Customer Reviews

Swamp Thing Vol. 6: Reunion

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Here is the final installment of Alan Moore's tremendous and groundbreaking run on the Swamp Thing series, collecting original issues #57-64. Moore brings to a precise ending his take on the character and his breathtaking development as an elemental spirit, but with plenty of room for future writers to continue the series. We also see the apotheosis of Moore's strong horror (and increasingly, sci-fi) writing, which both resurrected and revolutionized this comic genre. At the beginning of this particular collection, Swampy's spirit is still drifting in outer space, and Moore takes him on a series of adventures that illustrate his very "fertile" imagination. Swampy restores fertility to Adam Strange's nuclear-damaged planet, accidentally mates with a lonely bio-mechanical space station (in a great example of speculative sci-fi), and accidentally enslaves a sentient plant civilization but amends his misdeed with help from the local Green Lantern associate. Moore brings his run to a close by finally reuniting Swampy with his true love Abby, as he ponders his place as an elemental god on his home world. The artwork continues to astound as well, with Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala handling most of the duties during this period, while colorist Tatjana Wood continues her moody and praiseworthy work. This is the stupendous ending to one of the great series in comics history, and also one of the best graphic novel collections. [~doomsdayer520~]

While the title of the final collection of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing work has an obvious meaning to it, the reunion between Alec Holland the Swamp Thing and his wife Abby, the book is also Moore's last work, so it is just as much his departure from a character he changed in so many ways, helping to create what would someday be DC Comic's Vertigo line.

The final collection features some more of Moore's reworking of the DCU with some horrifying results. Adam Strange, hero of Rann, appears, and Moore suggests that Strange may be Rann's hero, but not for the reasons he thinks he is. As Swamp Thing makes his journey home to Earth after his forced severing from the Green as seen in the previous collection, he makes a variety of stops, some of which show how his abilities and such make him one of the more powerful beings, and as such, Alec's reasoning in the end as to why he doesn't just fix the Earth's ecology for humanity makes a good deal of sense.

Of course, Moore never lets you forget Swamp Thing began as a horror book. Alec's revenge against his would-be killers for separating him from Abby for so long (which, as far as Alec is concerned, is the real crime they committed) takes on terrifying aspects as we see just how powerful someone who can control plants really is. His trip to a planet of sentient plants has similar frightening results as he inadvertantly pulls up a body made entirely of the citizens of the city and needs to be stopped by the planet's Green Lantern, but not before his presense causes internal shifts in a few of the planet's inhabitants, most for the worse, seeing what they really are as opposed to what they believe themselves to be.

Most horrifying (and somewhat confusing) is an issue recounted by some kind of alien creature which it seems is part plant, part asteroid, and part machine, and her capture and what appears to be a rape of Alec trying to get home while his consciousness travels across space.

I give this collection four stars for a simple reason, though. In the middle of the book is a single issue Moore didn't write dealing with Alec and the New Gods. Artist Rick Veitch wrote that one. It's not a bad issue, but if you buy this thinking Moore wrote every issue (which may be an impression you get from reading the cover), then you should be warned that this is not the case.

Alan Moore's entire run on Swamp Thing is amazing. But his `Swamp Thing in Space' stories are my favorites as Moore switches from weird horror to weird sci-fi-horror. As remarkable and acclaimed as Watchmen is, for my money, this is where Moore penned his most ground-breaking stuff.

After Moore hit his peak with his meditation on solitude, "My Blue Heaven" in issue #56, which concluded the last volume, it goes downhill. The best issues collected in this volume are #59, written by Steve Bissette from a plot by Bissette, Totleben, Moore, and Veitch, and #62, by Veitch. Like Moore's mediocre _The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_. He takes slightly clever ideas that are rife in the zeitgeist and doesn't really take them anywhere terribly interesting.

I could barely get through Gardner Fox's Adam Strange Archives, Vol. 1--it was too formulaic. Strange couldn't stay on Rann because the Zeta Beam wore off. Finding the Zeta Beam was part of the story. Here, we open with Adam Strange tying to get to Zeta Beam coordinates in the outback, only to find the new Outback Mall (groan)--then it gets really scatological and has Adam throwing a man off the toilet to catch a Zeta Beam. Hahaha, Alan. How mature. As Roy Thomas points out in his introduction to ASA1, any sophisticated reader could tell en with the restrictions of the Code that Adam and Alanna's romance was less than chaste, and by this point, I believe they were supposed to be married, anyway. Now, Moore has him so dumb that he is the only one who doesn't know that he's primarily on Rann to give the princess an heir, even though he never sees any children when he visits Rann. Somehow, this Zeta Beam manages to capture Swamp Thing off the blue planet at the same time. In this two-issue story (needed so we can have an enormous fight between Swamp Thing and two Thanagarians who want to help Rann deal with its famine so they can get the Zeta Beam. Swamp Thing's abilities threaten the Thangarians plot, so they don't survive too long.

The volume is deservedly named for issue #59, which is written by Bissette. Swamp Thing doesn't appear in this issue except in flashback. In it, a coping Abby goes to work in a retirement home, where one of her co-workers is a thief. This is well thought-out, human drama, abetted by Chester's call that her father, the Patchwork Man has been spotted. This is a very emotional issue, not made too "comic-booky" by the occasional glimpses of Anton Arcane's severed head being toyed with in hell as we explore this story of his brother, Abby's father. Perhaps Bissette tries to be a little too profound by having Abby's favorite story from Gregori being Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but it all works together so beautifully.

Then we come to issue #60. As I wrote on ComicBookDb[...], in this issue, en route to Minraud, where Adam Strange advised him to go in issue #58, Swamp Thing is intercepted by a cybernetic spaceship being, who forces him to father her offspring. The issue is entirely narrated, in poetic waxing, by this being, who assures her offspring that its father would have loved her had she not ripped out his vitals and discarded a husk. Here Moore goes for making the ridiculously perverse seem normal, because it is to the point of view of the speaker. This is almost up there with the sickness of issue #48, but of a different nature, as a character tries to cover up the horrendous with the beautiful--it's intended by the writer to fail at this on certain levels, and as such, it's an understandably well-regarded issue.

Once on Minraud, we get a slightly misleading cover showing Swamp Thing wearing a Green Lantern power ring. Here Swamp Thing makes the mistake of arriving on a planet where all plant life is conscious. Moore takes another cheap shot by opening with the lovemaking of a couple we barely see in the rest of the issue. On Minraud, Medphyll is the Green Lantern, and his master is the obvious enlightened sort, only eating animals and never plants. Medphyll allows Swamp Thing to use this form and he learns how to return home.

Issue #62 is Veitch's first, and it is very strong. The first scene has Metron almost parodying Moore's opening voyeurism of the previous issue (was _Lost Girls_ really a big surprise, given the author?), but is mostly about Metron wanting to reconnect with the Source. The issue is very good, but almost doesn't seem to fit, especially all of Swamp Thing's comments about power and ego, which he seems to throw out the window in the next issue. The linework on Darkseid's face reminds me of some of the Yeats artwork on Sunderland's face that I didn't particularly care for during the Pasko run--lots of striations that make it look almost like we are looking more at exposed muscle than skin.

Issue #63 is Moore's nadir on the series. In that issue, Swamp Thing returns to Earth and destroys the men who killed him. Now, ever since Moore took over this title, we've known that Swamp Thing was not above revenge, but this story is unbelievably flawed. The drama with Abby and comatose Matt and Chester Williams, and even Liz Tremayne is fine, but the revenge plot is a failure on numerous levels. First, Swamp Thing never saw the men who killed him, so he is obviously relying on the Green to guide him to his killers. However, the mastermind who created the device to kill him was Lex Luthor, and DC would never allow Luthor to be killed outside of a Superman comic (and of course, when he has been, it's never stuck), which makes me wonder why Moore would conceive a revenge plot at all, especially when Swamp Thing recognizes in the next issue how much he has grown from the experience--and there is no reason he would have known of Luthor's association any less than the others. The execution in this scene is also poor. For the first of the killings, we get the random lewd detail that Paulie Skinner has kept his hand cupped between his legs when he sleeps since childhood. The first two victims are killed by roses, the third, by a hedge maze, and the fourth has isolated himself from plants, but it comes predictably through a tomato on a hamburger. If Moore is the great writer he is said to be, why is he doing something so predictable? It gets worse, though. Swamp Thing essentially turns the guy into a tree, when issue after issue shows that he could use only the plants that are nearby to grow into bodies, so turning into a tree inside Wicker's body from tomato and possibly lettuce (we see only the former) is as asinine an image as it is striking.

The final issue of this volume #64, has Swamp Thing contemplating his godhood, afraid to mention that he ended a famine on Rann so that he doesn't have to do so on Earth. He comes to the conclusion that gods observe but don't intervene. He then builds the floral house that he and Abby will continue to use later in the series. This is a significant improvement over the previous issue, but it's really not much different from the days of World War II when most of the JSA was to powerful to go against Hitler, and we get a page-Utopia paradox if they do. Moore does little better overcoming that problem than the Golden Age writers did, but I'm not aware that any writer has really been able to overcome it successfully.

Overall, this is above-average comics writing, but far from the best comics have to offer. Moore is a very intelligent writer, and this is Moore at neither his best nor his worst, except maybe in the penultimate chapter.

I want to be perfectly clear about this I LOVE ALAN MOORE AND HIS SWAMP THING RUN!!!! Now, having said that, this vol is seriously boring and takes a really really really really long time to get where it's going. The first two issues in this volume are really good and I was excited but then it hits a wall and just doesn't go anywhere. One issue I literally skipped because it made absolutely no sense what so ever and I have no clue why it was an entire issue. Also, two of the issues in this book aren't even written by Moore and one of those issues is completely useless and doesn't move the overall story anywhere. That same issue also made no sense to me. It might make sense if I read Swamp Thing before Moore because the writer is the original one but I couldn't understand it. If you need to have this to complete your collection like I do then by all means do so but other then that I will never read this again.

Swamp Thing has more of a philosophical approach to it than other comics I've read. It has a great story line and just keeps getting better!

Swamp Thing by Moore and Bissette is one of the best comic book series ever. Every issue is a masterpiece and explored themes that most comics of today won't tackle. Read this stuff, it's great!

One of the best runs in the history of comic books closes with this volume. If you're reading this, then I don't even have to recommend any of the other volumes, you've already bought them; you're just verifying it's the right one before placing the order.

Get it; delve into the story, marvel at the art, feel the love comes that through the coloring, the exquisite lettering and thank Grodd for the editorial staff's involvement; or lack thereof.

Enjoy.

This is last collection you need to have Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. The story about sentient technological organism is one of best SF stories I have read, but for me, opening story with Adam Strange was too strange :) since I don't know much of DC mainstream, Therefore only four stars.

As usual, Alan Moore delivers. A story that could easily get lost in it's own ambition is smoothly directed towards conclusion, with all the twists and turns that make Alan Moore the master. When you finish this volume you'll just want to turn around and read the entire series over again. Or explore more of Moore.