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alibi_shopSwamp Thing #12-19 (2012-2013)
Swamp Thing Annual #1 (2012)
Swamp Thing #0 (2012)
Written by Scott Snyder, except #12/17 by Snyder/Jeff Lemire
Art by Yanick Paquette, except #12 by Marco Rudy/Dan Green/Andy Owens, #0/19 by Kano, Annual #1 by Becky Cloonan/Andrew Belanger/Karl Kerschl, #15 by Rudy, #17 by Belanger
Two things in superhero comics that are theoretically cool and I get why people keep doing them, but I just don't enjoy them that much, are big crossover events and "the whole world got destroyed/transformed but maybe there's a do-over." Snyder spends his last ten issues doing both, and it's superficially entertaining but kind of a waste of time, and Swamp Thing himself gets a bit lost in the shuffle.
Having set up this big battle between the Rot and the forces of life, Snyder (with Lemire, who's the regular writer for Animal Man) gives us some potentially interesting trippy interdimensional quest stuff and the beginning of a fight, and then... we lose. Swampy finds himself a year in the future in a world mostly overrun by Rot monsters. By this point Paquette is no longer even trying to design new beasts, he's just sticking fangs and claws onto a bunch of existing DC characters so we have the zombie Superman (why does the spirit of "death and disease" cause Superman to have even bigger muscles and giant teeth? who knows), the zombie Kid Flash, etc... I haven't read the big DC zombie crossover event Blackest Night but it sounded awfully similar to this. There are mildly clever ideas of what the fates of various other superheroes might be in this situation, and they're each dealt with very briefly, and if you don't already know all those other comics then it'll be pretty meaningless. The ending is just another one of those endings where you blow up a special thing and it fixes all your problems.
I was often bored but if this is your kind of thing, enjoy. It has a pretty small amount of Swamp Thing-related content, except for two flashback/retcon issues (#0 and Annual #1) whose purpose is basically to boost Arcane's importance even more by saying that he secretly had various connections with Alec from the very beginning. And then we finally reach a new status quo where Alec and Abby have both left their human lives behind for good and separated again, so Swamp Thing is ready to do... whatever the next writer thinks he should do.
I feel like this has been a recurring theme: a new writer appears, and shows great promise because they're trying new things and taking the characters seriously and writing some interesting prose—and then in the second half of their run it all devolves into the usual chaotic smashing-together-all-the-toys stuff that DC could've gotten anyone to write. The result was not a classic but I was impressed with a lot of what Snyder and Paquette did, so I want to look for more of their work.
Inventories
Best pseudoscience gibberish: "There's a laser dome over the island." "But powered by what?" "It's a bio-laser. Green, appropriately enough. It uses a blue-lit fluorescent protein to generate the dome. It's nearly two thousand watts."
Who needs continuity anyway: I have no fucking idea whether the 50 billion DC characters in this story were consistent with their previous history. Poison Ivy is a hero now, I guess. Is that a New 52 thing? I have no fucking idea.
Grossest thing: Animal Man rips off his daughter's head because she turned into a monster. Arcane rips off Abby's head because he's evil, but since he had said he was going to tear her completely apart, that actually seems a little mild. Maybe I'm just numb to that kind of thing now, because what really disturbed me was the way Animal Man's cat is drawn in issue 12: cats can look many ways, but I'm not convinced that the artists really meant for it to turn out looking like that.
Next: Soule seeds some new plots
Swamp Thing Annual #1 (2012)
Swamp Thing #0 (2012)
Written by Scott Snyder, except #12/17 by Snyder/Jeff Lemire
Art by Yanick Paquette, except #12 by Marco Rudy/Dan Green/Andy Owens, #0/19 by Kano, Annual #1 by Becky Cloonan/Andrew Belanger/Karl Kerschl, #15 by Rudy, #17 by Belanger
Two things in superhero comics that are theoretically cool and I get why people keep doing them, but I just don't enjoy them that much, are big crossover events and "the whole world got destroyed/transformed but maybe there's a do-over." Snyder spends his last ten issues doing both, and it's superficially entertaining but kind of a waste of time, and Swamp Thing himself gets a bit lost in the shuffle.
Having set up this big battle between the Rot and the forces of life, Snyder (with Lemire, who's the regular writer for Animal Man) gives us some potentially interesting trippy interdimensional quest stuff and the beginning of a fight, and then... we lose. Swampy finds himself a year in the future in a world mostly overrun by Rot monsters. By this point Paquette is no longer even trying to design new beasts, he's just sticking fangs and claws onto a bunch of existing DC characters so we have the zombie Superman (why does the spirit of "death and disease" cause Superman to have even bigger muscles and giant teeth? who knows), the zombie Kid Flash, etc... I haven't read the big DC zombie crossover event Blackest Night but it sounded awfully similar to this. There are mildly clever ideas of what the fates of various other superheroes might be in this situation, and they're each dealt with very briefly, and if you don't already know all those other comics then it'll be pretty meaningless. The ending is just another one of those endings where you blow up a special thing and it fixes all your problems.
I was often bored but if this is your kind of thing, enjoy. It has a pretty small amount of Swamp Thing-related content, except for two flashback/retcon issues (#0 and Annual #1) whose purpose is basically to boost Arcane's importance even more by saying that he secretly had various connections with Alec from the very beginning. And then we finally reach a new status quo where Alec and Abby have both left their human lives behind for good and separated again, so Swamp Thing is ready to do... whatever the next writer thinks he should do.
I feel like this has been a recurring theme: a new writer appears, and shows great promise because they're trying new things and taking the characters seriously and writing some interesting prose—and then in the second half of their run it all devolves into the usual chaotic smashing-together-all-the-toys stuff that DC could've gotten anyone to write. The result was not a classic but I was impressed with a lot of what Snyder and Paquette did, so I want to look for more of their work.
Inventories
Best pseudoscience gibberish: "There's a laser dome over the island." "But powered by what?" "It's a bio-laser. Green, appropriately enough. It uses a blue-lit fluorescent protein to generate the dome. It's nearly two thousand watts."
Who needs continuity anyway: I have no fucking idea whether the 50 billion DC characters in this story were consistent with their previous history. Poison Ivy is a hero now, I guess. Is that a New 52 thing? I have no fucking idea.
Grossest thing: Animal Man rips off his daughter's head because she turned into a monster. Arcane rips off Abby's head because he's evil, but since he had said he was going to tear her completely apart, that actually seems a little mild. Maybe I'm just numb to that kind of thing now, because what really disturbed me was the way Animal Man's cat is drawn in issue 12: cats can look many ways, but I'm not convinced that the artists really meant for it to turn out looking like that.
Next: Soule seeds some new plots
