alibi_shop (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alibi_shop) wrote2019-07-17 07:51 pm
alibi_shop) wrote2019-07-17 07:51 pm
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Swamp Thing reread, part 24
Swamp Thing #28-40 (2014-15)
Swamp Thing: Future's End #1 (2014)
Swamp Annual #3 (2014)
Written by Charles Soule
Art: #28/33-34/38 by Javier Pina, #29/32/35/36-37/Future's End by Jesús Saiz, #30-31/40 by Saiz/Pina, Annual by Yanick Paquette/Dave Bullock/Pina/Ryan Browne/Carmen Carnero
The last 40 issues (plus various one-offs) have a consistency to them, both thematically and in the overall level of craft, that's been rare in this series. In the New 52 revamp, Snyder and Soule were clearly tasked with making Swamp Thing more superheroey, and they did—there are lots of systems and lots of crossovers, and a lot more punching—while not making him stupid, and leaving room for some weirdness. But although I've really liked some of the writing, I finally realized my big problem with this run: besides the narration by our main guy, Soule just doesn't do characters. There are almost no people in this.
I don't just mean there are no ordinary people; I'd be fine with an entirely supernatural crew if they were interesting. But except for Capuchine, who is theoretically interesting if not full of personality, the supporting cast is just very dull. Swampy has destroyed the whole management structure of the Green and made himself the king, but before he locked all the other Green entities away somewhere, he pulled out three of them and turned them back into human beings somehow. They're basic types: one is wise and good; one is decadent and sneaky; one is super-creepy and malicious and obviously the villain from the moment we first see her. That last one, Lady Weeds, at least had an interesting-looking design when she was in the Green, but in human form she's drawn as a standard Sexy Lady* and we never learn a thing about her except that she's evil. She and the second guy immediately start plotting against Swampy, maybe with the goal of taking his place—but since we have no idea at this point what the rules are for this stuff, it seems like just another excuse for a lot of fight scenes with monsters. The first guy has a romance with Capuchine for a few minutes, but otherwise doesn't have much to contribute.
But these characters aren't really driving the plot anyway: the new main issue is yet another big showdown between kingdoms. The Grey (fungal kingdom) is now a thing again (Swampy wonders why he never heard of it before, and the answer is basically "because the writers changed their minds—I mean it was classified"), but it's a minor presence; there are a couple of nice ideas about why it's so different from the Green and so unhappy, but those aren't followed up on. The main adversary is the "metal kingdom" and its computer minds, a.k.a. "the Rithm"*. These folks only achieved consciousness recently and they have a vague plan to... not exactly take over the world, I guess, they just want to helpfully "manage" everything, though I'm not sure how that's different from taking over the world. Soule tries to make them interesting by giving them goofy speech patterns based on stuff they've seen on TV or whatever, but they look generic and they do generic robot-overlord things. And all this shuffling around of the mythological rulebook (there are three realms—no, six—they're biological kingdoms—no, elements—no, kingdoms plus a couple other important things like decay** and metal) gives the narrative a quality I can only describe as up-its-own-assness. This is a common pitfall in any long-running fantasy series: the story becomes largely about fixing cumulative world-building problems and pruning loose ends, leaving less room for anything on a human scale.
Anyway, once these plot threads and rules are set up, the big conflict is pretty thin. The machines decide they need an Avatar, and after considering some characters who would be reasonable choices, they instead pick Lady Weeds since she's been an Avatar before (even though 1. that was for plants and 2. everyone knows she's unstable and destructive) and they give her all the superpowers. She goes on a predictable rampage (assisted vaguely by Arcane, who's just a punchline at this point, boasting about how evil he is), so there's a lot of fighting, so Swampy finally realizes he needs help, so he brings back the other Green Avatars, so he wins. Also, Capuchine's storyline is hastily resolved via a big fight between Swampy and Etrigan*. Again this just seems to me like a kid smashing lots of toys together; the dialogue is reduced to variations on "No, I'll destroy you." Soule does at least seem to realize that this is boring, because he cuts away from the mega-battle to an odd interlude where Swampy meets the Avatar of... stories or art or something, it's unclear, but they have a very metafictional conversation that touches on how weird it is to keep reimagining the same fantasy characters for decades ("each new copy is slightly different through interpretation," etc.). And when it's time to finally wrap everything up, he falls back on silly humor, which he's pretty good at**: Swamp Thing imprisons the machine consciousness in an Aibo.
So that's where Swamp Thing in its current form leaves off. I know I've been sounding more and more negative, and I wish it would've ended on a more satisfying note, but with only a few exceptions I've enjoyed reading every run in one way or another. This isn't the last Swamp Thing writer, though—just the last new writer. The next one is the first one: Len Wein!
Inventories
Best pseudoscience gibberish: Well, it's not gibberish, but it's one of those things where I think the real story is more interesting than the pop-science version. Mika, the Grey Avatar, turns out to be able to control people's minds using a variation on Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that she says "takes control of ants" and "infiltrates their nervous systems." Well, kind of. O. unilateralis does infect ants, and before they die the ants do a weird thing: they attach themselves to leaves in areas where the fungus can grow best. It's pretty creepy, but it's unclear whether it has anything to do with the ant's nervous system: there are plenty of indirect ways to affect behavior (like if you set my hair on fire, then I'll be more likely to stick my head in a bucket of water, but that doesn't mean you literally steered me to the bucket). There's also no sign that the fungus knows what it's doing: that is, if the ant isn't exactly the right kind, or the environment isn't set up quite right, it can't adapt and the system doesn't work. It's just what you'd expect if evolution had randomly tried a billion different things and one of them happened to be successful because it fit with some random feature of the ant—but just barely successful, because O. unilateralis seems to be pretty bad at reproducing itself on its own, so if it didn't have this ant trick it'd be out of luck. It's like a guy who's good at scamming tourists with Three-Card Monte, and he can do it all day and just barely make a living, but that doesn't mean that if you gave him more cards he'd have the power to take over New York.
Who needs continuity anyway: The New 52 editors are very aggressive with their crossovers, so things are often confusing if you haven't been following all these other comics. I guess at some point Swamp Thing got mixed up in the Brightest Day series, so there's some stuff about a White Lantern ring and an extra Swamp Thing and I have no idea what that's about. They also throw in a single issue that takes place five years in the future and mentions all kinds of events that haven't happened yet, which I guess might have been interesting if there was any follow-up, but there wasn't (unless it was all in some other comic I wasn't following).
Grossest thing: This writer and these artists continue to be not all that into gross things. Swamp Thing fights a three-headed bear, and then he feeds the bear to the Avatar of bacteria, and they sort of take it over and make it all slimy... and yet it's still not very gross, it's just a slimy bear. Alec Holland's mummified corpse gets Frankensteined into a sort of robot fungus zombie that literally eats Swamp Thing and barfs him up... and yet it's still not very gross, the creature is kind of lovable. But Arcane eats a dead cat, so there's that.
One more unnecessary postscript: Something I forgot to mention earlier in the 2011 series is that, starting with #18, it has these little backup stories that are so annoying that they make me yearn for the days of the boring backup stories about the Phantom Stranger. The idea is that there's a TV news show reporting on all the crazy events in the New 52 DC world. It's supposed to be funny. Is it funny? Dear God no. No one signed their names to these things and I'm really not surprised.
Next: re-Weined
Swamp Thing: Future's End #1 (2014)
Swamp Annual #3 (2014)
Written by Charles Soule
Art: #28/33-34/38 by Javier Pina, #29/32/35/36-37/Future's End by Jesús Saiz, #30-31/40 by Saiz/Pina, Annual by Yanick Paquette/Dave Bullock/Pina/Ryan Browne/Carmen Carnero
The last 40 issues (plus various one-offs) have a consistency to them, both thematically and in the overall level of craft, that's been rare in this series. In the New 52 revamp, Snyder and Soule were clearly tasked with making Swamp Thing more superheroey, and they did—there are lots of systems and lots of crossovers, and a lot more punching—while not making him stupid, and leaving room for some weirdness. But although I've really liked some of the writing, I finally realized my big problem with this run: besides the narration by our main guy, Soule just doesn't do characters. There are almost no people in this.
I don't just mean there are no ordinary people; I'd be fine with an entirely supernatural crew if they were interesting. But except for Capuchine, who is theoretically interesting if not full of personality, the supporting cast is just very dull. Swampy has destroyed the whole management structure of the Green and made himself the king, but before he locked all the other Green entities away somewhere, he pulled out three of them and turned them back into human beings somehow. They're basic types: one is wise and good; one is decadent and sneaky; one is super-creepy and malicious and obviously the villain from the moment we first see her. That last one, Lady Weeds, at least had an interesting-looking design when she was in the Green, but in human form she's drawn as a standard Sexy Lady* and we never learn a thing about her except that she's evil. She and the second guy immediately start plotting against Swampy, maybe with the goal of taking his place—but since we have no idea at this point what the rules are for this stuff, it seems like just another excuse for a lot of fight scenes with monsters. The first guy has a romance with Capuchine for a few minutes, but otherwise doesn't have much to contribute.
But these characters aren't really driving the plot anyway: the new main issue is yet another big showdown between kingdoms. The Grey (fungal kingdom) is now a thing again (Swampy wonders why he never heard of it before, and the answer is basically "because the writers changed their minds—I mean it was classified"), but it's a minor presence; there are a couple of nice ideas about why it's so different from the Green and so unhappy, but those aren't followed up on. The main adversary is the "metal kingdom" and its computer minds, a.k.a. "the Rithm"*. These folks only achieved consciousness recently and they have a vague plan to... not exactly take over the world, I guess, they just want to helpfully "manage" everything, though I'm not sure how that's different from taking over the world. Soule tries to make them interesting by giving them goofy speech patterns based on stuff they've seen on TV or whatever, but they look generic and they do generic robot-overlord things. And all this shuffling around of the mythological rulebook (there are three realms—no, six—they're biological kingdoms—no, elements—no, kingdoms plus a couple other important things like decay** and metal) gives the narrative a quality I can only describe as up-its-own-assness. This is a common pitfall in any long-running fantasy series: the story becomes largely about fixing cumulative world-building problems and pruning loose ends, leaving less room for anything on a human scale.
Anyway, once these plot threads and rules are set up, the big conflict is pretty thin. The machines decide they need an Avatar, and after considering some characters who would be reasonable choices, they instead pick Lady Weeds since she's been an Avatar before (even though 1. that was for plants and 2. everyone knows she's unstable and destructive) and they give her all the superpowers. She goes on a predictable rampage (assisted vaguely by Arcane, who's just a punchline at this point, boasting about how evil he is), so there's a lot of fighting, so Swampy finally realizes he needs help, so he brings back the other Green Avatars, so he wins. Also, Capuchine's storyline is hastily resolved via a big fight between Swampy and Etrigan*. Again this just seems to me like a kid smashing lots of toys together; the dialogue is reduced to variations on "No, I'll destroy you." Soule does at least seem to realize that this is boring, because he cuts away from the mega-battle to an odd interlude where Swampy meets the Avatar of... stories or art or something, it's unclear, but they have a very metafictional conversation that touches on how weird it is to keep reimagining the same fantasy characters for decades ("each new copy is slightly different through interpretation," etc.). And when it's time to finally wrap everything up, he falls back on silly humor, which he's pretty good at**: Swamp Thing imprisons the machine consciousness in an Aibo.
So that's where Swamp Thing in its current form leaves off. I know I've been sounding more and more negative, and I wish it would've ended on a more satisfying note, but with only a few exceptions I've enjoyed reading every run in one way or another. This isn't the last Swamp Thing writer, though—just the last new writer. The next one is the first one: Len Wein!
Inventories
Best pseudoscience gibberish: Well, it's not gibberish, but it's one of those things where I think the real story is more interesting than the pop-science version. Mika, the Grey Avatar, turns out to be able to control people's minds using a variation on Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that she says "takes control of ants" and "infiltrates their nervous systems." Well, kind of. O. unilateralis does infect ants, and before they die the ants do a weird thing: they attach themselves to leaves in areas where the fungus can grow best. It's pretty creepy, but it's unclear whether it has anything to do with the ant's nervous system: there are plenty of indirect ways to affect behavior (like if you set my hair on fire, then I'll be more likely to stick my head in a bucket of water, but that doesn't mean you literally steered me to the bucket). There's also no sign that the fungus knows what it's doing: that is, if the ant isn't exactly the right kind, or the environment isn't set up quite right, it can't adapt and the system doesn't work. It's just what you'd expect if evolution had randomly tried a billion different things and one of them happened to be successful because it fit with some random feature of the ant—but just barely successful, because O. unilateralis seems to be pretty bad at reproducing itself on its own, so if it didn't have this ant trick it'd be out of luck. It's like a guy who's good at scamming tourists with Three-Card Monte, and he can do it all day and just barely make a living, but that doesn't mean that if you gave him more cards he'd have the power to take over New York.
Who needs continuity anyway: The New 52 editors are very aggressive with their crossovers, so things are often confusing if you haven't been following all these other comics. I guess at some point Swamp Thing got mixed up in the Brightest Day series, so there's some stuff about a White Lantern ring and an extra Swamp Thing and I have no idea what that's about. They also throw in a single issue that takes place five years in the future and mentions all kinds of events that haven't happened yet, which I guess might have been interesting if there was any follow-up, but there wasn't (unless it was all in some other comic I wasn't following).
Grossest thing: This writer and these artists continue to be not all that into gross things. Swamp Thing fights a three-headed bear, and then he feeds the bear to the Avatar of bacteria, and they sort of take it over and make it all slimy... and yet it's still not very gross, it's just a slimy bear. Alec Holland's mummified corpse gets Frankensteined into a sort of robot fungus zombie that literally eats Swamp Thing and barfs him up... and yet it's still not very gross, the creature is kind of lovable. But Arcane eats a dead cat, so there's that.
One more unnecessary postscript: Something I forgot to mention earlier in the 2011 series is that, starting with #18, it has these little backup stories that are so annoying that they make me yearn for the days of the boring backup stories about the Phantom Stranger. The idea is that there's a TV news show reporting on all the crazy events in the New 52 DC world. It's supposed to be funny. Is it funny? Dear God no. No one signed their names to these things and I'm really not surprised.
Next: re-Weined