fetish gear, without a pre-Elm Street Wes Craven and his cinematic vision, there’s a good chance that the world of comic books would be a whole lot different.

Yeah, go on, yuk it up. When you’re done, I’ll explain.

So, how is it that a rubber-suited monster movie fundamentally changed the medium of comics? Well, without it, Saga wouldn’t exist. In one of the industry’s greatest bits of irony, what would come to be one of the most acclaimed comic series of all time was originally created to capitalize on the release of a souped up B-movie. Yes, Saga was originally nothing more than a cheap cash in on what could be considered another cheap cash in.

Ain’t comics grand?

Of course, the series quickly rose above that cash in status, and the second issue starts to prove it. While still a bit shaky and seemingly unsure of what direction it wants to go, its footing feels a bit firmer here. Yeates really starts to deliver the goods on the visual front, seeming to have a better feel for the world he’s portraying and imbuing it with more shadows and depth.

The story picks up right where the last issue ended, with Swampy protecting is his new friend Casey from a bunch of mobbed up townies. After escaping, a plane swoops out of nowhere, spraying Swampy with some sort of plant-tailored knock out gas. When he comes to, he finds that he and Casey are at the mercy of a man in a turtleneck, a purple blazer, and orange bell-bottoms, which explains why this is considered a horror comic. Oh, and he has robotic hands, but they distract from the orange bell-bottoms, which are obviously the most important part of his character. While Swampy is tied to a Frankenstein slab, Casey is watched over by the creepy scientist from the last issue, who speaks fifty percent in gratuitous cliches and fifty percent in gratuitous German. I think the implication is supposed to be that he’s an ex-Nazi, but his hairdo and yellow sunglasses make him seem more like an aged beatnik who got lost in a Salvation Army. The man with the robo-hands calls himself Grasp, and he wants the Bio-Restorative Formula. He’s a representative of the Sunderland Corporation, a military contractor who learned of Holland through the grapevine and wanted in on a piece of that Bio-Restorative pie. When Holland explains that he doesn’t have the recipe committed to memory, Grasp tries to cut him in half with a buzz saw, because his super cool lair is located in an old saw mill. Meanwhile, Casey escapes Dr. Salvo by using her psychic powers to attack him with a set of curtains. After using her head to free Swampy, the two flee into a cave, pursued by a Grasp and his handy dandy laser rifle. During the escape the mill catches on fire, and we see a hideous burned figure rising from the wreckage and swearing his revenge. Yes, it’s a tragedy that the creepy scientist suffered such pain, but the good news is that his terrible clothes are gone. Back in the cave, Grasp loses his footing, catching a stalactite as he falls—but alas, he loses his grasp when he accidentally lasers his robo-hand off (get it? GET IT???), and he plummets to his doom. We’re then treated to a brief aside of a teenager in a town called Rosewood, Illinois being murdered by a guy called “Stiv”, which is probably the predestined outcome for anyone named “Stiv”. The issue ends with our boggy hero and Casey riding the rails towards an uncertain future.

The Phantom Stranger back-up is a fun little diversion, about a firefighter being haunted by the spirit of his best friend who died during a fire. While he blames himself (and so does the vengeful ghost), the man really died because he was drunk on the job. The story has the cool gimmick of the ghost manifesting through fire, at one point even appearing in the flame of a cigarette lighter. These stories serve as a welcome foil to Swampy’s adventures at the front of the book, breaking up the overarching plot with enjoyable one shots. The one real flaw is that, since they’re back-up features and take up less space, they can end up feeling a little rushed.

Issue #2 is pure comic book schlock, delicious sci-fi horror camp. Grand literature it ain’t, but it wasn’t trying to be. The question of what exactly is the deal with Casey becomes more developed and intriguing, and this issue really draws you in compared to the last—that is, if you have the same appetite as me for B-grade pulp cheee.

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The Saga of the Swamp Thing #1

Story Title: “What Peace There May Be in Silence” (main story), “...In Shadowed Depths” (back-up feature)

Writer: Martin Pasko (main story), Bruce Jones (back-up feature)

Artist: Tom Yeates (main story), Dan Spiegle (back-up feature)

Editor: Len Wein

Colorist: Tatanja Wood (main story), Philip Felix (back-up feature)

Letterer: John Costanza (main story), Adrienne Roy (back-up feature)

Release Date: May 1982

I’ve been thinking about how (or even if) to go about this blog for a while, but the one thing that I knew for sure was that I would be starting with The Saga of the Swamp Thing. Though Vertigo wasn’t yet a twinkle in DC’s bulging corporate eye when DC’s revival of Swampy hit the stands, Alan Moore’s seminal run on the series would come to define many of the elements that would make the imprint stand out. Among these were a more literary tone and a tendency to treat even the most absurd comic book tropes with a certain dignity and respect. So great was Moore’s impact on the book that discussions of Saga tend to forget that there were nineteen issues beforehand, penned by Martin Pasko, except perhaps as a curiosity. 

My original plan was to skip right on over these early issues as well, mainly because modern printings of Moore’s run are published under the Vertigo label, whilst Pasko’s has been mostly consigned to obscurity to the point where it has been consistently excluded from trade collections of the series. In the end, that’s the exact reason I decided to cover them. Are these stories unfairly forgotten gems, or have they faded from the public consciousness for good reason? Well, that’s what we’re here to find out. 

Now, for the uninitiated: The idea of a “Swamp Thing” first appeared courtesy of Len Wein (famous for creating a certain yellow spandex-clad slicing-and-dicing Canuck over at Marvel) and Bernie Wrightson in a 1971 issue of House of Secrets, one of DC’s horror anthology titles. This Swamp Thing was a self-contained story, but the concept would be revisited in an ongoing series the next year. The new Swamp Thing was Alec Holland, a scientist working on a “Bio-Restorative Formula” (comic book speak for “magical super-fertalizer”). After Holland refused to hand over the formula to some criminals, they blow up his lab. His wife Linda is killed, and Alec is doused in the Bio-Restorative Formula before catching on fire and plunging into the swamp. Reborn as a so-called “Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Man”, Holland proceeded to wander through twenty-four increasingly ridiculous adventures in the hope of returning to his human form. Wrightson left after issue ten, and though Wein stuck around for three more, the series was already starting to show signs of fatigue. By the time Wein left, the series was, much like Holland, a shambling husk of its former self, and its cancellation was one of the great mercy kills of comic book history. Shortly before the end, the series introduced Alen’s previously-unmentioned brother Edward and showed him successfully regain his humanity, both plot points which have been mercifully ignored by subsequent writers. After a brief team-up with the Challengers of the Unknown, a now-obscure team of Silver Age adventurers, Holland was last seen wandering the woods, having become a Bigfoot-esque legend. 

So this is where we find our boggy hero at the start of Saga, taking up residence in a swamp outside of Limbo, North Carolina. About half of the story is dedicated to recapping his origin, and it does a fine job of getting the reader up to speed. The story itself is mostly focused on the town’s reaction to the monster in their midst, kicked off when Swampy tries to save a group of drunk hunters from a bear, only to have his hand lopped off for his trouble. It’s a fundamental element of early Swamp Thing stories that the poor guy just can’t catch a break, so this reintroduction feels right at home. Another one of early Swampy’s defining characteristics is his endless moping and angsting, and there’s plenty of that here. That said, he’s had a rough time, so some moping isn’t unearned. A bit later, Swampy witnesses a father attempting to shoot his young daughter, and naturally Big Green intervenes. The father is killed, but not before making some cryptic comments about the girl and her mother (who he already killed) being some sort of demonic abominations. The girl is mute, but courtesy of her vaguely-defined psychic powers, Swampy learns that her name is Casey. Immediately latching onto the girl as a conduit to reconnect him with his lost humanity, he becomes her protector. The townspeople, upon seeing the two together, decide that the girl is in fact an evil entity and that Swampy is her familiar, and pull out the torches and pitchforks. The story ends with the revelation that a creepy German fashion reject/mysterious evil scientist has Holland’s severed hand, and that the big guy is dying. It ends the issue on a nice note of suspense. 

The whole affair is a perfectly functional fresh start for Swamp Thing, with everything working as it needs to. Unfortunately, that functionality comes at a price. The story feels frustratingly safe, adhering closely to the formula established by Wein instead of taking the character in a new direction. It’s a decent reintroduction, and would probably feel a lot fresher to someone who hadn’t read the original run, but feels disappointingly restrained. The art matches the writing; it does its job, but is light on atmosphere. 

The same cannot be said of the issue’s back-up feature, which features a wonderfully wicked edge which is missing from the main story. These early issues also include short one-and-dones featuring DC’s man (possibly? Maybe an angel? All we really know about his origin is that it sure as hell isn’t whatever the New 52 cooked up) of mystery The Phantom Stranger. This is a delightfully dark little tale about a crooked preacher who messes with the wrong forces, both mortal and immaterial. It feels like something out of an old EC anthology, and is a great cap to the issue. 

In the end, this is a fine jumping off point for the series, and while it doesn’t do anything that new or exciting, it’s also a swell place for first-time Swamp Thing readers to catch up without rooting around (hah!) for the original series. Though it’s only a shadow of what the series would become, it does enough right to make itself more than a mere historical curiosity for geeks like me—whether the same can be said for the rest of Pasko’s run remains to be seen.