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alibi_shopSwamp Thing #19-27 (2013-14)
Written by Charles Soule
Art: #19-20/22 by Kano, #21/23.1/25-27 by Jesús Saiz, #23 by Kano/David Lapham, #24 by Andrei Bressan
That pattern I mentioned seeing with new Swamp Thing writers is still in effect: Charles Soule starts off with some really strong character-based writing and some creative twists on the mythology, and handles the superhero stuff well in small doses too (the first two issues have the best-written Superman I've seen in a long time)... but once the big conflict kicks in, the ideas get sillier and the plotting incoherent. Maybe one of these days, when they hire someone who's good at quieter stories, they'll let them just tell quieter stories.
In this case, the big conflict starts out strongly: someone called Seeder is manipulating the Green to make benevolent miracles like oases in the desert, which Swampy always has to undo (to everyone's dismay) because they cause death in other places. It's a great idea: Seeder is both well-meaning and ominous, Soule has a good feel for writing the mystical Green stuff, and it's a new angle on a question that Alan Moore played with earlier, that someone with Swamp Thing's powers could do a lot more to help humanity so why doesn't he. Unfortunately, very soon the mystery of Seeder is sidelined for a subplot involving Constantine that plays like a Hellblazer story and has a pretty arbitrary connection to the premise, and then the mystery is revealed and it's... not that great. At least it's not Arcane (although he does show up again and at least he isn't exactly the same); it's Jason Woodrue, who hasn't been seen in a while so I was hopeful that Soule would have an interesting new take on him. And indeed the New 52 Woodrue has a new origin that could have some potential: he's a scientist who is pissed off that he can't be Swamp Thing. But there's nothing more to the character. He's kind of a jerk, then he gets magic powers and he wants to help people, but then once he gets more powers he wants to kill people, because he's a jerk. Worse, Soule's explanation for how this happened involves making the Parliament of Trees very, very stupid (and stupid-looking: instead of somber ancient giants, they are now little cartoon pine trees with petulant little faces), and turning Swampy's cosmic role into a generic superhero idea (the Avatar has all the power, and you can steal the power and become the Avatar yourself by... having a fight). Plus we get more of Brian Vaughan's worst idea: populating the Green with entities who are basically just people dressed as plants, one of whom has some horses dressed as plants. If you want to get literary about it, this is all a pretty good example of bathos.
The subplot about Capuchine, a nearly-immortal adventurer with a magical problem that a previous Swamp Thing had promised to help her with, is potentially good but it's shoehorned into the main plot so awkwardly that Soule ends up having to hang a lampshade on the silliness of Swampy repeatedly almost getting to hear Capuchine's story. I do want to see where this goes.
There isn't a stable art team but the art looks pretty good all the way through this section—nothing incredibly distinctive, I think this is just one of the main DC house styles at this point, but it's solid and atmospheric. Swampy continues to have more of a heroic fantasy look, more woodsy and less monstery, which isn't my favorite but it fits with the more human way his narration is written these days (sometimes he sounds almost like Philip Marlowe, which works better than you might think). I like the character design for Capuchine, which goes against standard female fantasy warrior conventions by being basically practical and having no eyebrows.
Inventories
Best pseudoscientific gibberish (maybe): One of Woodrue's teachers says "Gagliano posits that [plant] communication comes in the form of subtle acoustic vibrations that plants can transmit and receive." Monica Gagliano has indeed been positing things like that for some time, and I don't have the background to say if there's anything to her work or not (though the way she explains it to a lay audience uses some very iffy logic), but the way some people have latched onto it is heavily pseudoscientific: e.g. if other scientists don't take Gagliano's ideas seriously it must be because she's "opening up areas of knowledge that some might feel threaten the sovereignty of humans over nature." She was quite obscure at the time (a New Yorker piece that came out at almost exactly the same time brought her more attention), so maybe this was already an area of interest for Soule, or maybe he just did an Internet search.
Who needs continuity anyway: Here's a case where a past idea would've been better forgotten about. Earlier, Scott Snyder reintroduced Woodrue in a tiny flashback bit where he made some kind of mysterious bargain with the Parliament of Trees, where he would do them a pretty basic favor that anyone could've done, and they would give him... something. I think trying to fill in this blank is what led Soule to write such a disappointing storyline for Woodrue and the PoT.
Grossest thing: Soule isn't heavily into violence or monsters so far. The most violent moment is simple but disturbing: a guy under the influence of the magic whiskey tree starts a fight and then starts gleefully stomping on the other guy's head. If Mark Millar had written the whiskey storyline we would've gotten 20 pages of lurid atrocities, but this brief bit is just as effective.
Next: plant-robot grudge match, farewell New 52
Written by Charles Soule
Art: #19-20/22 by Kano, #21/23.1/25-27 by Jesús Saiz, #23 by Kano/David Lapham, #24 by Andrei Bressan
That pattern I mentioned seeing with new Swamp Thing writers is still in effect: Charles Soule starts off with some really strong character-based writing and some creative twists on the mythology, and handles the superhero stuff well in small doses too (the first two issues have the best-written Superman I've seen in a long time)... but once the big conflict kicks in, the ideas get sillier and the plotting incoherent. Maybe one of these days, when they hire someone who's good at quieter stories, they'll let them just tell quieter stories.
In this case, the big conflict starts out strongly: someone called Seeder is manipulating the Green to make benevolent miracles like oases in the desert, which Swampy always has to undo (to everyone's dismay) because they cause death in other places. It's a great idea: Seeder is both well-meaning and ominous, Soule has a good feel for writing the mystical Green stuff, and it's a new angle on a question that Alan Moore played with earlier, that someone with Swamp Thing's powers could do a lot more to help humanity so why doesn't he. Unfortunately, very soon the mystery of Seeder is sidelined for a subplot involving Constantine that plays like a Hellblazer story and has a pretty arbitrary connection to the premise, and then the mystery is revealed and it's... not that great. At least it's not Arcane (although he does show up again and at least he isn't exactly the same); it's Jason Woodrue, who hasn't been seen in a while so I was hopeful that Soule would have an interesting new take on him. And indeed the New 52 Woodrue has a new origin that could have some potential: he's a scientist who is pissed off that he can't be Swamp Thing. But there's nothing more to the character. He's kind of a jerk, then he gets magic powers and he wants to help people, but then once he gets more powers he wants to kill people, because he's a jerk. Worse, Soule's explanation for how this happened involves making the Parliament of Trees very, very stupid (and stupid-looking: instead of somber ancient giants, they are now little cartoon pine trees with petulant little faces), and turning Swampy's cosmic role into a generic superhero idea (the Avatar has all the power, and you can steal the power and become the Avatar yourself by... having a fight). Plus we get more of Brian Vaughan's worst idea: populating the Green with entities who are basically just people dressed as plants, one of whom has some horses dressed as plants. If you want to get literary about it, this is all a pretty good example of bathos.
The subplot about Capuchine, a nearly-immortal adventurer with a magical problem that a previous Swamp Thing had promised to help her with, is potentially good but it's shoehorned into the main plot so awkwardly that Soule ends up having to hang a lampshade on the silliness of Swampy repeatedly almost getting to hear Capuchine's story. I do want to see where this goes.
There isn't a stable art team but the art looks pretty good all the way through this section—nothing incredibly distinctive, I think this is just one of the main DC house styles at this point, but it's solid and atmospheric. Swampy continues to have more of a heroic fantasy look, more woodsy and less monstery, which isn't my favorite but it fits with the more human way his narration is written these days (sometimes he sounds almost like Philip Marlowe, which works better than you might think). I like the character design for Capuchine, which goes against standard female fantasy warrior conventions by being basically practical and having no eyebrows.
Inventories
Best pseudoscientific gibberish (maybe): One of Woodrue's teachers says "Gagliano posits that [plant] communication comes in the form of subtle acoustic vibrations that plants can transmit and receive." Monica Gagliano has indeed been positing things like that for some time, and I don't have the background to say if there's anything to her work or not (though the way she explains it to a lay audience uses some very iffy logic), but the way some people have latched onto it is heavily pseudoscientific: e.g. if other scientists don't take Gagliano's ideas seriously it must be because she's "opening up areas of knowledge that some might feel threaten the sovereignty of humans over nature." She was quite obscure at the time (a New Yorker piece that came out at almost exactly the same time brought her more attention), so maybe this was already an area of interest for Soule, or maybe he just did an Internet search.
Who needs continuity anyway: Here's a case where a past idea would've been better forgotten about. Earlier, Scott Snyder reintroduced Woodrue in a tiny flashback bit where he made some kind of mysterious bargain with the Parliament of Trees, where he would do them a pretty basic favor that anyone could've done, and they would give him... something. I think trying to fill in this blank is what led Soule to write such a disappointing storyline for Woodrue and the PoT.
Grossest thing: Soule isn't heavily into violence or monsters so far. The most violent moment is simple but disturbing: a guy under the influence of the magic whiskey tree starts a fight and then starts gleefully stomping on the other guy's head. If Mark Millar had written the whiskey storyline we would've gotten 20 pages of lurid atrocities, but this brief bit is just as effective.
Next: plant-robot grudge match, farewell New 52
