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alibi_shopSwamp Thing #1-11 (2011-2012)
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Yanick Paquette except #3 by Paquette/Victor Ibáñez, #4 by Marco Rudy/Sean Parsons/Michael Lacombe, #6/11 by Rudy, #8-9 by Paquette/Rudy, #10 by Francesco Francavilla
Surreptitiously ditching older ideas and making up new explanations for everything has always been a big part of superhero comics. But literally announcing that you're doing that, and releasing new versions of everything where lack of continuity is actually a selling point, seems different somehow—more gimmicky, and kind of a bummer for fans who pride themselves on having memorized all the old plots, but still there's something attractive about clearing the decks and not having to keep track of decades of stuff by hundreds of writers. I never followed the Marvel Ultimates, and I still haven't seen most of the DC New 52 things, and I admit that like many readers I tend to cling stubbornly to however things were when I was 12. But, sure: a New 52 Swamp Thing, why not. We've gone back to issue #1 four times already. Bring on the fifth issue #1.
It's hard to tell at first how much of a break with previous continuity this will be. We suddenly have a live human person called Alec Holland again... but we've had that before, and it always turned out to be a fake-out. Scott Snyder's take on this is pretty clever: Alec has just recently returned to life somehow, and all he knows is that he remembers being a big green monster, and being with this Abby woman he's never met. We soon learn that he never was that monster: he just has its memories, which have somehow been put into a new body—in other words, the exact opposite of Alan Moore's version of the Swamp Thing origin. It's a cool idea, especially because Snyder writes Alec pretty well; this is a different character than the one we've seen before, more weary and practical, but that could be either because this is the New 52 version or just because this guy has been through so much insane shit that nothing will ever surprise him again (even Superman suddenly appearing to give him a bunch of exposition: Alec is just like "Yeah I know" and finishes the exposition for him).
This is all set up in the first issue in such an efficient and engaging way that I looked forward to seeing more of that kind of thing, just Alec readjusting to life and eventually figuring out whatever the mystery is. But Snyder quickly kicks the plot into high gear and dismisses the mystery—largely by explaining how previous Swamp Thing writers didn't mean what they said they meant, which seems like an odd strategy when DC has given you freedom to just make up whatever you want, but OK. It seems that Moore was still right about Alec being dead and Swamp Thing being an independent thing, but now we're told that a Swamp Thing normally should be a transformed human; it just didn't work out right in this case, and now Alec has somehow been revived so he can become the proper kind of Swamp Thing. Understandably he has no desire to do this. What happened to the other Swamp Thing is unclear, but it's not hard to see why Snyder is so insistent on revising how all this stuff works: first, it puts the hero in a situation where, having had all this crap happen to him against his will before, now he might have to decide to do it again on purpose; and second, it drastically scales back Swamp Thing's powers and makes him more vulnerable, because he'll have more of a real body that's partly human and can be hurt. When Alec does make the change and we finally see the new design... I'm not crazy about it, it's more of a streamlined heroic fantasy look (he even gets wings for a while), but these things are always subject to change anyway so I can roll with it.
So, why is it so important for Swamp Thing to return? This is Snyder's other big retcon idea. Remember the Grey—the spirit of fungi, one of the three kingdoms of multicellular life, which is sometimes evil? Forget it, there's no such thing. Instead, the mythology now puts all forms of life (Red and Green) up against the spirit of death and disease, the Rot. This is not a very well worked-out idea. Its main point of interest is that it can create gross zombie monsters, and it has human avatars, one of which of course was Anton Fucking Arcane (I am so, so sick of that guy) and now the new one might be Abby. So if both she and Alec fulfill their destinies, they'll be on opposite sides—which doesn't come to much in the end, but does produce some fairly cool visuals. I would like this better if we got to know the new Abby better, but she's very briefly introduced as an ass-kicking exposition-deliverer and then has to deal with some bullshit about her demonic half-brother who's pretty quickly forgotten about. I don't think it's ever explained why the Rot would only just now decide to start a huge apocalyptic attack on the world; it's a convenient storyline is all. It's also an excuse to bring in Animal Man fairly late in the game to set up some kind of big crossover event.
It seems like Snyder is also trying to distance himself from the general "humans are the main threat to the Earth, and the Green is pure at heart" point of view that Moore and others established: we no longer hear much about ecology, and Alec goes out of his way to explain that plants are vicious bastards and that the Green would probably fuck everything up if it didn't have the human insight that Swamp Thing provides. That's not very interesting to me, but it is different.
We're now in a new era in terms of the artwork: the fancy end of the mainstream superhero art spectrum has absorbed some graphic design ideas that would've been more unusual before. Yanick Paquette is working in a similar tradition to J.H. Williams III, with a lot of intricate detail (leaning pretty hard on the digital colorist to do some of the rendering, but still with a strong use of line and shadow) and very inventive page layouts. I really like it overall, but once the action scenes start, you can see how the trend toward decompression has changed this kind of storytelling: four pages will fly by and, while there were a lot of cool drawings, all that's happened is that a monster killed a couple of people (also the issues are a bit shorter these days, so that monster scene might end up being the only thing that really happened in that issue) and Snyder's strengths as a writer become irrelevant. Also, while I enjoy how incredibly gruesome some of this is, when Paquette is called upon to draw a whole lot of monsters, the results are often unimaginative—basically variations on one of Steve Bissette's "big claws, and 200 huge teeth sticking out of its face" designs.
This is definitely a more action-oriented Swamp Thing, but they're putting some thought into it, keeping it weird and not trying to make him into just another superhero. And I have to admit the wings were kind of cool.
Inventories
Best pseudoscience gibberish: Not much! Alec says some reasonably accurate things about plants.
Who needs continuity anyway [New 52 version]: The Parliament of Trees definitely got destroyed before, but now no they didn't. I'm not sure if Abby's half-brother is supposed to be the offspring of Arcane and that demon from the Josh Dysart years, or what. Abby was in her fifties last time we saw her; now she looks maybe 30.
Grossest thing: There's some tough competition here. The backwards-head zombies are a simple idea that creeped me out. Another simple creepy image: Aquaman surrounded by eyeless dead fish. Abby's stupid demon brother destroys lots of people in pretty gross ways. But Anton Arcane's big speech about all the evil things he's going to do to everyone is gross not in the intended way, but rather because it's so incredibly familiar and pointless.
Next: big crossover battle time
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Yanick Paquette except #3 by Paquette/Victor Ibáñez, #4 by Marco Rudy/Sean Parsons/Michael Lacombe, #6/11 by Rudy, #8-9 by Paquette/Rudy, #10 by Francesco Francavilla
Surreptitiously ditching older ideas and making up new explanations for everything has always been a big part of superhero comics. But literally announcing that you're doing that, and releasing new versions of everything where lack of continuity is actually a selling point, seems different somehow—more gimmicky, and kind of a bummer for fans who pride themselves on having memorized all the old plots, but still there's something attractive about clearing the decks and not having to keep track of decades of stuff by hundreds of writers. I never followed the Marvel Ultimates, and I still haven't seen most of the DC New 52 things, and I admit that like many readers I tend to cling stubbornly to however things were when I was 12. But, sure: a New 52 Swamp Thing, why not. We've gone back to issue #1 four times already. Bring on the fifth issue #1.
It's hard to tell at first how much of a break with previous continuity this will be. We suddenly have a live human person called Alec Holland again... but we've had that before, and it always turned out to be a fake-out. Scott Snyder's take on this is pretty clever: Alec has just recently returned to life somehow, and all he knows is that he remembers being a big green monster, and being with this Abby woman he's never met. We soon learn that he never was that monster: he just has its memories, which have somehow been put into a new body—in other words, the exact opposite of Alan Moore's version of the Swamp Thing origin. It's a cool idea, especially because Snyder writes Alec pretty well; this is a different character than the one we've seen before, more weary and practical, but that could be either because this is the New 52 version or just because this guy has been through so much insane shit that nothing will ever surprise him again (even Superman suddenly appearing to give him a bunch of exposition: Alec is just like "Yeah I know" and finishes the exposition for him).
This is all set up in the first issue in such an efficient and engaging way that I looked forward to seeing more of that kind of thing, just Alec readjusting to life and eventually figuring out whatever the mystery is. But Snyder quickly kicks the plot into high gear and dismisses the mystery—largely by explaining how previous Swamp Thing writers didn't mean what they said they meant, which seems like an odd strategy when DC has given you freedom to just make up whatever you want, but OK. It seems that Moore was still right about Alec being dead and Swamp Thing being an independent thing, but now we're told that a Swamp Thing normally should be a transformed human; it just didn't work out right in this case, and now Alec has somehow been revived so he can become the proper kind of Swamp Thing. Understandably he has no desire to do this. What happened to the other Swamp Thing is unclear, but it's not hard to see why Snyder is so insistent on revising how all this stuff works: first, it puts the hero in a situation where, having had all this crap happen to him against his will before, now he might have to decide to do it again on purpose; and second, it drastically scales back Swamp Thing's powers and makes him more vulnerable, because he'll have more of a real body that's partly human and can be hurt. When Alec does make the change and we finally see the new design... I'm not crazy about it, it's more of a streamlined heroic fantasy look (he even gets wings for a while), but these things are always subject to change anyway so I can roll with it.
So, why is it so important for Swamp Thing to return? This is Snyder's other big retcon idea. Remember the Grey—the spirit of fungi, one of the three kingdoms of multicellular life, which is sometimes evil? Forget it, there's no such thing. Instead, the mythology now puts all forms of life (Red and Green) up against the spirit of death and disease, the Rot. This is not a very well worked-out idea. Its main point of interest is that it can create gross zombie monsters, and it has human avatars, one of which of course was Anton Fucking Arcane (I am so, so sick of that guy) and now the new one might be Abby. So if both she and Alec fulfill their destinies, they'll be on opposite sides—which doesn't come to much in the end, but does produce some fairly cool visuals. I would like this better if we got to know the new Abby better, but she's very briefly introduced as an ass-kicking exposition-deliverer and then has to deal with some bullshit about her demonic half-brother who's pretty quickly forgotten about. I don't think it's ever explained why the Rot would only just now decide to start a huge apocalyptic attack on the world; it's a convenient storyline is all. It's also an excuse to bring in Animal Man fairly late in the game to set up some kind of big crossover event.
It seems like Snyder is also trying to distance himself from the general "humans are the main threat to the Earth, and the Green is pure at heart" point of view that Moore and others established: we no longer hear much about ecology, and Alec goes out of his way to explain that plants are vicious bastards and that the Green would probably fuck everything up if it didn't have the human insight that Swamp Thing provides. That's not very interesting to me, but it is different.
We're now in a new era in terms of the artwork: the fancy end of the mainstream superhero art spectrum has absorbed some graphic design ideas that would've been more unusual before. Yanick Paquette is working in a similar tradition to J.H. Williams III, with a lot of intricate detail (leaning pretty hard on the digital colorist to do some of the rendering, but still with a strong use of line and shadow) and very inventive page layouts. I really like it overall, but once the action scenes start, you can see how the trend toward decompression has changed this kind of storytelling: four pages will fly by and, while there were a lot of cool drawings, all that's happened is that a monster killed a couple of people (also the issues are a bit shorter these days, so that monster scene might end up being the only thing that really happened in that issue) and Snyder's strengths as a writer become irrelevant. Also, while I enjoy how incredibly gruesome some of this is, when Paquette is called upon to draw a whole lot of monsters, the results are often unimaginative—basically variations on one of Steve Bissette's "big claws, and 200 huge teeth sticking out of its face" designs.
This is definitely a more action-oriented Swamp Thing, but they're putting some thought into it, keeping it weird and not trying to make him into just another superhero. And I have to admit the wings were kind of cool.
Inventories
Best pseudoscience gibberish: Not much! Alec says some reasonably accurate things about plants.
Who needs continuity anyway [New 52 version]: The Parliament of Trees definitely got destroyed before, but now no they didn't. I'm not sure if Abby's half-brother is supposed to be the offspring of Arcane and that demon from the Josh Dysart years, or what. Abby was in her fifties last time we saw her; now she looks maybe 30.
Grossest thing: There's some tough competition here. The backwards-head zombies are a simple idea that creeped me out. Another simple creepy image: Aquaman surrounded by eyeless dead fish. Abby's stupid demon brother destroys lots of people in pretty gross ways. But Anton Arcane's big speech about all the evil things he's going to do to everyone is gross not in the intended way, but rather because it's so incredibly familiar and pointless.
Next: big crossover battle time
