Uncollected Editions #8: Mark Millar and Grant Morrison’s Swamp Thing: Bad Gumbo (Vertigo/DC Comics)

[With Swamp Thing rejoining the DC Universe, a timely "Uncollected Editions" feature by Paul Hicks]

When Mark Millar and Grant Morrison took over Swamp Thing in 1994, they must have been faced with several dilemmas. Alan Moore had broken all types of new ground in making the book a cutting edge mature readers title and that had been successfully been continued under the pen of Rick Veitch. Somewhere between issue #87 and #88 the book stumbled dreadfully. Veitch left, editorially prevented from completing his long-planned finale to a time travel arc and his stoey where Swamp Thing meets Jesus Christ. In a show of solidarity, the series's already-lined-up and promising new young writer, named Neil Gaiman, decided to walk as well. After several months of nothing, issue #88 finally appeared with writer Doug Wheeler at the helm to hastily wrap up the time travel arc in a less controversial, more workmanlike manner.

The book continued for another seven years with Wheeler, followed by horror novelist Nancy A. Collins. The stories became very safe, status-quo-maintaining adventures split between the Louisiana bayous and the plant spiritual dimension known as the Green. Between Veitch's last issue and issue #140, there's nothing truly memorable or compelling. Swamp Thing was a title now mired in mediocrity and desperately needing to be dragged out of its rut. Millar and Morrison had the antidote, but it was a brutal process that started with the decimation of the supporting cast.

The four-part "Bad Gumbo" story in Swamp Thing #140-144 begins with an incoherent Swamp Thing howls through the Louisiana bayou, murdering the local populace. For a long-time reader, this is the equivalent of watching Superman tear apart everyone at the Daily Planet (except for Lois and Jimmy or in this case his wife Abby and the hippie Chester). Meanwhile, botanist Dr Alec Holland awakes in the Peruvian forest from a drug-induced coma. The plant who dreamed that he was a man is now a man who dreamed he was a plant. This is Millar and Morrison sweeping the pieces off the board and making sure we can’t play the game the same familiar way anymore.

Abby no longer lives in the bayou, shacked up instead with a regular man. She gets an ominous phone call from the mysteriously absent Tefé, the half-human, half-elemental daughter she had with Swamp Thing. Tefé warns that Swamp Thing is coming to kill Abby and she should run for her life. Abby runs, but she’s already being tracked through the flora in her intestines.

Wearing his artist hat, Phil Hester works with inker Kim DeMulder to superbly return the darkness to this title. There is wildness to the art that meshes brilliantly with the plot as the familiar world of Swamp Thing falls apart. Real locations give way to nightmare-scapes. Simple things like a black bird or ivy on the side of a house become ominous and threatening. Peruvian forests give way to jungles of machinery eating the forests. Alec is guided to board the horrific Soul Train to journey from Peru to Louisiana. It’s fantastic to look at and it works so well to convey the dislocation as Alec begins his physical and spiritual journey to find what he lost, or may have never had.

Millar and Morrison introduce a number of new characters to nudge Alec to learn what he needs, including Don Roberto, El Seńor Blake and the mysterious Traveller. I’ve heard the writers wanted to use established characters like the Phantom Stranger and John Constantine, but they were unavailable; this is better, I think, because the reader can't as easily predict the motives of Alec's new mentors as we could with familiar faces. The writers (maybe one in particular) deliver many well-informed explanations about the effect of plant-based drugs on human physiology, but it’s all a smokescreen. Alec isn’t a victim of hallucinogenics, rather Swamp Thing is under attack by his elemental forefathers, the Parliament of Trees. He’s a disappointment, failing to reach his true potential and held back by his connection to humanity. Their solution is to sever the human part from the plant, and the rampaging remains are trying to destroy every human connection Alec has.

Alec must race to save Abby and recover his power. The climax is a very physical confrontation with guns and explosions, not the usual fodder for this title. Alec does attain a victory, but it is bittersweet; Abby can no longer live in the world of monsters. While she isn’t killed off like the bayou-dwellers, her relationship with Alec has been destroyed. I thought this a travesty at the time, but looking at where the story went to from there, the writers offered wide-open possibilities. Abby was Alec’s center, his last true connection to humanity; she grounded him, but isn't that another way to say she held him back?

You may have noticed I’ve always placed Millar’s name ahead of Morrison’s. That’s deliberate. This isn’t Grant Morrison’s book with a novice writer hanging on his coattails, but rather this is the start of Millar’s run and beyond these four issues he was on his own. Millar's twenty-eight issue solo run on Swamp Thing after this arc surpassed these beginnings. It was marvelously inventive, deliciously dark and ultimately became a thoughtful exploration of the plant elemental with the safeties off. It carries the book to a (sadly all too rare) fully satisfying conclusion.

To get there, the authors needed a dose of "Bad Gumbo" to clear their collective heads and make way for something new and stranger. And isn't that just what Alan Moore did, too?

[DC may be rebooting, but we've still got trades to read! Reviews of Birds of Prey and more coming next week -- see you then!]

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Review: Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One hardcover (Vertigo/DC Comics)

[This review comes from Adam J. Noble, a public librarian living in Eastern Canada. At Noble Stabbings!!, he is blogging his attempt to read all of the comic series Cerebus in 2009.]

This hardcover volume, entitled Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One reprints "Saga of the Swamp Thing" issues 20-27, the opening eight issues of Alan Moore's mid-eighties run on the series. It includes the famous story "The Anatomy Lesson," in which the titular muck-man discovers that he is not a man transformed into a mossy beast, but rather a vegetable-creature who has deluded itself into believing it is a man.

As an "archival" edition, this new hardcover is ... durable, I guess, which you want in something calling itself "archival." Gone is the original beautiful Michael Zulli painted cover from the trade paperback, replaced by a lot of black, Alan Moore's name in big lettering and Swamp Thing's head in profile.

There are other problems with this volume, and they also have to do with how it stacks up to the earlier paperback edition. Yes, this hardcover is a big deal because, for the first time, it reprints "Loose Ends," issue #20 of the original series, where Alan Moore tied off the stump of Martin Pasko's run, and sowed the seeds of Moore's own story-to-come. However, there is always a price to be paid: we got some Moore, but we also lost some Moore. The original text introduction by Moore is gone in the new edition, most likely because it did its best to summarize Swamp Thing's back story for the new reader, up to and including "Loose Ends." Fair enough, death to spoilers and all that, but in the process we also lost some excellent musings on the horror genre, DC continuity, comic book continuity in general and storytelling in general including a tangent in which Moore discusses the possibility of Dr. Frankenstein performing experiments on the heroines of Little Women, a notion that seems to anticipate both League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls.

(When this volume was announced, months ago, I donated my "Loose Ends"-less Saga of the Swamp Thing trade to my local library. After the hardcover came out, I quickly made a photocopy of Moore's intro to stick between the pages of the new hardcover. Don't laugh, there but for the grace of God go you.)

It's also a shame that Moore's intro has been lost because new readers may find themselves surprised at how easily Moore's Swamp Thing bumps up against other denizens of the DCU proper. After all, Gaiman's Sandman usually tried its best to ignore those early cameos by the Martian Manhunter and Mister Miracle. Same goes for much of Hellblazer. But Moore's Swamp Thing is a "mature readers" book that happily co-exists alongside Jack Kirby's Etrigan, the Justice League, and later, the Crisis on Infinite Earths itself. The DCU is a true cosmos of fiction that we're often in danger of taking for granted, and the lost Moore intro illustrates that point explicitly -- although we've still got the comics themselves, so I guess it's not so bad.

Oh, incidentally: instead of Moore's intro, we get a chummy, backslaps-all-around intro by Swamp Thing creator Len Wein and another by horror author Ramsey Campbell, who gives a brief history of the "mature reader" comic up to the point before Moore began to work in American comics ("My ward is a junkie!" et al).

It's necessary to read Swamp Thing now with the proper context in mind. Moore's prose is sporadically overblown and purple; the art by Moore's former Miracleman cohorts Stephen Bissette and John Totleben, while evocative and atmospheric, is sketchy and at times bogged-down with "inventive" (read: difficult-to-follow) panel layouts; the "horror" is, to be honest, pretty conventional. But the characters shine through all the rough patches: "Alec," the Thing himself; his lover Abby Cable; Abby's husband Matt (later to be seen as the pet raven of Dream); and perhaps most indelibly, Jason Woodrue, the villainous Floronic Man, who delivers to Alec the truth about his inhumanity, before trying to Take Over the World with only Alec to stop him.

Whatever its flaws and growing pains, without Moore's run on Swamp Thing, modern comics would look very different indeed, and we certainly wouldn't have Vertigo, which is the biggest evolutionary step that mainstream comics has ever taken.

And, finally, did anyone else's copy arrive slightly sticky, as if slicked with chlorophyll? If so, DC, I am declaring this the worst cover gimmick ever.

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