Swamp Thing reread, part 4

The Saga of the Swamp Thing #20-30 (1984)
Swamp Thing #31-32 (1985)
Swamp Thing Annual #2 (1985)
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Steve Bissette/John Totleben, except #28/#32 by Shawn McManus, #30 Bissette/Alfredo Alcala, #31 Rick Veitch/Totleben

Now the famous stuff begins. If anyone is reading this, sorry, it's long.

Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing has been a lot of people's introduction to the series, and his second issue, "The Anatomy Lesson", has been presented as the first one in anthologies because that's where he fully broke away from Pasko's storyline (as well as being his first one with both Bissette and Totleben). That's fine, it's a great story and it works well as a starting point, but I'm glad to have finally read #20 as well because it's interesting to see so many Mooreisms emerging right away before the new story has kicked in. So I'll start there.
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Swamp Thing reread, part 3

The Saga of the Swamp Thing #1-19 (1982-83)
Written by Martin Pasko, except #14-15 by Dan Mishkin
Art by Tom Yeates, except #10 by Yeates/John Totleben, #14-15 by Bo Hampton/Scott Hampton, #16-19 by Steve Bissette/Totleben

So, he's back. It's been six years since DC first decided to move the series toward "a new super-heroic mold", gave it to Gerry Conway who turned Swamp Thing back into Alec Holland, then almost immediately announced they were giving it to the total novice David Anthony Kraft, but then cancelled it instead. After all that, it's no surprise that the next iteration would be fairly different from previous ones, and there's almost no attempt at continuity—the Conway issues apparently never happened (Swampy did appear in a few crossovers in the meantime with a hasty excuse for why he stopped being human, but then they just officially disavowed that whole storyline), and I'm totally fine with that.

DC Comics veteran Martin Pasko is our new writer, and despite having the original series writer Len Wein as an editor, he's doing his own thing. We're not going to get the kind of Gothic horror and SF pulp seen in the earlier series; most of the story will be one long scientific-occult-spy-conspiracy-apocalypse storyline in which Swampy not only is almost never in a swamp, but is in pretty much the least swamp-like environments possible, like a lab or a cruise ship or a ski resort.
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