alibi_shop (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alibi_shop) wrote2019-07-20 06:21 pm
alibi_shop) wrote2019-07-20 06:21 pm
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Swamp Thing reread, part 26, the end
Swamp Thing and related titles, 301 issues (1972-2018)
Written by 23 people
Art by 72 people [not counting the colorists]
As of 2019, there haven't been any more Swamp Thing comics. Should there be? Based on Len Wein's last unfinished series I would have said no, I can let it go, but then there was that special issue last year and I was hooked again. So I guess we'll see.
Why do I like Swamp Thing so much? There's the "I got into it at an impressionable age" thing, which may affect my judgment, who knows (and the series is also almost exactly the same age as me). I'm always up for "hero who's doomed to be a monster" stories, and things that have one foot in fantasy and one foot in horror, and things where the concept of identity isn't straightforward. The massive amount of non-human life on Earth is an underdeveloped area for fantasy fiction in general, especially in the sense of it having a completely different mode of existence (rather than just living in an unfamiliar place, like Aquaman)—and part of what made Alan Moore's contribution so special was that he figured out how the premise of the series made it possible to bring in a massive theme like that, with all kinds of philosophical and aesthetic potential, while still being able to do stories about monsters and aliens too. In the right hands, it's heady stuff that lends itself to mind-bending imagery. In the wrong hands, it's super hokey but still enjoyable for its basic weirdness.
One thing that reading it all in a short time made clear is that the requirements of ongoing shared-universe superhero storytelling make it hard to keep an epic fantasy/horror series interesting for very long. By that I don't mean "superheroes are dumb, swamp monsters are cool"; I mean that the need for frequent crossovers (which you can't help having, even if they're not huge events like Crisis on Infinite Earths, as long as your main character sometimes deals with threats to the whole world but you have 200 other characters who are also supposed to be protecting the whole world) really limits how much you can focus on your characters and how much of a unique feeling you can give the story, and conversely, you can't take your story in a direction that would have major consequences for the world unless you coordinate it with a room full of senior editors. In a genre that's often less about plot and action, and more about atmosphere and emotion and undermining everything familiar about the world, those are serious problems. And once you've wandered into the larger story universe, it's hard to back out of it and try to do something smaller-scale again to keep it feeling unique. So it's pretty impressive that something like this managed to develop in that setting.
Alan Moore's work didn't suffer from those issues as much as later writers for several reasons: no one really cared about Swamp Thing when he started, so he could play around more and throw in really obscure DC characters just because he felt like it, without having to keep them viable for others to use; DC was experimenting with letting writers be weirder, at least in their fantasy/horror books; Karen Berger was an excellent editor; and Moore is in general absurdly clever. However, he has a history of teaching people the wrong lessons. From The Killing Joke and Watchmen, what many people thought they learned was that making superheroes scarier and more violent is automatically interesting; from Miracleman and Swamp Thing, they thought they learned that the secret to an impressive revival is just to make a really big change to the origin story. And I wouldn't say that Moore successfully avoided all those pitfalls either. There's plenty of super-clunky crossover stuff in his run, he brought up problems that he didn't have good solutions to (like "why can't Swampy just solve world hunger"), and when he had no interest in a character but had to keep them around for continuity's sake you could really tell. He just kept throwing enough cool things at you that you didn't have time to worry about all that.
In terms of my own personal taste, speaking as a pretty morbid person who likes to overthink everything, the Swamp Thing writers I really cherish are Moore and Veitch, though both of them certainly had their off days. Then there's a solid crew of people who did some good stuff on a less innovative level, though they almost always hit a wall at some point and descended into silliness: Collins, Dysart, Snyder, Soule. Vaughan, I really wanted to like but didn't. Millar, I really wanted to hate but didn't, but then did. Wein and Michelinie aren't what I would call very good writers and their version of Swamp Thing is the simplest, but they're good at the type of thing they do and it was a necessary phase for the character. Pasko and Wheeler are just kind of there. I haven't said as much about the art because I'm just not very good at talking about it, and because when it's good it speaks for itself.
For someone who wants to read some Swamp Thing but maybe not 300+ issues of it, I guess I would recommend starting from the beginning, reading the Wein and Michelinie stuff (as long as you like it—if you realize it's not your thing, just skip ahead because it's not really going to change), then you can probably skip Pasko, then read all of Moore and at least half of Veitch, and Tom King's single issue from 2018. There's definitely some good reading in the rest, but I think it works better if you're already pretty into Swamp Thing.
I started writing these posts for three reasons. First, I had access to almost the whole series for the first time (there are a few one-off issues that I still haven't read, but I'm not too worried about that) so why not. Second, there's this TV adaptation and I figured they would be pulling ideas from many different writers, so I was curious to see what I would recognize. Third, I've been depressed, and obsessive critical writing projects have always been a helpful distraction for me. I wouldn't have written so much under other circumstances when no one was actually asking me to, but if you're reading this, I hope you got something out of it. That's all!
(Or almost all. ST 2019 TV review)
Written by 23 people
Art by 72 people [not counting the colorists]
As of 2019, there haven't been any more Swamp Thing comics. Should there be? Based on Len Wein's last unfinished series I would have said no, I can let it go, but then there was that special issue last year and I was hooked again. So I guess we'll see.
Why do I like Swamp Thing so much? There's the "I got into it at an impressionable age" thing, which may affect my judgment, who knows (and the series is also almost exactly the same age as me). I'm always up for "hero who's doomed to be a monster" stories, and things that have one foot in fantasy and one foot in horror, and things where the concept of identity isn't straightforward. The massive amount of non-human life on Earth is an underdeveloped area for fantasy fiction in general, especially in the sense of it having a completely different mode of existence (rather than just living in an unfamiliar place, like Aquaman)—and part of what made Alan Moore's contribution so special was that he figured out how the premise of the series made it possible to bring in a massive theme like that, with all kinds of philosophical and aesthetic potential, while still being able to do stories about monsters and aliens too. In the right hands, it's heady stuff that lends itself to mind-bending imagery. In the wrong hands, it's super hokey but still enjoyable for its basic weirdness.
One thing that reading it all in a short time made clear is that the requirements of ongoing shared-universe superhero storytelling make it hard to keep an epic fantasy/horror series interesting for very long. By that I don't mean "superheroes are dumb, swamp monsters are cool"; I mean that the need for frequent crossovers (which you can't help having, even if they're not huge events like Crisis on Infinite Earths, as long as your main character sometimes deals with threats to the whole world but you have 200 other characters who are also supposed to be protecting the whole world) really limits how much you can focus on your characters and how much of a unique feeling you can give the story, and conversely, you can't take your story in a direction that would have major consequences for the world unless you coordinate it with a room full of senior editors. In a genre that's often less about plot and action, and more about atmosphere and emotion and undermining everything familiar about the world, those are serious problems. And once you've wandered into the larger story universe, it's hard to back out of it and try to do something smaller-scale again to keep it feeling unique. So it's pretty impressive that something like this managed to develop in that setting.
Alan Moore's work didn't suffer from those issues as much as later writers for several reasons: no one really cared about Swamp Thing when he started, so he could play around more and throw in really obscure DC characters just because he felt like it, without having to keep them viable for others to use; DC was experimenting with letting writers be weirder, at least in their fantasy/horror books; Karen Berger was an excellent editor; and Moore is in general absurdly clever. However, he has a history of teaching people the wrong lessons. From The Killing Joke and Watchmen, what many people thought they learned was that making superheroes scarier and more violent is automatically interesting; from Miracleman and Swamp Thing, they thought they learned that the secret to an impressive revival is just to make a really big change to the origin story. And I wouldn't say that Moore successfully avoided all those pitfalls either. There's plenty of super-clunky crossover stuff in his run, he brought up problems that he didn't have good solutions to (like "why can't Swampy just solve world hunger"), and when he had no interest in a character but had to keep them around for continuity's sake you could really tell. He just kept throwing enough cool things at you that you didn't have time to worry about all that.
In terms of my own personal taste, speaking as a pretty morbid person who likes to overthink everything, the Swamp Thing writers I really cherish are Moore and Veitch, though both of them certainly had their off days. Then there's a solid crew of people who did some good stuff on a less innovative level, though they almost always hit a wall at some point and descended into silliness: Collins, Dysart, Snyder, Soule. Vaughan, I really wanted to like but didn't. Millar, I really wanted to hate but didn't, but then did. Wein and Michelinie aren't what I would call very good writers and their version of Swamp Thing is the simplest, but they're good at the type of thing they do and it was a necessary phase for the character. Pasko and Wheeler are just kind of there. I haven't said as much about the art because I'm just not very good at talking about it, and because when it's good it speaks for itself.
For someone who wants to read some Swamp Thing but maybe not 300+ issues of it, I guess I would recommend starting from the beginning, reading the Wein and Michelinie stuff (as long as you like it—if you realize it's not your thing, just skip ahead because it's not really going to change), then you can probably skip Pasko, then read all of Moore and at least half of Veitch, and Tom King's single issue from 2018. There's definitely some good reading in the rest, but I think it works better if you're already pretty into Swamp Thing.
I started writing these posts for three reasons. First, I had access to almost the whole series for the first time (there are a few one-off issues that I still haven't read, but I'm not too worried about that) so why not. Second, there's this TV adaptation and I figured they would be pulling ideas from many different writers, so I was curious to see what I would recognize. Third, I've been depressed, and obsessive critical writing projects have always been a helpful distraction for me. I wouldn't have written so much under other circumstances when no one was actually asking me to, but if you're reading this, I hope you got something out of it. That's all!
(Or almost all. ST 2019 TV review)