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Seeing that the DC Universe streaming service had put up a whole lot of Swamp Thing comics in its reading section (presumably because of the upcoming TV show), I decided to catch up on the older ones I'd never seen, and maybe look again at the ones I had read. So I'm going to write some notes while I do that, not one issue at a time or anything, just whatever I think of.
Swamp Thing is mostly talked about these days for being Alan Moore's big break in America, and his work on the series in the '80s is notable in many ways which I'll get to later. Other people have since done other things with it. But the early stuff is interesting too, as a bridge from an older tradition of horror comics to a newer kind of SF-tinged dark fantasy that had both one-off monster threats and serialized story arcs. It wasn't the only comic doing the latter: Marvel's Tomb of Dracula started around the same time, as well as the other green swamp whatsit Man-Thing, both with very different styles. Swamp Thing looked more traditional in some ways than either of those, somewhat closer to the older forms (especially with its first two creative teams), but it also had a special tragic element: a hero who was doomed to be a monster and knew it.
Swamp Thing #1-10 (1972-74)
Written by Len Wein
Art by Berni Wrightson
The first two pages of issue 1 do a good job of summarizing what you're going to be getting from here on: lots of gorgeous lushly inked illustrations of spooky nature scenes, a big monster brooding about how he died, and a lot of very flowery narration.
( Read more... )
Swamp Thing is mostly talked about these days for being Alan Moore's big break in America, and his work on the series in the '80s is notable in many ways which I'll get to later. Other people have since done other things with it. But the early stuff is interesting too, as a bridge from an older tradition of horror comics to a newer kind of SF-tinged dark fantasy that had both one-off monster threats and serialized story arcs. It wasn't the only comic doing the latter: Marvel's Tomb of Dracula started around the same time, as well as the other green swamp whatsit Man-Thing, both with very different styles. Swamp Thing looked more traditional in some ways than either of those, somewhat closer to the older forms (especially with its first two creative teams), but it also had a special tragic element: a hero who was doomed to be a monster and knew it.
Swamp Thing #1-10 (1972-74)
Written by Len Wein
Art by Berni Wrightson
The first two pages of issue 1 do a good job of summarizing what you're going to be getting from here on: lots of gorgeous lushly inked illustrations of spooky nature scenes, a big monster brooding about how he died, and a lot of very flowery narration.
( Read more... )
