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alibi_shopSwamp Thing #1-20 (2000-2001)
Written by Brian K. Vaughan
Art: #1-4 by Roger Petersen/Joe Rubinstein, #5 by Petersen/Mark Lipka, #6-8/10-11 by Petersen/Rick Magyar, #9 by Petersen/Magyar/Steve Lieber/Guy Davis/Paul Pope, #12 by Giuseppe Camuncoli/Magyar/Rodney Ramos, #13-16/18 by Camuncoli/Marc Hempel, #17/19-20 by Camuncoli/Cameron Stewart
In theory, a new Swamp Thing series that's all about Tefé Holland, with virtually no other existing DC characters, and edited by Joan Hilty and Heidi MacDonald, is a great idea. And while Brian Vaughan was more or less unknown at the time, he would go on to write some comics that I like a lot, so I was looking forward to reading his run.
I don't know, maybe I just don't like anything any more, but I liked this almost not at all.
The setup is fine. Even though in 1996 it sure looked like Tefé was destroyed by Swamp Thing, that's been un-happened now with no explanation; I didn't like that storyline anyway, so fine. She's now a teenager living in California, having been magicked into thinking she's a normal girl. The magic wears off* and she regains her identity and powers, but doesn't know what she ought to do with them, so she travels around a lot and meets people and eventually finds a quest worth her time. Meanwhile, some sinister government agents and also some nice government agents are on her trail. Cool.
Stereotypically, in a Vertigo comic, one might expect a teenage protagonist to be a plucky, sassy hero who may be a little confused but is basically right. Vaughan pushes against this pretty hard by making Tefé a highly confused impulsive arrogant asshole—which could be interesting, except that we only get her point of view intermittently; she's more often seen through other characters' eyes, and they don't have much to say about her except that she sure is intense. Two pretty major facts about her past and her motives are withheld until pretty late (or possibly made up pretty late), while she refuses to believe stuff that's been established as fact in the series (e.g., "fantasy worlds" like heaven and hell exist; she's literally been to hell). The philosophical debates she has about whether humans should be wiped out because they threaten the environment are exactly like the last three or four times we've seen such debates in Swamp Thing, except that it's hard to take anything she says seriously because we know she doesn't think things through and is incredibly easily misled. So all of these conflicts are just bombastic wheel-spinning, until the predictable conclusion where she's like "no one's entirely right" and decides to just do her own thing. The same is true of virtually every other big dramatic conflict: Tefé and her adversary yell back and forth for a while, then it gets resolved in the expected way for no clear reason.
Speaking of adversaries: oh dear. There's an evil assassin who's really evil and kills everyone and talks about killing and torturing everyone because she's evil (I would almost rather see a lot of horrible murders than the 10,000th repeat of "assassin breezily mentions how they just finished torturing and killing all these people we just met"; also, the one time she doesn't kill an innocent bystander, it's completely unclear why not). Her boss is one of the stupidest ideas for a villain I've ever seen—I don't even know where to start—and yet still so generic as to not even be entertaining. There's a supernatural agent of the plant world who's called Kudzu, and he dresses and talks like a samurai, because Japan, get it?—although to be fair, it turns out he really was once a human samurai who was transformed by kudzu, but that gets to another problem. Vaughan is absolutely uninterested in the mystical and transcendent themes in earlier iterations of Swamp Thing, but he still wants to use the idea of the Green... so he makes it as prosaic as possible. When we see the spiritual forms of totally non-human beings, they look like people with a little plant makeup on, just like Kudzu, and their spiritual world looks like human environments with a little plant makeup on, all very cute and unimaginative; there's a brief explanation of how Tefé is too human to perceive their real nature, but come on. (He also seems to think that the Parliament of Trees were literally trees. I know there's been a lot of mythology to keep track of, but come on.)
There's an annoying habit Vaughan has that I noticed a lot in Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina (not so much in Saga for obvious reasons): the Fun Fact. This is when he happens to have learned something that we might find interesting or educational, so he's going to have some character mention it for us. It's not an unusual writerly device (Alan Moore certainly leaned on the "strange but true!" thing at times) but Vaughan does it all the time here*, with no regard for whether that character would really start going on about that thing, or if so, how they would talk about it. Besides the stylistic clumsiness, a big problem with the Fun Fact is that it encourages you to assume that whenever a character mentions something you haven't heard of, that's the writer educating you about a true thing—so, when we get a logger reciting some logging industry propaganda about how "there are more redwoods now than when we started", it sounds exactly like all the other Fun Facts and your only clue that it's bullshit is that he's an unsympathetic character. It's also kind of strange to try to teach your readers about how the real world works when your story relies on ideas like "secret military agencies can be largely controlled by the junior Senator from California" or "traffic cameras are placed at highway rest stops and can see pollen" or "if you stick a sword into a car, you'll be electrocuted". Those things aren't presented as weird or satirical (unlike the "low-level Department of Agriculture employees can go on spy missions" thing, which is lampshaded like crazy); Vaughan either thinks they're true or, more likely, just doesn't care because he needs a plot point.
The art is OK, I guess. Actually I really like how the Petersen/Magyar art looks, just as cartooning, but it's in line with Vaughan's whole approach: people and mundane things look pretty good, but anything really weird or disturbing is barely an afterthought. When Swamp Thing himself appears, he sure is boring, except when he's briefly drawn by Paul Pope.
This installment does do one thing to move the series forward: we now have an adult Tefé who can potentially be in stories that aren't about destroying the human race. I'm not sure we needed 20 issues full of overwrought-yet-jokey bullshit to get to that point, but OK. Other than that, Vaughan hasn't changed much in Swamp Thing continuity (although, weirdly, out of nowhere he seems to show that Black Orchid—who wasn't even in the story—has been killed in a flashback), so future writers can do whatever. Just please don't do this.
Next: Breccia!! also two new writers
Written by Brian K. Vaughan
Art: #1-4 by Roger Petersen/Joe Rubinstein, #5 by Petersen/Mark Lipka, #6-8/10-11 by Petersen/Rick Magyar, #9 by Petersen/Magyar/Steve Lieber/Guy Davis/Paul Pope, #12 by Giuseppe Camuncoli/Magyar/Rodney Ramos, #13-16/18 by Camuncoli/Marc Hempel, #17/19-20 by Camuncoli/Cameron Stewart
In theory, a new Swamp Thing series that's all about Tefé Holland, with virtually no other existing DC characters, and edited by Joan Hilty and Heidi MacDonald, is a great idea. And while Brian Vaughan was more or less unknown at the time, he would go on to write some comics that I like a lot, so I was looking forward to reading his run.
I don't know, maybe I just don't like anything any more, but I liked this almost not at all.
The setup is fine. Even though in 1996 it sure looked like Tefé was destroyed by Swamp Thing, that's been un-happened now with no explanation; I didn't like that storyline anyway, so fine. She's now a teenager living in California, having been magicked into thinking she's a normal girl. The magic wears off* and she regains her identity and powers, but doesn't know what she ought to do with them, so she travels around a lot and meets people and eventually finds a quest worth her time. Meanwhile, some sinister government agents and also some nice government agents are on her trail. Cool.
Stereotypically, in a Vertigo comic, one might expect a teenage protagonist to be a plucky, sassy hero who may be a little confused but is basically right. Vaughan pushes against this pretty hard by making Tefé a highly confused impulsive arrogant asshole—which could be interesting, except that we only get her point of view intermittently; she's more often seen through other characters' eyes, and they don't have much to say about her except that she sure is intense. Two pretty major facts about her past and her motives are withheld until pretty late (or possibly made up pretty late), while she refuses to believe stuff that's been established as fact in the series (e.g., "fantasy worlds" like heaven and hell exist; she's literally been to hell). The philosophical debates she has about whether humans should be wiped out because they threaten the environment are exactly like the last three or four times we've seen such debates in Swamp Thing, except that it's hard to take anything she says seriously because we know she doesn't think things through and is incredibly easily misled. So all of these conflicts are just bombastic wheel-spinning, until the predictable conclusion where she's like "no one's entirely right" and decides to just do her own thing. The same is true of virtually every other big dramatic conflict: Tefé and her adversary yell back and forth for a while, then it gets resolved in the expected way for no clear reason.
Speaking of adversaries: oh dear. There's an evil assassin who's really evil and kills everyone and talks about killing and torturing everyone because she's evil (I would almost rather see a lot of horrible murders than the 10,000th repeat of "assassin breezily mentions how they just finished torturing and killing all these people we just met"; also, the one time she doesn't kill an innocent bystander, it's completely unclear why not). Her boss is one of the stupidest ideas for a villain I've ever seen—I don't even know where to start—and yet still so generic as to not even be entertaining. There's a supernatural agent of the plant world who's called Kudzu, and he dresses and talks like a samurai, because Japan, get it?—although to be fair, it turns out he really was once a human samurai who was transformed by kudzu, but that gets to another problem. Vaughan is absolutely uninterested in the mystical and transcendent themes in earlier iterations of Swamp Thing, but he still wants to use the idea of the Green... so he makes it as prosaic as possible. When we see the spiritual forms of totally non-human beings, they look like people with a little plant makeup on, just like Kudzu, and their spiritual world looks like human environments with a little plant makeup on, all very cute and unimaginative; there's a brief explanation of how Tefé is too human to perceive their real nature, but come on. (He also seems to think that the Parliament of Trees were literally trees. I know there's been a lot of mythology to keep track of, but come on.)
There's an annoying habit Vaughan has that I noticed a lot in Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina (not so much in Saga for obvious reasons): the Fun Fact. This is when he happens to have learned something that we might find interesting or educational, so he's going to have some character mention it for us. It's not an unusual writerly device (Alan Moore certainly leaned on the "strange but true!" thing at times) but Vaughan does it all the time here*, with no regard for whether that character would really start going on about that thing, or if so, how they would talk about it. Besides the stylistic clumsiness, a big problem with the Fun Fact is that it encourages you to assume that whenever a character mentions something you haven't heard of, that's the writer educating you about a true thing—so, when we get a logger reciting some logging industry propaganda about how "there are more redwoods now than when we started", it sounds exactly like all the other Fun Facts and your only clue that it's bullshit is that he's an unsympathetic character. It's also kind of strange to try to teach your readers about how the real world works when your story relies on ideas like "secret military agencies can be largely controlled by the junior Senator from California" or "traffic cameras are placed at highway rest stops and can see pollen" or "if you stick a sword into a car, you'll be electrocuted". Those things aren't presented as weird or satirical (unlike the "low-level Department of Agriculture employees can go on spy missions" thing, which is lampshaded like crazy); Vaughan either thinks they're true or, more likely, just doesn't care because he needs a plot point.
The art is OK, I guess. Actually I really like how the Petersen/Magyar art looks, just as cartooning, but it's in line with Vaughan's whole approach: people and mundane things look pretty good, but anything really weird or disturbing is barely an afterthought. When Swamp Thing himself appears, he sure is boring, except when he's briefly drawn by Paul Pope.
This installment does do one thing to move the series forward: we now have an adult Tefé who can potentially be in stories that aren't about destroying the human race. I'm not sure we needed 20 issues full of overwrought-yet-jokey bullshit to get to that point, but OK. Other than that, Vaughan hasn't changed much in Swamp Thing continuity (although, weirdly, out of nowhere he seems to show that Black Orchid—who wasn't even in the story—has been killed in a flashback), so future writers can do whatever. Just please don't do this.
Next: Breccia!! also two new writers
