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Swamp Thing #1-14 (2004-2005)
Written: #1-6 by Andy Diggle, #7-8 by Will Pfeifer, #9-14 by Joshua Dysart
Art: #1-6/9-12 by Enrique Breccia, #7-8 by Richard Corben, #13-14 by Timothy Green II
Maybe it's fitting that a comic that was originally about a person getting blown up and burned up and then recreated as an unrecognizable monster would spend the next 30-plus years being repeatedly cancelled and then dredged up and handed off to a random assortment of writers, like: "Here, maybe you can make something out of this." It's no longer possible to really do a continuation of Swamp Thing—it's been demolished and reimagined too many times—but you can absorb some of its memories.
The new main writer, Joshua Dysart, and the two others we get before him, seem to understand this; they all have some new ideas and have grafted pieces of Swamp Thing history onto them, and the results vary but a lot of them are good. But the biggest asset in this latest go-round is the art of Enrique Breccia. I had never seen his work before, but his father Alberto Breccia was one of the greats not only in South American comics but worldwide, and there are obvious parallels in their styles: there's an effortless precision in line and texture and composition, but also a looseness that lets forms and spaces become more abstract at times, and the inking is wonderfully alive. For US readers, the way he draws faces may take a little getting used to—it's not really any more cartoony than for instance Wrightson's or Petersen's, it's just a different tradition where eyes, noses, etc. are stylized in a somewhat different way—but it all feels like part of a cohesive vision. He's an incredibly good choice for this comic, and all of his several different versions of Swampy are great.
( Read more... )
Written: #1-6 by Andy Diggle, #7-8 by Will Pfeifer, #9-14 by Joshua Dysart
Art: #1-6/9-12 by Enrique Breccia, #7-8 by Richard Corben, #13-14 by Timothy Green II
Maybe it's fitting that a comic that was originally about a person getting blown up and burned up and then recreated as an unrecognizable monster would spend the next 30-plus years being repeatedly cancelled and then dredged up and handed off to a random assortment of writers, like: "Here, maybe you can make something out of this." It's no longer possible to really do a continuation of Swamp Thing—it's been demolished and reimagined too many times—but you can absorb some of its memories.
The new main writer, Joshua Dysart, and the two others we get before him, seem to understand this; they all have some new ideas and have grafted pieces of Swamp Thing history onto them, and the results vary but a lot of them are good. But the biggest asset in this latest go-round is the art of Enrique Breccia. I had never seen his work before, but his father Alberto Breccia was one of the greats not only in South American comics but worldwide, and there are obvious parallels in their styles: there's an effortless precision in line and texture and composition, but also a looseness that lets forms and spaces become more abstract at times, and the inking is wonderfully alive. For US readers, the way he draws faces may take a little getting used to—it's not really any more cartoony than for instance Wrightson's or Petersen's, it's just a different tradition where eyes, noses, etc. are stylized in a somewhat different way—but it all feels like part of a cohesive vision. He's an incredibly good choice for this comic, and all of his several different versions of Swampy are great.
( Read more... )
