Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Re-Reads (Now Reading: Swamp Thing: 1971 through 1985)

Just to add, the other most memorable part of the Monkey King arc in Swamp Thing, was the horrifying sequence in Elysium Lawns when Kamara draws out the kids' fears including the smothered baby brother and Jessica's: "Mommy needn't know". I was ten when I first read that and it was the most terrifying thing I had ever come across. I had loved horror comics before this, but always at a gimmicky level and this was my first taste of what scary and uncomfortable felt like. It's amazing the things they were able to explore, even before the code was dropped from the book.

I mentioned before how much I loved Abby and this arc was a huge part of that. The scene where she stands up to the creepy drunk Matt was also something I'd never seen in a comic at that age. She wasn't a side-lined helpless damsel in distress, she kicked ass and stood up to the horrific. Sure she was scared, how could she not be, but there was a fierceness of strength to her character I hadn't seen, especially in a non-powered supporting character. Though the argument is certainly there that she's as much a protagonist of Moore's run as Alec is.

Very well said, Dave.

If Swamp Thing was the heart of the book, Abby was the soul of the book.

Got em. Also grabbed Starman and Squadron Supreme. They were all in the same box for some reason...so, why not.

Lardy...you want to start a different thread for this thing?

Hmmmm....no, I think it's fine to do it here. This thread is a focus on re-reads, so it's fair game. Unless you thing it would be better in the "Vertigo Title Review" thread? Opening a new thread for SMT might encourage closet or unknown fans to participate, but it might just as well be nothing but a back-and-forth between you and me. I don't want a whole new thread just for that.



Not much of a mystery there....looks like you grabbed the "S" box!

Damn! I just finished "The Brute" and then realized I'm missing #13, the first part of "The Vamp"! I often find I've misplaced a random issue in long runs, as I did with Preacher and Hellblazer last year. Hate doing it, but I guess I'll start with "The Vamp" part 2. SUX!

Here's a quick synopses of "Vamp" for you to get up to speed on, Paladin:

"Two fraternity pledges go to a sleazy bar looking for strippers to entertain their college friends. They have problems with transportation, Biker gangs, and worst of all, the staff of the bar, all of whom seem to be vampires, with Grace Jones playing the head vampire."

[img:left]http://s782.photobucket.com/user/djsopko/media/SMT-TheTatantula_zps922a3296.jpg.html]

Sandman Mystery Theatre # 1 - 4

"The Tarantula"

How to go about this without really spoiling anything...

First off, Matt Wagner is, and always has been a great story teller that seems to excel at period pieces. He weaves a great tale here. There's mystery, suspense, and some brutality. This is gas mask wearing Wesley Dodds. No bright colors or hero costumes here...just trench coats and gas masks.

We are introduced to our main characters. Wesley Dodds, Humphries (Wesleys butler), Lawrence and Dian Belmont (father and daughter), as well as several other characters that will play a role as the series continues.

Wagner does not cheat with the mystery. Everything unfolds in a fair manner, following accepted rules of such things...no last second Captain Atoms showing up as the villain of the piece.

Guy Davis, who has a ery unique style handles the art chores here. His is a style that I love. The characters are not super models...they look like real people. Some are attractive, some are not. There is weight to the figures he draws that tells you that these are people like you or I. Not a bunch of 6-pack characters (main and otherwise) running around.

The Sandman is still learning here. Wesley is not perfect and mishandles some situations. Gets himself into situations that most writers would not let their character get into.

Dian proves herself to be more than just the "girlfriend," or "damsel in distress."

As far as story line...The Tarantula begins kidnapping young women, making no ransom demands. It's up to The Sandman to figure out what is going on before another young woman dies.

One more thing...I feel like Colombo here.

The covers. They are phenomenal. In the same vein of Dave McKean and his Sandman covers, Gavin Wilson uses photos, art and other mediums to spectacular effect.

Saga of the Swamp Thing #28-31 & Saga of the Swamp Thing Annual #2

Alan Moore goes into overdrive with his best arc yet. Swamp Thing finally puts the ghost of Alec Holland to rest (literally), then must battle Arcane, who has possessed Matt and is using Matt's reality-warping powers for evil ends. Arcane has also used Matt's body to commit incest with Abby, and it is to Moore's (and Karen Berger's) credit that it doesn't feel exploitive in the least, and that the worst is left to the imagination (what a difference 30 years makes, huh? Shame on modern DC.) After this vile deed, Arcane and his army of undead psychos kill Abby and send her soul to hell. Once Swamp Thing has confronted Arcane and purged Arcane's soul from Matt's body back to hell, a dying Matt heals Abby's body, but does not have enough strength to rescue her soul. And so Swamp Thing himself must journey into the realms beyond the mortal sphere, where, with the guidance of Deadman and the Phantom Stranger, and after an encounter with the Spectre, he re-teams with Etrigan the Demon to rescue Abby's soul. Heady, heavy stuff, yet executed by Moore with a self-assurance that's simply amazing.

The art, to a degree, can't quite keep up with Moore, for this is where Bissette and, to a lesser extent, Totleben, began falling seriously behind on deadlines. And so we get Shawn McManus drawing the first installment, adequately but nowhere near as good as his next Swamp Thing issue, "Pog", which I'll review in my next block of issues; then Bissette & Totleben return for a stunning job; but then Bissette and soon-to-be-frequent-guest inker Alfredo Alcala are thrown together in a match which will pay off in the long run, but looks rushed here; then Rick Veitch, who had helped Bissette on some of the earlier issues, does full pencils with Totleben inking, and while Veitch acquits himself admirably, he's just not as good as Bissette; finally, Bissette & Totleben draw the journey to hell and back, and do their usual outstanding work.

To give Bissette & Totleben extra time to work on what might be their very best issue, #34, issues #32 and #33 will be fill-ins, and unexpectedly delightful ones at that. I'll get to all of them next week.

Caught up on this thread and love seeing the reviews all around. I'm terribly too busy in real life to join in on the rereading but I'm definitely enjoying reading the reviews.

Thanks, Cobie. And you'll be pleased to know that once I'm done Swamp Thing, I'm going to re-read a run I know you love: the first 26 issues of Peter David's Aquaman.

Saga of the Swamp Thing #32-34

As mentioned at the end of my last post, issues #32-33 are both fill-ins to keep the book on schedule. But what surprisingly wonderful fill-ins they are!

You don't need to be a fan of Walt Kelly's classic swamp-based comic strip "Pogo", to understand the story in issue #32, "Pog", but if you are (and I've been one for over a quarter-century, since an older cousin gave me a book of "Pogo" reprints) it just makes the story all the more of a treat. The analogs of the Pogo characters are wandering aliens who escaped from a world corrupted by one race which set itself up as superior. They think they've finally found in Earth a world to call their new home, until Swamp Thing's guidance and a tragic encounter with swamp wildlife proves otherwise. Moore does an astonishing job of replicating Walt Kelly's elaborate wordplay in the aliens' dialect, and the whole thing adds up to a charming little fable, beautifully drawn by Shawn McManus.

Issue #33 takes the most cynical form of fill-in -- a reprint bookended by a few pages of new material -- and comes up not only with a way to actually make it work, but also a way to expand the Swamp Thing mythos, as Abby discovers that there have been a whole line of plant elementals throughout time immemorial. I don't know whether the hosts of DC's horror anthologies "House of Mystery" and "House of Secrets" had already been established as being the biblical Cain and Abel before this story, but either way, Moore scores yet another bullseye. Also worth mentioning is the artistic contribution of Ron Randall to the framing sequences, whom I've always considered underrated (loved his art on JLE, even if I didn't always care for the stories.)

Which brings us, finally, to issue #34, "The Rites of Spring", in my opinion the peak of Moore's Swamp Thing run. Oh, it stayed good throughout, and was often great after #34, but this quiet tale of Abby & Swamp Thing finally admitting that they love each other, and consummating their relationship by having Abby eat Swamp Thing's fruit, resulting in her consicousness intertwining with his, is one of the most beautiful comics ever published, a milestone in the history of the artform. Moore's sensitive writing and Bissette & Totleben's stunning art, which combine to bring the psychedelic sensibilities of the underground comics the creators were raised on into the mainstream, are some of the best contributions these creators have made to comic books. And IIRC, Bissette has said that "The Rites of Spring" was the last issue of Swamp Thing that was a complete pleasure for him to work on, before problems in his personal and professional lives began souring his experience of working in mainstream comics.

So where did they go from here? Well, Bissette & Totleben stayed with Moore on Swamp Thing off-and-on through issue #50, the climax of the epic "American Gothic" saga which makes up the middle section of Moore's run. I actually regard issues #35-50 as being the weakest of Moore's run, but the standards set were so high that there is still plenty to enjoy in these issues, and we'll get into them in my next few posts.

Time for a shameful comicbook confession....

I've never read Moore's run on Swamp Thing.
I have it, but like everything else, its sitting in the backlog of things to do.

"Rites of Spring" is definitely a landmark story. It's amazing how erotic it is without being even slightly pornographic. Just an amazing piece of art.

"Pog" was so heartbreaking! Such a beautiful story...and so sad. Shawn McManus is such a great artist whose work I wish we saw more of. He's an artist that took a while to grow on me, but I really grew to love it. His run on Dr. Fate with DeMatteis was one of the best showcases for his work.

I know that Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is something I'll re-read again and again. If I hadn't already completed that re-read recently, I would soooo be doing it with you, Fickles!

Don't feel bad, Virdie--that was me for a long time. I must say, though, if you have it, WHAT THE #$%& ARE YA WAITING FOR?!?!?



(I think the biggest thing in comics I've never read is the original Galactus/Silver Surfer story from Fantastic Four #48-50...and for that matter most of the classic Lee/Kirby FF. But at least I can say I don't have them on hand! )

It's okay, Lardy. Maybe a couple years down the road we can re-read it together?

McManus definitely had a unique style. I wish DeMatteis' Dr. Fate had been collected, because even though I'm not usually a fan of his, that's another run that I've been intrigued by since Greg Burgas did a length essay on it.

I loved re-reading "The Tarantula"! In fact, I think I enjoyed it a lot more than I probably did the first time. SMT was a curiosity for me when I originally tried it. I think I was drawn in by the title and my thinking there was a connection to Neil Gaiman's Sandman (there was, but it was small and not spelled out for a while), which I was just starting to get into around that time. Instead, I got a book set in the '30s and starring a JSA character that I wasn't particularly fond of. Plus, unlike the other Vertigo titles, there wasn't more than a vague supernatural aspect to it. I think SMT was the first hard-boiled, nourish , "pulp"-style book I'd ever picked up on an ongoing basis. It would be my first in a style of books I would come to dearly love over time. (I'm fairly sure I picked up SMT before my first Miller "Sin City" book.)

"The Tarantula" introduces the core cast of characters and opens things up with a violent mystery. A series of women are being kidnapped, tortured, maimed and finally killed. All except for the first one, who happens to be the friend of the female lead Dian Belmont, a socialite looking for her lot in the world. Dian is not content to fall into her expected gender role of the time but doesn't know quite what to do. Her friend's kidnapping begins to point her in the direction of finding herself, a direction which leads her toward both the Golden Age Sandman and his alter ego Wesley Dodds.

One thing amazing about this story is that though it has violence, the violence is understated and mostly left to the imagination. It doesn't eroticize the violence done to the women in the story. vertigo is kind of known for excessive violence, but here it's mostly the suggestion of same thru the horrified reactions of others and leaving most of the gory details to the imagination.

Despite the title, I've found that the "mystery" isn't really the center of what the draw of the stories is. Through the three arcs I've re-read so far, it's either pretty easy to figure out who's behind the crimes or there's no real mystery to solve at all beyond the "why" as opposed to the "who". "The Tarantula" gives you four suspects, all in the same damaged nuclear family. You see pretty early that there are two of them involved, and it's not hard at all to figure out which two. But what you slowly have unravel is the "mystery" of what has happened to this family and why two of them are murdering women to gain a advantage over the other half of the family. The answers are truly disturbing.

The art by Guy Davis was so unusual at the time that it took me a while to warm up to it. His manner of drawing Wesley as particularly nerdy and unheroic, even a little pudgy. But I grew to love it! Everyone looks so human, and I swear Guy just draws you into the period with the detail of his lines. Reading the second and third arcs afterwards, I saw how substandard they're work was compared to his. Guy would go on to draw, iirc, two out of every three arcs after the third one and cement himself as the definitive SMT artist. His work is just so perfect for nailing this pulpy atmosphere. Looking back, I think it was Guy who was a cornerstone for helping me start to appreciate artists who weren't "clean".

And I can't say enough about Matt Wagner's (and later Steven Seagle's) character work on this series! Wesley, Dian and so many others under his skillful scripts just came ALIVE for me, and I could see that fire re-igniting as I re-immersed myself in the world. It's the characters, more than anything, that made SMT make my list of the ten best comic series I listed here a few years ago. Among them is Lt. Burke, who is such a bastard but such a guilty pleasure to read. We barely see much of Burke in this arc, but there's MUCH more to come!

In the early lettercols the editor states that Wagner's focus will be on hate crimes, and this is very much true in the onset of this series. It's a great way to learn a lot more about the time period and to give these stories that extra emotional investment that draws you into the stories and then punches you in the gut!

Well, I'm intrigued so far. I've long been a casual fan of Wesley and Dian in the sense that even though I haven't read a lot of stories with them, I love the IDEA of them as both an ahead-of-their-time couple and as two individuals who didn't quite fit into the society of their times. I do have a feeling that Davis' art might turn out to be an obstacle, though.

Thanks, Lardy and Dev. Looking forward to the next reviews.

Fickles, I'm curious: Have you ever encountered an artist whose style you either didn't immediately like or even hated but then grew on you to such a degree that you, in fact, came to absolutely LOVE it? That's happened to me quite often. When I think of your past artistic appraisals, I have the overall impression that if you dislike the style from the outset that your opinion doesn't change. Is that fair...or am I actually very wrong?

Good question, Lardy. The first artists I thought of off the top of my head were Sal Buscema and Gil Kane. Both had problems drawing attractive people, but both had a punchiness and flow to their storytelling that I didn't appreciate until much later. They also had considerable strengths in their styles of drawing I learned in time to appreciate -- Sal with monsters, Kane with anatomical articulation.

I agree with Lardy that the mystery aspect of this mystery mans cases is not really the main thrust of the stories. They are pretty east for the reader to figure out. As, we are given to information that the Sandman is not.

Arc Two is named "The Face," As noted by my esteemed colleague above, the art takes a massive nosedive here. Watkiss is just not up to the task of following Guy Davis. The art in its best instances here is sub-standard for the most part...and at worst, painful to look at. I'm really not being over-reactive at all...I think in it's own way, it's worse than Liefeld for me.

The story centers around a brewing war between two Chinese gangs. Someone is trying to start a war...but who? How does Jimmy, one of Dians od boyfriends fit into the whole puzzle? The answer isn't too hard to figure out, but there is a lot of subtext about racial relations and bigotry going on throughout the story.

Wesley and Dian take steps here in their relationship. Both are out of place in their society in their own way...and a good fit for each other.

The narrative srwitches from Wesley to Dian for this arc, and it's refreshing to listen to her thoughts as the story progresses. Thoughts about her father, Wesley, Jimmy and the situation they are all drawn into.

This is a case of the story carrying the art. It's a feat for a story to be engaging enough to let me get pass the shortcomings of the art...but Wagner pulls it off.

I'll disagree with the extremity of Dev's assessment of Watkiss's work on "The Face". I don't feel Watkiss is a bad artist at all, but he's a let-down from Guy Davis' work. Watkiss brings more of a classic pulp feel in his story. By "classic pulp", I mean his heroes are more idealized and square-jawed and his Asian characters have more of that stereotypical look to them. By the latter part of that statement, I don't mean that he goes so far as in deep caricature to make his Asians buck-toothed and what-not, but he does evoke a little of the "yellow peril" type in broad strokes. This is intentional, I'm sure, to make this tale feel somewhat more like they were depicted during this era in which the pulps really boomed with Asians as a common threat in them. It's all tasteful, except for the first part of the arc when the coloring is entirely too yellow, a mistake which the editor says in a subsequent letter column was unintentional and was fixed in chapter two-on.

And Watkiss takes the flawed Wesley Dodds and Dian Belmont designed by Guy Davis and jarringly transforms them practically into Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth by comparison. That's really my biggest gripe with the art in this arc. It also isn't immersive in the era as Guy's work. So while not terrible as Dev characterizes it, I'd say it's disappointing. Watkiss has done better things since, including a notable issue or more on Gaiman's Sandman.

I thought the art on "The Brute" was even more of a step down, though it had its moments....

OK, not a reread, but here's what I said about SMT awhile ago:

I didn't care much for it. I don't think the art suited it, although I enjoyed the hell out of Baker Street. I expected, and wanted, something closer to the covers. Also, I'm fine with silent panels, but in several cases I could not figure out what was going on -- although that was more the case for the non-Davis arc, IIRC.

There is a panel with Wesley doing the "Walking up the wall" thing from Batman...it is extremely out of proportion to me. Faces are warped, and I get the effort he made with the Chinese characters, but there were panels scattered all over that just seemed sonky to me.

Maybe I am being a bit hard on him, but it was so jarring to me, even on this re-read. Gonna crack open the next arc tomorrow and see what that looks like.

Looking forward to seeing Guy again to be sure.