alibi_shop (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alibi_shop) wrote2019-07-20 04:11 pm
alibi_shop) wrote2019-07-20 04:11 pm
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Swamp Thing reread, part 25
Convergence: Swamp Thing #1-2 (2015)
Swamp Thing #1-6 (2016)
Written by Len Wein
Art by Kelley Jones
Swamp Thing Winter Special (2018)
Written by Tom King
Art by Jason Fabok
With an unfinished story by Len Wein and Kelley Jones
Well, Kelley Jones is still a cool illustrator but otherwise the eight issues of 2015-16 are pretty weak. They give the impression that Len Wein's fame was not due to his skill at writing prose or telling stories—but since I'm not familiar with much of his work in between, it's hard to say if that means that he really hadn't developed in 43 years, or just that he wasn't trying very hard. I think it's the latter, because this seems like it was conceived as pretty much the least ambitious Swamp Thing revival ever. But if you want a happy ending, skip to the end of this post.
The two Convergence issues are a tie-in to yet another DC crossover series involving alternate universes, which was an excuse to bring back some of the universe-clutter that they got rid of in Crisis and also undo some of the New 52 reboots, just in case any readers had finally gotten used to the newer stuff. That means 1. we get to see a vampire version of Batman, which is fun, and 2. there can be yet another do-over of Swamp Thing's whole history and origin. What Wein does with the latter is basically to say that almost everything up through the mid-'80s happened, but nothing else did, so he keeps Moore's ideas about the Green but we have Abby as a human love interest instead of Scott Snyder's metal-goth version of her. They have a very minor adventure that's like the least amount of story Wein could write—especially since the first three pages are just a beat-for-beat retelling of his first Swamp Thing origin story.
The origin recap suggests that Wein was brought back for nostalgia value, and this feeling continues throughout the 2016 miniseries. He makes sure to repeat familiar verbiage like "muck-encrusted mockery of a man." He writes terrible narration because that's how it was in the '70s: captions were supposed to just describe the same stuff that the drawings were showing you, but with extra dramatic words—so for instance when you see someone putting salt in a zombie's mouth and sewing it shut, the captions talk about "stitching shut the zombie's salt-filled craw." Whether any of it is actually necessary or sounds good is irrelevant, in fact it seems like the editor (if there was any editing) may have even encouraged extra hokiness, so Wein reuses stock phrases a lot (the zombie has a "voice, such as it is" and a "mouth, such as it is"), and Jones writes SALT on what we've already been told is a bag of salt.
The main storyline is also based on nostalgia, although it may be more Wein's nostalgia than the reader's since it revolves around Matt Fucking Cable, a character that I'm fairly sure no one else has ever given a shit about in his human form except for the brief period when he had scary psychic powers—something which Wein now says never happened, so this is just Matt the generic tough guy. Cable shows up with a magic discovery that could make Swampy human, and we're told over and over that if they do this it can never ever ever ever be undone, and then of course it turns out to be a bad idea and we get yet another evil version of Swamp Thing, and also yet another cameo by Anton Fucking Arcane... until the thing that could never ever ever ever be undone is undone. There's no trace of the audacious pulp energy that Wein put into the 1972-74 series, where at any moment we might be whisked away to some new setting or meet some new monster; it's a greatest-hits remix, with lots of "hey, remember this cool* character?" moments.** The retro attitude also extends to calling Zatanna a "she-wizard" and leering a bit about how hot she is.
Unless you're an obsessive completist, Jones's art is the only reason to read this. Like Berni Wrightson, he draws human faces pretty goofily, and there are some things he's just not interested in drawing at all so he totally half-asses them (like trees), but his grotesque figures and lush inking make it all good. There's no consistency to the designs, one minute Swampy is all smooth shapes and the next minute there's raggedy moss all over him, it's just whatever Jones feels like doing from one panel to the next and he's clearly having a good time and therefore so are we. I don't think he would work well for a longer, more ambitious Swamp Thing story, but he was a good choice for this.
The series was meant to go on, but Wein died after writing the script for issue 7, which was published as a backup feature (with the unlettered artwork by Jones) in the 2018 Winter Special. It gets more interesting plot-wise, but I think the writing is still very corny, alas. But that's OK, the guy wrote several million comics and it doesn't matter if I don't like the last seven ones. I'm awfully glad he created Swamp Thing.
Inventories (greatest hits version)
Non-human animals: Swampy wrestles gators and snakes for fun, and indeed it's fun.
Swamp Thing origin recaps: Three pages of the original origin, then half a page explaining who Abby and Matt are, then half a page recapping Moore's Sunderland/Woodrue storyline.
Best pseudoscience gibberish: Wein thinks "there are microscopic plant organisms in every human body," because he doesn't understand that "flora" in that context means bacteria.
Who needs continuity anyway: I mean of course this is all a reboot anyway, but still it's pretty ballsy for Wein to give us a "Turn me back into Alec Holland!" storyline when he just finished telling us, two issues ago, that Alan Moore was right about Swampy never having been Alec in the first place. More minor: Swampy reminisces about what it was like to watch Matt and Abby fall in love and get married; but in the original series they vanished and were forgotten about for years, and the next time he met them they were already married. It's also a stretch for him to call Matt his "best friend" but I guess he hasn't had a whole lot of friends.
Grossest thing: Kelley Jones's first Swamp Thing gig in 1990 was most notable for its gleefully gory axe-murders, and here he ups the ante by having a guy get torn apart as graphically as possible.
The happy ending
That may or may not have been the last Swamp Thing series ever, but in 2018 we got the Winter Special by Tom King, presumably due to the theory (which may be correct) that Tom King can make something interesting out of literally anything. King, with beautiful art by Jerry Fabok, gives us a Swamp Thing one-off story that on the surface is nowhere near as innovative as Alan Moore's one-offs—it's just Swampy dealing with a snowstorm and a bear and a bad guy and a mysterious child—but it's slyer than it looks, and overall is just excellent storytelling, touching on a variety of familiar themes (Swamp Thing as a hero, a monster, a friend, an outcast, a spiritual point of view, and a plain cool-looking thing) but feeling new, and building up a mystery whose answer is in hindsight pretty obvious but only because King has been so careful to keep us focused on other things. He even manages to create real feeling out of the endless retcons and reboots the series has gone through: someone asks Swamp Thing a question about his past that we're not even sure of the correct answer to (because it hasn't been addressed since the last reboot), but due to his current impaired condition he just can't remember, which in context is incredibly sad. I was very happy to read this comic. I don't know if King or someone else could sustain this level of quality in an ongoing series, but if they try, I will read the shit out of that. And if they don't, this is a fine sendoff.
I'll wrap things up in the next post, before letting this series disintegrate like a Swamp Thing who's sending his spirit away to parts unknown.
Next: afterthoughts
Swamp Thing #1-6 (2016)
Written by Len Wein
Art by Kelley Jones
Swamp Thing Winter Special (2018)
Written by Tom King
Art by Jason Fabok
With an unfinished story by Len Wein and Kelley Jones
Well, Kelley Jones is still a cool illustrator but otherwise the eight issues of 2015-16 are pretty weak. They give the impression that Len Wein's fame was not due to his skill at writing prose or telling stories—but since I'm not familiar with much of his work in between, it's hard to say if that means that he really hadn't developed in 43 years, or just that he wasn't trying very hard. I think it's the latter, because this seems like it was conceived as pretty much the least ambitious Swamp Thing revival ever. But if you want a happy ending, skip to the end of this post.
The two Convergence issues are a tie-in to yet another DC crossover series involving alternate universes, which was an excuse to bring back some of the universe-clutter that they got rid of in Crisis and also undo some of the New 52 reboots, just in case any readers had finally gotten used to the newer stuff. That means 1. we get to see a vampire version of Batman, which is fun, and 2. there can be yet another do-over of Swamp Thing's whole history and origin. What Wein does with the latter is basically to say that almost everything up through the mid-'80s happened, but nothing else did, so he keeps Moore's ideas about the Green but we have Abby as a human love interest instead of Scott Snyder's metal-goth version of her. They have a very minor adventure that's like the least amount of story Wein could write—especially since the first three pages are just a beat-for-beat retelling of his first Swamp Thing origin story.
The origin recap suggests that Wein was brought back for nostalgia value, and this feeling continues throughout the 2016 miniseries. He makes sure to repeat familiar verbiage like "muck-encrusted mockery of a man." He writes terrible narration because that's how it was in the '70s: captions were supposed to just describe the same stuff that the drawings were showing you, but with extra dramatic words—so for instance when you see someone putting salt in a zombie's mouth and sewing it shut, the captions talk about "stitching shut the zombie's salt-filled craw." Whether any of it is actually necessary or sounds good is irrelevant, in fact it seems like the editor (if there was any editing) may have even encouraged extra hokiness, so Wein reuses stock phrases a lot (the zombie has a "voice, such as it is" and a "mouth, such as it is"), and Jones writes SALT on what we've already been told is a bag of salt.
The main storyline is also based on nostalgia, although it may be more Wein's nostalgia than the reader's since it revolves around Matt Fucking Cable, a character that I'm fairly sure no one else has ever given a shit about in his human form except for the brief period when he had scary psychic powers—something which Wein now says never happened, so this is just Matt the generic tough guy. Cable shows up with a magic discovery that could make Swampy human, and we're told over and over that if they do this it can never ever ever ever be undone, and then of course it turns out to be a bad idea and we get yet another evil version of Swamp Thing, and also yet another cameo by Anton Fucking Arcane... until the thing that could never ever ever ever be undone is undone. There's no trace of the audacious pulp energy that Wein put into the 1972-74 series, where at any moment we might be whisked away to some new setting or meet some new monster; it's a greatest-hits remix, with lots of "hey, remember this cool* character?" moments.** The retro attitude also extends to calling Zatanna a "she-wizard" and leering a bit about how hot she is.
Unless you're an obsessive completist, Jones's art is the only reason to read this. Like Berni Wrightson, he draws human faces pretty goofily, and there are some things he's just not interested in drawing at all so he totally half-asses them (like trees), but his grotesque figures and lush inking make it all good. There's no consistency to the designs, one minute Swampy is all smooth shapes and the next minute there's raggedy moss all over him, it's just whatever Jones feels like doing from one panel to the next and he's clearly having a good time and therefore so are we. I don't think he would work well for a longer, more ambitious Swamp Thing story, but he was a good choice for this.
The series was meant to go on, but Wein died after writing the script for issue 7, which was published as a backup feature (with the unlettered artwork by Jones) in the 2018 Winter Special. It gets more interesting plot-wise, but I think the writing is still very corny, alas. But that's OK, the guy wrote several million comics and it doesn't matter if I don't like the last seven ones. I'm awfully glad he created Swamp Thing.
Inventories (greatest hits version)
Non-human animals: Swampy wrestles gators and snakes for fun, and indeed it's fun.
Swamp Thing origin recaps: Three pages of the original origin, then half a page explaining who Abby and Matt are, then half a page recapping Moore's Sunderland/Woodrue storyline.
Best pseudoscience gibberish: Wein thinks "there are microscopic plant organisms in every human body," because he doesn't understand that "flora" in that context means bacteria.
Who needs continuity anyway: I mean of course this is all a reboot anyway, but still it's pretty ballsy for Wein to give us a "Turn me back into Alec Holland!" storyline when he just finished telling us, two issues ago, that Alan Moore was right about Swampy never having been Alec in the first place. More minor: Swampy reminisces about what it was like to watch Matt and Abby fall in love and get married; but in the original series they vanished and were forgotten about for years, and the next time he met them they were already married. It's also a stretch for him to call Matt his "best friend" but I guess he hasn't had a whole lot of friends.
Grossest thing: Kelley Jones's first Swamp Thing gig in 1990 was most notable for its gleefully gory axe-murders, and here he ups the ante by having a guy get torn apart as graphically as possible.
The happy ending
That may or may not have been the last Swamp Thing series ever, but in 2018 we got the Winter Special by Tom King, presumably due to the theory (which may be correct) that Tom King can make something interesting out of literally anything. King, with beautiful art by Jerry Fabok, gives us a Swamp Thing one-off story that on the surface is nowhere near as innovative as Alan Moore's one-offs—it's just Swampy dealing with a snowstorm and a bear and a bad guy and a mysterious child—but it's slyer than it looks, and overall is just excellent storytelling, touching on a variety of familiar themes (Swamp Thing as a hero, a monster, a friend, an outcast, a spiritual point of view, and a plain cool-looking thing) but feeling new, and building up a mystery whose answer is in hindsight pretty obvious but only because King has been so careful to keep us focused on other things. He even manages to create real feeling out of the endless retcons and reboots the series has gone through: someone asks Swamp Thing a question about his past that we're not even sure of the correct answer to (because it hasn't been addressed since the last reboot), but due to his current impaired condition he just can't remember, which in context is incredibly sad. I was very happy to read this comic. I don't know if King or someone else could sustain this level of quality in an ongoing series, but if they try, I will read the shit out of that. And if they don't, this is a fine sendoff.
I'll wrap things up in the next post, before letting this series disintegrate like a Swamp Thing who's sending his spirit away to parts unknown.
Next: afterthoughts